I've never shot much video before, but in recent months I've been experimenting with it. I'm lucky enough to have access to a machine with Final Cut on it. However, I'm still quite confused about how to create a sensible workflow for videos.For photos, I have a well-defined workflow: Ingest, Cull, Process, Export  to Album. I keep the original RAW images with any edits in sidecar files in an archive with a traditional storage structure so that I don't need special software to find them. With videos, things don't work the same way.Firstly, culling isn't so easy with video clips as with stills, as it's normally hard to say if a clip has no usable portions. That means all I can cull are the videos of my feet, etc. I end up with lots of clips that are mostly bad, but I can't really tell if there's anything worth keeping in them.Next, the .MOV files are enormous, which means I'm not sure if it's worth keeping them in an archive at all. Should I just import the clips into Final Cut straight away, and re-export losslessly compressed versions for storage? Or should I just back up the Final Cut library and forget about keeping the original clips in an archive? In either case, am I potentially losing any quality I might want later?Also, video footage isn't so self-contained. How do I deal with footage that I might want to make part of a different clip later? For example, if I have a video of a family birthday, I might want to use portions of that later as part of a video about that family member. I could just cut a portion of the final video and add it to a new project, with other elements, but by working from a final clip, will I be losing flexibility, for example matching colours with other footage?Any tips on this sort of stuff would be really useful to me.

This is kind of the nature of the beast with video. You record a several minute long clip and you only end up using ten seconds of that particular segment of video. As you've alluded to that results in massive files when you only need a small portion of the file. Now you could import the clips into final cut, trim them down and export but that's going to result in a "lossy" edit, meaning that there is some compression that takes place pretty much any way you export it. This also takes much more time than need. All hope is not lost though as there's a better way.First it helps to create a folder that will contain all the video clips for the project that you're going to put together. It makes importing and assembling your video easier once you eventually want to put everything together in FC.Once you've done that, by far the easiest and most referring l efficient way to do this is as follows:Open the folder of your clips then open your first clip in quicktime. Scrub through the video and find the start and end times of the relevant portion you wish to keep. Go to the edit pull down and select trim. Use the yellow bar at the bottom of the screen to set the start and end point to the segment you want. Look at the top of the window and make mental note of the file name. Then go to the file menu and select save, not export. You'll get a dialog pop up box which should have you within the same folder you opened the file from but of not, navigate to that folder. Click on the file that you edited and then select ok. You'll get a warning that you are over writing that file, which is what you want. Then you're done and only left with the portion you wanted.This method is completely lossless as there is no compression added and the file remains completely intact other than just having it be shorter.Hope that helps. If you have any other questions just ask.

Fuji Maine wrote:Open the folder of your clips then open your first clip in quicktime. Scrub through the video and find the start and end times of the relevant portion you wish to keep. Go to the edit pull down and select trim. Use the yellow bar at the bottom of the screen to set the start and end point to the segment you want. Look at the top of the window and make mental note of the file name. Then go to the file menu and select save, not export. You'll get a dialog pop up box which should have you within the same folder you opened the file from but of not, navigate to that folder. Click on the file that you edited and then select ok. You'll get a warning that you are over writing that file, which is what you want. Then you're done and only left with the portion you wantedThis makes a lot of sense. Rendering the new file does take some time. You are simply going to have to buy more drives.

Thanks Fuji Maine, that was exactly what I was looking for. I'll give it a try and see how I get on. I think I'm going to need a bigger disk!

Iuvenis wrote:Thanks Fuji Maine, that was exactly what I was looking for. I'll give it a try and see how I get on. I think I'm going to need a bigger disk!Happy to help. If you honestly think you are going to need disk storage I'd advise you get a standard external hard drive for archiving but to either work directly off your internal hard drive for files you are working with in FC or use an external solid state drive. The speed of external spinning platter drives isn't fast enough for use when putting your project together in final cut.

Iuvenis wrote:I've never shot much video before, but in recent months I've been experimenting with it. I'm lucky enough to have access to a machine with Final Cut on it. However, I'm still quite confused about how to create a sensible workflow for videos.For photos, I have a well-defined workflow: Ingest, Cull, Process, Export to Album. I keep the original RAW images with any edits in sidecar files in an archive with a traditional storage structure so that I don't need special software to find them. With videos, things don't work the same way.Firstly, culling isn't so easy with video clips as with stills, as it's normally hard to say if a clip has no usable portions. That means all I can cull are the videos of my feet, etc. I end up with lots of clips that are mostly bad, but I can't really tell if there's anything worth keeping in them.Next, the .MOV files are enormous, which means I'm not sure if it's worth keeping them in an archive at all. Should I just import the clips into Final Cut straight away, and re-export losslessly compressed versions for storage? Or should I just back up the Final Cut library and forget about keeping the original clips in an archive? In either case, am I potentially losing any quality I might want later?Also, video footage isn't so self-contained. How do I deal with footage that I might want to make part of a different clip later? For example, if I have a video of a family birthday, I might want to use portions of that later as part of a video about that family member. I could just cut a portion of the final video and add it to a new project, with other elements, but by working from a final clip, will I be losing flexibility, for example matching colours with other footage?Any tips on this sort of stuff would be really useful to me.Yes you are correct in your assumptions - which most people don’t realise but video is very different to photography and you do need a lot of storage and a fast machine and fast storage  to edit on. There are a few ways you can go about your workflow.I create a folder on my MacBook where I drop all my media (video files, graphic, audio) I edit my project and save it in the same folder. I don’t let FC render my footage as this would create multiple files of the same thing (unless your machine is too slow and you need to create proxy files to use those for editing)Once finished I export an H264 file (and if the video is short a Pro-Res 422 file as well) of the final video.I than save the folder with project and media files off my MacBook to a NAS or other storage in case I want to re-edit or use the original files at a later date.I don’t have time to go over each clip and re-save like others have suggested. But it is a good idea if you’re low on storage. Storage is cheap and time is money as they say.Also, as you get better at shooting video you should start to have less non-usable footage and more of exactly what you want to use.