[From Reference Movies | Weekly Tip | Final Cut Help]

Need to save some space? Reference movies allow you to work with your video clips or

sequence files in other applications. Think of a reference movie as a pointer back to the
original media, a lot like a link on a web page

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Reference movies are a great way to quickly move your Final Cut Pro movie to another application for encoding — any app that supports QuickTime files will accept QuickTime reference files (Compressor, VisualHub, Sorenson Squeeze, etc.)
The reference file is a smaller version that points to its media & render files on your machine. A caveat — if you move or delete any of these render or media files, your reference movie will be dead, and you’ll get strange & irritating errors in QuickTime and in your encoding application.
If disk space and / or time are in endless supply for you, or if you’d like to make a final archive-able version of your movie, make it self-contained.

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