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Media Manager Overview

I realized recently that nobody ever talks about one of the most powerful tools in Final Cut Pro– the Media Manager. Click the above link to view a video tutorial on the subject.

Here’s a quick overview on how to properly use the Media Manager:

Right Click on any sequence in your bin and choose “Media Manager”. The tool will pop up and give you information about your sequence and options for what to do with it. From top to bottom:

Summary

Any changes you make to the options below will be reflected in this handy text summary at the top.

Original

This shows you the amount of media used by this sequence. Note that there might be lines breaking up the media usage across any multiple drives you might have. Render files will also be reflected here as a different color.

Modified

This bar reflects the media usage, accounting for any changes you make to the options below, e.g. deleting unused media, not including render files, etc.

Media Dropdown

Copy

This option will allow you to copy all of the media (video, audio, music, pictures, assets, etc) to your chosen Media Destination. Use this option if you’d like to make an archive of the sequence for backup.

Move

This option moves all the media in the sequence to the new location. Use this option with caution if you reference some of the same media across multiple sequences or projects.

Use Existing

Use this option to free up disk space in combination with the media deleting options below.

Recompress

Re-encode your media to a different format / codec. This is most commonly used to “offline” sequences using the Offline RT (Motion JPEG) codec to turn large / HD projects into smaller, more portable projects. More recently editors have been recompressing troublesome HDV format sequences to better-behaving DVC Pro HD or Apple’s ProRes 422.

Delete Unused Media from Duplicated Items

This does what it says . . . deleting media from your clips that is not used on the sequence itself. This can be a great space saver if you think you’ll never need that footage again. You can further choose “Use Handles” to add some time to the outside of the in & out points. Use this if you might need some “transition time” in the new sequence or would like to have a few editing options in the future.

Project / Media Destination

The final steps are to determine if you’d like to make a new project out of this process and, if you’re moving or copying media, where you would like it to go.Have fun and happy media managing!

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