Hi - I am working on a project where I have roughly 225 videos that together total roughly 500GB of footage. All shot 1080px. This footage covers the hand production of a bass guitar. My intent is to take this nearly 30ish hours of footage and wind it down into a 10-20 minute video that has the footage sped up significantly. Knowing that the FCPX files are significantly larger than the raw footage, I am trying to figure out how to handle so much storage, and am also wondering if it is wise (my guess would be no) to have all of the 225 videos in one project. Any guidance is appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Hi - That doesn't sound like an unmanageable amount of video to me [given the multi-TeraByte sizes of today's disks], but I'm really an audio guy so I can't say for sure if there are any practical limits to FCPX's data handling. I would assume that with modern multi-TB drives it would be fine as long as your drive[s] are large enough [so there's always plenty of free space] and fast enough, and you have enough RAM. A quick search turned up a lot of discussion about FCPX maximum project size, but nothing definitive, and a lot of it seemed to be worrying about larger amounts of video data. Some of it seemed to suggest that the computer spec will ultimately be the limiting factor. I did notice some discussion suggesting that breaking up larger/longer projects into smaller FCPX projects might be a good idea, but they seemed to be more concerned with running time (ie >30 min or so) than file size. Since as you noted the file size may increase depending on how you bring the video into FCPX, I've attached a course on importing -- perhaps there'll be something useful in there in regards to keeping the FCPX files to a manageable size, or maybe an experienced FCPX user/guru will weigh in..

Thanks for your reply Joe - I don't see the attached course....but I'd like to :). Can you share that link?

Hi - The link to the attached course is at the top of the thread -- just click on the "More Info" button..

"Knowing that the FCPX files are significantly larger than the raw footage..." No, you import the raw footage into FCPX and edit that. There's no extra sized files. You totally misunderstand how FCPX works. You also posted this question at FCP.co and got your answer there, too. There is zero increase in the file size, and what you are proposing is not a huge project. Many of use do things with that much footage just fine. Hollywood features have been cut on FCPX with no issues. https://fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/36154-handling-500-gb-of-footage-and-then-the-fcpx-project-files