Large file workflow advice: 12 camera concert event with eye on storage efficiency

Re: " looking for the best way to keep the timeline drives and their backups lean once clips have been chosen or after finishing a project"

There is no easy way to do that on the current product. DaVinci Resolve has and I think "Classic" FCP 7 had clip trimming during consolidation. The current FCP does not have that. Doing bulk trimming with the Resolve media management feature has historically been very buggy. I tested it several times on version 16, and it caused widespread data corruption. There are current reports of continuing problems on version 19. That may be why Apple has been reticent to add that feature -- *bulk* "no render" trimming of Long GOP formats is inherently risky.

With FCP the fastest workflow is normally to import all content using "leave files in place," then in the Event Browser, rapidly skim and mark favorites, rejects and keyword ranges. It is much faster than doing two-pass curation, once at the file level and again after import to FCP. But if you want to copy untrimmed media within the library, that will take more space.

That said, Quicktime Player can do "no render" trimming and splitting of individual video files. It's not limited to just trimming the head and tail -- you can cut out multiple pieces, reorder sections of the clip, then save the result without re-encoding. Given your criteria it might be better to process the clips with Quicktime Player, then import the curated results to FCP. For details, in Youtube query on "Easily Trimming Video Files With QuickTime Player."

The very first piece of advice that I can offer is this: use external media.

There is no need to copy everything to the library. A library that is several hundred GB or even TB in size is a disaster waiting to happen.

By using external media, you can organize the files in any meaningful way using Finder, and importing into FCP using "Leave in Place". Clips will point to the media's location instead of being full copies inside the library. The library will be small and measured in MB instead of GB. You can backup the library and media separately, and easily relink media if needed (like for example if you copy the original media to a faster or larger drive). Media can even be split amongst multiple drives, without issue.

If you have a 12-camera multicam shoot of a concert, you will probably edit it using the FCP multicam feature. In that case you don't want to split the files, as it makes syncing those more difficult.

As Luis said, if importing with "leave files in place" it does not take any more library space. The files are left in the original location.

If you want to share the content with other editors, use a "proxy only" workflow. In Youtube, query on 'Proxy Workflow Deep Dive with Final Cut Pro.' If you will be editing a 12-camera event, you will likely be using proxies anyway for performance reasons. The key is to create them in a separate folder, which can then be sent to the remote editors. The procedure is documented in tutorials you'll see if using the above query.

Scenario 1; you can use QuickTime to slice and dice the long files into individual song segments and save them individually for use in FCP. I believe that FCP allows you to import sections of video by selecting a range in the import window. I have never used this function so am not sure how it works. To save space be sure that background rendering is turned off and occasionally delete the render and generated files feature.