Keep your filenames – and find them more easily.

This week on MacBreak Studio, Steve and Mark from Ripple Training continue their exploration of the new features in the 10.1.2 update to Final Cut Pro X. Today, they explore two improvements: file import and file relinking.

In previous versions of FCP X, when you imported files from certain cameras such as DSLRs, Final Cut would rename the files with a time-date stamp. It did this because these cameras often create files with duplicate filenames after the card is erased and used again. Now, that is no longer the case: no matter what camera you use, file names are preserved (of course, you can always rename them if you wish). If you store media in the library and you have a duplicate filename, it will be appended with (fcp1) to distinguish it from the first instance. And if you store your media in an external location, Final Cut places each batch of imports into a time-date stamped folder to keep them separate.

By creating all these folders you might think relinking your media would be difficult, but that's another area that's improved in this update. It used to be you needed to point Final Cut to the specific folder locations of files to be relinked. But now, all you need to do is select the volume that contains the files. Final Cut will scan the entire volume to locate any selected files. Of course, if you know the location of the files, you can speed up the process considerably by selecting that location so that Final Cut doesn't have to search an entire volume, but if you don't know where the files are, or if they are spread about in multiple locations, you'll see the benefit of this feature immediately. Another benefit is that if you move your media to a different location on the same volume, Final Cut will automatically locate and reconnect to those files.

In this episode, we demonstrate both these features so check it out.