Apple Final Cut Pro 6 - Manual (Page 1498)

Chapter 1 Media Management 15
I
What You Need to Know to Manage Your Media
To effectively keep track of or manage your media, you must have a good
understanding of the following:
 The distinction between a clip and a media file, as well as the relationship between
the two
 The relationship between master and affiliate clips in a Final Cut Pro project
 How timecode works, providing a bridge between footage on tape or film to media
files on hard disk to clips in your project
 How to effectively sort and search large amounts of data, such as clips in the Browser
or in a sequence
 How to name files concisely and descriptively
 The fundamental nature of your media: frame size, aspect ratio, frame rate, codec,
color bit depth, color space, and audio sample rate and bit depth.
Media Management Steps in Final Cut Pro
Logging, capturing, making subclips, and processing your media are all steps in
managing your media files. Because clips are separate from media files in Final Cut Pro,
you can be easily assign them to different media files throughout the course of a
project. This allows you to switch between low- and high-resolution versions of your
media files, and transfer projects to other Final Cut Pro systems without media files and
quickly reconnect them. You can also delete unused media files to save hard disk space,
or recapture media files using clips in your project.
Here is one practical example of how media management occurs throughout a project:
Step 1: Log and capture
Media files are captured from tape to hard disk. A clip which represents that media file
is simultaneously created in your project.
Step 2: Refine your sequence and manage media
As you edit, you refine your sequence, using fewer and fewer of your media files, but
those files still take up valuable hard disk space. Once you finish your sequence, you
can remove media files (or portions of media files) you no longer need. Final Cut Pro
defines unused media as any media file not used by a sequence in your project.
Final Cut Pro can easily tell you which clips in your project are not used in any
sequences, and thus which media files are likely irrelevant to your project. You can
use the Media Manager to delete the unused media from your hard disk.