where is your media where are your videos stored well let me answer that for you today
it's all about libraries in Final Cut Pro X or 10x10 in the new Final Cut Pro
welcome back everyone my name is joel Feld thanks for watching and if you love this content you want
to learn more spread the love hit that subscribe button down below and let's let's learn some
stuff today's topic is final cut libraries and understanding where your files actually live
within Final Cut and where they're stored and why possibly it's filling up your hard drive space and
you need 18 different hard drives because let's face it I'm pretty sure we've all been in those
shoes before so let's take a look and understand the concept of libraries and how final cuts wants
us to think about our organization if I open up Final Cut the very first thing is understanding
libraries and the best way to do that is to actually go to the help menu so I'm gonna
go up to the help menu I'm gonna open up Final Cut help and if you've never used the help menu
before it's actually really really helpful and not only in Final Cut but also in regular Mac usage
for your computer now iMovie photos GarageBand any application that's on your computer the Apple menu
for the help is actually really really helpful let's open this up and we're gonna open up this
user guide and go to table of contents now we're gonna choose what our libraries on the left-hand
side and this actually gives you a nice broad overview of what or how Apple describes libraries
and how to use them within Final Cut I don't think there's any wrong right or wrong way to use them
it's just understanding how they work and what you can put inside of a library what you can put
inside of an event projects and understanding all of those different elements within final
cuts within this application so if we look at this the library itself is kind of the head honcho it
is the big bucket it's the container that stores everything that you do inside a Final Cut it could
be Clips your raw video footage it could be the projects that are used to tell a story using your
raw video footage it could be clips and projects so there's multiple ways to use libraries and
this little diagram is helpful so here they they show the main library and under there you can have
an event so naturally events go into libraries an event can contain either just all clips all
video clips or an event could contain clips and projects or an event could contain all projects
so think about what type of work you do what kind of video you're working on how you organize your
footage maybe you have a lot of b-roll maybe you have client work maybe you just home videos that
you're storing in final cut like I said there's no right or wrong way it's just understanding
how to find and organize your video footage and really where it's at on your computer so that
if you do fill up your hard drive you know how to move that content from one place to another like
an external hard drive or maybe a new computer let's go ahead and close this and let's look at
our final cut libraries now over on the left-hand side we have our sidebar for our libraries if you
don't see this whole section here go ahead and click on the button to reveal your libraries
so if I toggle this on and off I can show or hide this column also make sure that you have
your browser turned on because if you don't have your browser here turned on you're not going to
see anything over here on the left-hand side now you all probably have noticed the very first time
you actually opened up final cut it created you with an untitled library and it's untitled just
because it's wanting you to title it I would title it as the first thing you do because that way you
know what it is it makes sense it's logical to your workflow as you can see here I have
actually multiple libraries within Final Cut so I have one called untitled I have one called travel
vacations my youtube sound effects here and I have another one drone footage so you can actually have
multiple libraries open at the same time and if I don't want one of these opened let's say I don't
need my sound effects and logos if I right-click on this I could choose closed library or I could
select the library here go up to the file menu and also choose close library and that will just
hide it from this list here it's actually not deleting it it's not removing it permanently I'm
just closing it because I don't need it now if we look at the structure that I have here's a couple
examples I have a travel and vacations library and this library contains different events and
the events are let's say the time of which I took that video footage so here is North Shore this
was an event in my life I traveled up the North Shore and through Minnesota and this is all the
video footage within that event so naturally all of the clips here reside and live in this North
Shore event and that event lives in the library of travel and vacations that way when I go on another
trip I make a new event and start loading that content into in that event that way I'm kind of
filtering it and narrowing down the content that I have if I go right below there I have California
2020 so again these are all of the video clips that I have from a California trip and they're
not mixed in with the North Shore you know doing all the hiking and everything like that so all of
that lives in this travel and vacations library let's pretend I wanted to create a new event in
this library so I can select the library here and go up to file choose new and then I can choose new
events if I click on event let's say in New York so now event named New York I'm putting it within
the library of travel because I don't want it in drones I don't want it and untitled I don't want
it in the YouTube channel and I'm not going to create a new project because I'm not working on
a project I'm just creating containers to hold my video footage and if I click OK I now have this
New York event here ready for me to organize input video footage in now if we go back to the untitled
one I would recommend you to rename it and it also creates you by default an event within there based
off of the date that you created this untitled library if you want to change the name of it
you just have to click at once after its selected and I could say this is family videos press return
and then you know this event could be let's say birthdays and I could create another event that
could say file do event maybe we do holidays you know you kind of get the idea of you had this main
kind of category but then you're breaking it down into these subcategories called events now you'll
also notice that inside each events there is a folder called smart collections and naturally
our instinct is to put files in pictures and such inside of folders but it doesn't work that
way here for whatever reason I don't know so a folder actually holds smart collections and smart
collections are just pre created searches from final cuts that automatically go and find video
clips based off of ratings or people or whatever filter you apply to that so if we look at these
as an example in the smart collections folder in the travel and vacations library it's all of the
same except I added one here for frame rates so the way that you see what these filters are is if
you go into the browser in this little magnifying glass right underneath there you see the filter if
I click on this I can choose and see that okay this is finding every video rate frame that is
29.97 so it's going through and finding all of that if I click on projects here it's going to
show me that the filter for this is the type is project and I could change that to anything here
so that's something that will automatically go and find different clips based off of the filters and
the criteria that you've set now where are these libraries stored naturally they're stored in the
movies file of your home folder so if I open up the finder and I go to the movies typically you'll
find that untitled library here for me I have all of my library stored on my external hard drive so
if we look at this they're designated and you can see if I change it to the icon view all of the
libraries are these purple icons here so these are all of the different libraries and the beautiful
thing about them is they're all self-contained so right now I have all of these libraries on my
extra hard drive and if I wanted to take this external hard drive plug it into a new Mac as
long as both Macs are running the same flavor at the same version of Final Cut Pro I can pick up
where I left off and start editing on someone else's computer so it's really convenient to
have all of your video footage within a library and specifically know where that library is at
now one of those things that you'll come across is is space you're gonna fill up space really
really quickly do tube render files now I'll explain that in a whole nother video but I want
to show you where and how that comes to be if we take my YouTube channel for example I have a
library called YouTube channel this has all of my different projects that I have working on but for
the videos that I create here now if I right-click on this this is an easy way to find your library
if I right click on it I can say reveal and finder if I go to here notice it's selected
it if I change it to list view this library itself is 778 gigabytes that's that's a lot of space and
I can tell you I do the raw video footage that I have in there is nowhere near 778 gigabytes worth
of space and the reason it's so large is because the render files every time you bring a file down
into your timeline notice this little bar across the top of the timecode this starts to render and
what that means it's it's starting to process your video footage so that your computer can play it
successfully a hundred percent speed at the full quality of your of your video footage because
sometimes if you're depending on the speed of your computer and the specs that your hardware has your
computer has a hard time playing back video if you've ever experienced drop frames or just the
choppiness of it playing back that's because your video needs to be rendered it needs to
it's like the cake needs to be baked in order for you to eat it the video files have to be rendered
out in order for you to play that video back in real time now there's a preference for that if
I go to preferences final cut preferences under the playback there's actually a background and
it tells if I check this box it's going to start rendering that video footage for me automatically
if there's no activity after the set duration I have here and it's just gonna go through and
start doing that but my point is as it does that it's building up all of these other files that we
could actually get rid of if we don't need them if I go up to file I can actually come down to
delete generated library files and this allows me to delete those files so this is just a quick
reference I could choose ok and that's going to delete all of those files and actually let's do
it because it's not going to delete any of my projects it's not going to delete any of my raw
video footage so if I say delete unused only or I could say all I'll say unused and that will be
for all past projects that I've exported things like that it's gonna go through and delete all of
that and then that should free up some space now these libraries here like I said before they can
be moved around but the most important piece also or one of the things that could cause you issues
down the road is when you first import your video footage you want to make sure that you've told it
to copy those files into the library instead of leaving them where they're at so for example I
have a memory card here and it's got some video footage on it and if I put that memory card into
my computer if I go up to file and I can do import and I could do media or I could use the import
button here in the top left but here I have my memory card selected on the left but over here
on the right there's this option for files either copied to library or leave files in place I highly
recommend to copy the files into the library that way if you move the library from one location to
another location everything is self-contained inside that library if you have it set to
leave files in place well now it's just making a reference final cut when you when you open a final
cut it's going to be looking for wherever those files that were at when you imported them so for
if we look at this I'll import one clip here we'll come up to the top do it into this event will
create a new event that just says test import I'll tell it to leave the file in place I'll do import
selected I'm going to cancel out the rendering and here it is so the file is right here now if
I each act this memory card and it's gonna say hey can't do it okay so let me click ok because it's
connected to Final Cut Final Cut is using that media off that memory card so if I quit out of
final cuts go back and eject my memory card now if I open up my library again notice it says the
file is missing that's because it's looking for my memory card it's saying hey wait a minute you
imported it but told it to leave the file in place so if I go ahead and plug it back in my my memory
card wait for it to mount so wait for it to show up in my finder it will now relink it and it pops
up again right here so essentially you want to make sure that i would highly recommend to always
leave and import your videos into the library itself now if you wanted to change that after
the fact let's say that i want to copy these files into the library if I select this event and go up
to file and choose consolidate event media it will actually do that for me it will go through and say
hey I'm gonna copy all of the video footage do you want me or the raw video footage do you also want
me to include the optimized and the proxy media well for this I don't have any so I can just click
OK and I'll leave those checked it's going to actually copy those into the event in that library
behind the scenes so if I click on here's another shortcut or another trick if I right-click on this
on the clip itself and say reveal in finder this is another way where it shows you kind of behind
the scenes where it opens up that library to show all of the organization that Final Cut is created
for you and again don't go in here you could potentially wreck some of your project files or
your things like that so this is just showing me that this video file lives in the original
medium which lives in the events test import which lives in this YouTube channel so I can see that it
now copied that file from the memory card and put it actually into the library without referencing
it so then I would be able to eject my memory card without Final Cut saying hey it's being referenced
to that clip so just notice just another side note don't go through here and mess around with
any of this stuff because this holds a lot of the functionality for a final cut to work behind
the scenes so that is a little bit of Final Cut libraries or the library is the the bucket the big
organization that holds your raw video clips your projects your events you know all of the different
ways to organize your media and the libraries are very mobile you can move them from one hard
drive to another hard drive and they can fill up pretty fast so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial
if you liked it show some love hit that subscribe button down below click that little bell and we
will see you next time with a brand new tutorial yes so again thanks for watching if you have any
comments I'd love to hear what you have to say and thank you so much for watching until next time