I downloaded the FCP 10.0.8 free trial and am also in the middle of the Ripple Training. With respect to versioning, when duplicating a project, it gives 3 options:

1. Duplicate project only
2. Duplicate project and referenced events
3. Duplicate project + used clips

There is also a checkbox for including render files. So if you pick option 1 and leave the include render files checkbox unchecked, wouldn’t that solve the issue of creating extra/duplicate files. What would be the advantages/disadvantages of versioning this way using projects vs. compound clips (as mentioned above)?

I’m def seeing some of the benefits of FCP X already but needing to wrap my head around workflow issues like this. Thanks!

Awesome find Ray. I didn’t even know you could edit in Compound clips without making a project first. I’ve been creating a project first, editing, then creating comp clips later. Love this method. Thanks for sharing.

http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/tutorials/1017-superb-walk-through-tutorials-on-making-trails-with-final-cut-pro-x-on-shared-storage

Trust me Elif, you wouldn’t be the only one. The irony is, among the filmmakers I’ve been working with, many of the guys were on FCPX and I was the only one on 7.

As one doc filmmaker to another, I can attest to how great FCPX’s meta tagging features are for organizing your media. Especially if you are interviewing a lot of people and there are a lot of topics to keep track. Because you can easily tag ranges of clips, you could have keyword collections for both topics and people. So one person’s clip could have five keywords attached to it, making it easy to assemble an edit based on topic.

Do what I did. Try out the 30-day trial, get Ripple Training’s Advanced Video Training Series (the 5 hour one) and have at it. Worse case scenario you’re out the $40 for the training and you decide something else is better for you. Best case, you significantly improve your editing efficiency enjoy editing more than you have before.

Thanks for sharing Tim. FCPX has some light years since you took that orientation. It’s like night and day.

As far as the bin orienation, the keyword collection feature works pretty much like bin, but BETTER. It’s easier to find clips in FCPX AND you can have the same clip in more than one “bin” if you like. You could have a clip b-roll, then have the same clip in “closeups.” Visually, they work like bins. Practically, they’re better.

I agree the versioning aspect is not that great. But, it’s not that hard to create compound clips as your scenes, or even full versions. What’s great about that is that those scenes can now be used in ANY project. So let’s say you have a scene you’ve edited for a main doc, and now you want to create a presskit video, or some other kind of shortened version. Or maybe you want to create a reel. You can easily access those compound clip/scenes in those other projects just as easily as you would a regular clip.

Alternatively, you can create a separate project for each version. It’s really not that huge a deal, outside of the additional render files that may be created if you render each version. But the list of projects in your project library are really not that much different than a list of Sequences you would have had in FCP7.

Well done. For me the “paradigm shift” into keywords for managing subclips is amazing. I work with people who use Premiere and have tried to switch to make it easier but just can’t give up the keyword functionality for organizing clips. It works as almost a rough edit.

I actually HAVE done that as a type of versioning. And have even suggested it. The problem with that is when you have a project that is so big and/or complicated, and comprised of nested compound clips, it’s actually just easier to dupe the project. You also have to remember to DUPE the compound clips, not use the same one, lest you change that incident of the clip in any project where its used.