Fast Project Versioning in Final Cut Pro X

Creating backup versions of your work in Final Cut Pro X is important if you ever need to return to a previous state of a project you are working on.

In this episode, excerpted from Mark Spencer’s Warp Speed Editing in Final Cut Pro X tutorial, he will show you some useful shortcuts for creating backups without interrupting your workflow.

Welcome to Final Cut Pro X in under 5 minutes, My name is Mark Spencer. Although Final Cut is making backups of your project in the background as you work. It can be very helpful , to create incremental backups of your projects, so you have different version to return to. If you’ve made a lot of changes and decide you want to go back to an earlier version I want to show you a way to create a backup, a snapshot of the state of your project without interfering with your workflow. Because when you’re deep in the workflow of building your edit and you’re in the creative process. You don’t want to have to break from that in order to create a backup. So, here’s a very fast way to do that. My timeline is active I’m working in my project, i’m creating edits and first thing I’m gonna do is press Option-Shift -F. That will reveal the current project i’m working on in the browser. Sometimes you cant actually see it when it does so because its up higher. So, i’m going to scroll up to show you, but you don’t need to locate it. That’s the key thing about this Option-Shift-F sometimes forces you to look around but is has selected this project here. So, Option-Shift-F, then the next thing you wanna do duplicate the project as a snapshot which is Shift-Command-D. That will create your duplicate and now you wanna go back to the project you’re working on which is simply, Command-2 to go back to the active window. So just to repeat, ill move to someplace else in the project. I’m working long and all you need to do very quickly is press Option-Shift-F, Shift-Command-D, Command-2. And in those 3 keyboard combinations that you can execute very quickly you’ve created a backup and you can just keep working. After you’ve gotten used to executing those keyboard shortcuts a few times you’ll be able to create snapshot states of your project without even thinking about it. to learn more tips like this, check out my Warp Speed Editing in Final Cut Pro X tutorial. Click the Info button in the upper right, or visit rippletraining.com.