Apple Final Cut Pro 7 - Manual (Page 1495)

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 Process 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
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:
Stage 1: Logging and Capturing
Media files are captured from tape to hard disk. A clip which represents that media file
is simultaneously created in your project.
Stage 2: Refining Your Sequence and Managing 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.
1495 Chapter 87 Media Management