FCP should force you to name & save projects before you can capture

When you open up a new project and digitize something it puts it in a capture scratch folder named Untitled because that's the name of the project. Five minutes later autosave comes up and makes you save it before it can Autosave so you give the project a name. Now your media is /Capture Scratch/Untitled. The next day you open up a new project and digitize new footage for it and forget to save before you digitize and it sticks it in the same Untilted folder. It would be nice if it made you save the project before you digitized anything into it. In a true professional editing room this wouldn't be much of a problem but when you're doing four or five quick things a week it just gets your hard drive disorganized when you're forgetful.

> When you open up a new project and digitize something it puts it in a capture scratch folder
> named Untitled because that's the name of the project.

Uh...that's the user's problem, not the application's. In seven years of using Final Cut Pro, I've never had a clip end up in an "Untitled" folder. If you want all your media in one place, open the project file used in the last session and capture from that.

Software designers can give you options, but they can't try to remember things for you if you're just "forgetful". If computer applications were constantly trying to second-guess you or assume your needs and wants, the result is a "consumer" application that would drive professionals batty, because then you'd have to spend a lot of time undoing the computer's erroneous assumptions. Like Windows (where file management is a thorough pain in the ass because they assume you don't need to know where your stuff is), or the fiddly default settings of iTunes, or "AutoCorrect" and "Correct Grammar as You Type" in MS Word, which I constantly struggle against because it keeps changing my typing for me, in an obnoxiously presumptuous way.


www.derekmok.com

"Software designers can give you options, but they can't try to remember things for you if you're just "forgetful"."

What a load of rubbish. The answer to this IS for the software to have a serious media management layer and the whole issue of which folder your media is in becomes mute as it simply doesn't matter - the app knows where it is and will always find it, be able to move it, relink to it, copy it etc etc, without any shuffling through the Finder for the user. All comes back to Media Management.