Hey guys,

Longtime lurker.. first time posting a question. I am still relatively new to editing and even newer to editing on FCP. I am producing a local outdoor TV show (yeah, I jumped in head first!) and I am having trouble figuring out the best workflow for FCP. I previously used Sony Vegas, and I would save all the recurring weekly segments (show's intro, sponsor billboards, commercial breaks, credits, etc) as separate projects and just nest them in the individual episodes - which were also separate projects.

What would be the best way to do this in FCP? Create those segments as individual Sequences and just copy from one episode to the next? Or should I export those segments as Quicktime Movies and then plug them into my overall timeline for each episode? If I do the latter, will I be degrading quality by essentially rendering those segments twice?

Any advice from someone who has worked with similar TV episodes or something similar would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Brian Grossman

Assuming that your clips are originally encoded with precisely the same settings as your timeline, there's NO re-encoding in a situation where you're generating EXPORT clips for repetitive elements then assembling them on a new matching timeline. (You only re-render if you're MIXING clips in a new transition or if you're transcoding from one video type, rate, codec, etc to another.)

The key difference is that once you've exported a clip, you can't go back and change anything in it.

OTOH, if you simply concatenate that sequence into another, double clicking on the imported sequence in the timeline will open the original timeline in another window. Eventually, if you get too many layers of concatenation, FCP will get sluggish and cranky because you're editing references to references to other references, rather than just editing a single, simple data stream.

Nesting is useful. But not free of a "complexity penalty."

Hope that helps.

YMMV.

Thanks, Bill. Based on what you said, I will probably just export those repetitive segments to individual clips, put them in one folder, and just pull that folder into each episode project.