Final Cut Pro 2 takes media management beyond the bin: powerful, intuitive tools let you mark and store hundreds of video and audio clips and sequences where you can retrieve and apply them at will, faster than you can say Rosebud. Final Cut Pro’s media management tools One of the advantages of using a nonlinear environment is the random access you have that enables you to make decisions quickly. Keep in mind, however, that the more digital elements you have, the more important it is to manage your media for multiple projects and long-form projects.   That’s when Final Cut Pro’s enhanced media management capabilities come into their own. You can use them for everything from archiving your projects and recapturing media elements based on higher data rates, to recovering drive space and creating duplicates (based on your timeline, but without all the excess media that can fill up your hard disk).   The Media Manager is your most important media management tool. The Media Manager lets you remove unwanted media from your projects to free up disk space, and lets you create a project file with offline sequences that have had unused sections of the clips removed, in preparation for recapturing just the media you need for your program at a higher data rate.   Removing unused media from your project is a good way to avoid filling up your entire hard disk. Say, for example, that you’ve captured an hour’s worth of media from tape, but that you only use 15 minutes of it in your project. That means you have 45 minutes of excess video footage hogging precious storage space on your disk With the Media Manager, you can easily delete those 45 minutes of unused media without recapturing your source media.   The Media Manager lets you move or copy clips and sequences — together with their associated media and render files — into new project files and hard disk volumes. It preserves all existing links between the moved or duplicated media files on disk and your new project file.   The Render Manager allows you to remove unnecessary render files associated with the sequences in your projects, thereby freeing up tons of hard disk space. Other commands include Find unused clips in the browser, Add Media Start/End columns, Dates and times for sequences, Show last date for rendered files in the Render Manager, and Labeling.   If the links between the clips in your projects and the source clips on disk are broken, you can use the Reconnect Media command to re-establish them. (Incidentally, this command is applied automatically whenever you open a project or switch to Final Cut Pro from the Finder, and the application detects a broken link.)   The Analyze Movie command enables you to examine the properties — such as the data rate, frame rate, frame size, as well as video and audio compressors used — of clips in your project or media files on disk.

Using your bins Bins are like folders — great for storing your project files. They provide a logical structure for projects, making your media easier to manage. You use voiceover bins, title bins, A-roll bins, B-roll bins and graphics bins, among others. All these bins have clips, all these clips have media attached to them, and you have tons of media on your hard disk. The advantage of using a nonlinear environment is the digital random access where you can make decisions quickly. However, the more digital media that you have, the more important it is to manage your media for either multiple projects or long-form projects to recovering drive space to creating duplicates based on your timeline without all the excess media, archiving our projects and recapturing based on higher data rates offline or online.   Changes you make to the contents of a bin — like deleting, moving, and renaming clips or renaming the bin itself — have no effect on the original files or folders where your source material is stored. You can create separate bins for different phases of your project, or for separating your original and production footage. You can stack bins hierarchically and open them in their own windows. And you can even put bins inside other bins.   Until quite recently, editing a movie was a time-consuming, white-knuckle process. Even experienced filmmakers confessed reluctance to leave anything but footprints on the cutting room floor. After all, what if they changed their mind about a sequence and decided they needed it after all? Back then when you edited footage out of a movie, you cut it by hand. And that’s how you had to splice it all back together again whenever you changed your mind — which, usually, was often.   That paradigm shifted for good when Final Cut Pro shipped two years ago. Sure, there’d been video editing systems before Final Cut. But they cost an arm and a leg. Final Cut Pro gives independent movie producers an affordable new way to make movies with nonlinear, nondestructive video editing. How sweet it is: no fear about the consequences of changing your mind. And with bins to store and retrieve your media clips, Final Cut Pro offers an astonishing degree of freedom to rearrange and re-edit your sequences just as you please.   Nonlinear and nondestructive editing In the good old days of linear editing, video editors had to edit everything onto a tape sequentially, one shot after another, from beginning to end. If you wanted to change a series of shots in the middle of your edit, you had to re-edit everything from that point forward.   With nonlinear editing, you can begin editing at any point. For instance, you can start from the end of the program and work your way back to the beginning. Whatever suits you.   Nondestructive editing means you can modify a clip in Final Cut Pro without affecting the original source clip stored on your hard disk. That’s because clips in Final Cut Pro are pointers to your original source material, not the actual source material itself.   Fact is, almost nothing you do in Final Cut Pro has any effect on your original digital video files. Even if you delete entire clips, they are still stored in the folder to which you stashed them — until you make a conscious decision to get rid of them by dragging them to the Trash. It’s like having unbreakable toys.