Manual

Chapter 14 Managemedia,libraries,andarchives 425
Back up projects, events, and libraries
Backing up your work and your media consistently is an essential part of your workow. Some
people back up daily or weekly; others back up when a project is complete. To protect your
media, it’s recommended that you back up to a storage device or partition dierent from the one
where you store the media les used with Final Cut Pro.
Final Cut Pro provides both automatic and manual tools that let you:
•
Back up projects, events, and libraries manually. See Copy or move items between libraries and
hard disks on page 432.
•
Enable automatic backups of the database portion of Final Cut Pro libraries. See Restore a
library from automatic backups on page 76 and Manage storage locations on page 434.
•
Back up projects by duplicating them as snapshots. See Duplicate projects and clips on
page 64.
•
Collect the source media les for a library, event, or project in one location. See Consolidate
projects, events, and libraries on page 424.
Important: When you import media into Final Cut Pro, you can select the “Leave les in place”
option to link to the les in their current location rather than copy them into the library. In that
case, Final Cut Pro creates symbolic links (also known as symlinks), which are special les that
point to the media les. When you copy or move clips between events, Final Cut Pro copies or
moves the symbolic links only (not the source media les). To replace the symbolic links with the
actual source media les, select the events and choose File > Consolidate Event Files. For more
information about les and clips, see Media les and clips on page 22.
Note: If you have customized any Final Cut Pro eects, transitions, titles, generators, or themes,
you must manually back up and move the Motion Templates folder located in your Movies
folder. Similarly, you must manually track and move any third-party eects, because they are not
managed within the Final Cut Pro library.
Manage optimized and proxy media les
Final Cut Pro can play back many media formats. For a complete list, see Supported media
formats on page 46. Final Cut Pro also provides options for transcoding your media (converting it
to a dierent format or changing its settings) to make it suitable for editing.
•
Create optimized media: This option transcodes video to the Apple ProRes 422 codec format,
which provides better performance during editing, faster render times, and better color quality
for compositing. If the original camera format can be edited with good performance, this
option is dimmed.
•
Create proxy media: This option creates video and still-image proxy les. Video is transcoded to
the Apple ProRes 422 Proxy codec format, which provides high-quality les useful for oine
editing at the original frame size, frame rate, and aspect ratio. Final Cut Pro creates medium-
quality (one-half resolution) proxy versions that increase editing performance. Video proxy
les often take up considerably less storage space than optimized les, which can allow you to
work on a portable computer instead of a desktop computer with signicantly more memory
and processing power. Still images are transcoded to either JPEG (if the original le doesn’t
have alpha channel information) or PNG les (if the le has alpha channel information).
Still-image proxy les facilitate faster processing and rendering when the original image is
very large.
Note: For better import and playback performance, Final Cut Pro automatically transcodes
all MP3 audio les to WAV audio les. When transcoding les, Final Cut Pro always retains the
original media for future use.
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