Behind the Headlines with Avid2FCP
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing |
The good folks over at Avid2FCP have begun answering some of the more important questions (at least in my mind) behind Final Cut Pro 6 in a post called Behind the Headlines. We all know what the most flashy features are but I want to know what they have fixed under the hood to make FCP more robust and stable when editing utilitarian projects like a documentary where you have to track thousands of media files. A redesigned Easy Setup menu that uses a secondary menu to better categorize all the different codecs should make that process easier, especially with the added complexity of ProRes 422. But better than that is the mention of a “new option to rename files.” A real weakness of FCP has always been it’s media management and how it tracks the files used within a project. The Avid2FCP post states:
“In FCP6 there are two new options available when right-clicking on a Browser clip:
- Rename clip to file
- Rename file to clip
With this new feature, you can have the clipname match the QT filename and vice versa without having to rename manually and then reconnect the media.”
In current versions of FCP, if you rename clips once they are loaded in the browser the original file on disk is unchanged. In fact if you look at the properties of the master clip you’ve changed it will still reference the original name. This ability to change the original files to match the new name (or vice versa) is a small step toward better media management, especially for the novice editor who doesn’t really understand that relationship between the master clip in a FCP browser and the file on disk. Anything to add a bit more symmetry between the browser and the disk should mean less offline files and reconnection issues.
