Day minus 1, setting up the project - merging logged events

That was the easy day; traveling, shooting some beauties around Millstaetter See, a lake in southern Austria, where Peakbreak will start tomorrow, and then capturing material from the F3 and the EX-3 and two DSLRs.

It wasn´t much so we tested the sharing of events.

We are 3 shooters and 2 editors with MacBooks.

What we try to do is this: 

Macbook Pro A has the main drive, we called her BEAST, and the main Event on it, we called it Peakbreak 2011, what an inventive name.

 On Macbook A Alban imports his footage. EX-3 material gets transcoded via SONY XDCam Transfer and then imported as a folder, h.264 files get transcoded within FCP-X.

On Macbook B Stefan transcodes his F3 material via XDCam Transfer and imports the clips into an Event he called Stefan Peakbreak Transfer.

Here´s what we tried and what happened: Stefan copied the event (File>Duplicate Event) onto a mobile-drive. We took the drive with and connected it on MBPA. FCPX recognized the event on the drive and showed it with the content in the event browser. Now I dragged that event on top of my event and FCPX responded with a "Merge Events" dialogue. 

FCPX MOVED the event´s files onto Beast and in the main event I ended up with the one keyword selection and the material from Stefan´s day. That was easy!

All that was good. Problem. The material was moved, so when we plugged in the drive with his Mac again (BTW, needed to close FCPX to unmount that drive), the event was gone (it had been moved after all). 

Tomorrow he will make a new event and keyword collection (with his favorites) and we will merge that again into the main event on my machine.

In the end I will have all in one event in my drive and FCPX, he will have 9 or 10 events on his machine. In the end Stefan will have to merge all his events into one, by simply dragging their icons onto a master event.

There´s one problem. Stefan tagged his best clips as favorites. Then made a smart collection called "FavsDay-1" based on the tag: "Rating is Favourites"

Ok, now he made a second Event to test what would happen tomorrow. There he imported different clips and again created a Smart Collection  called "FavsDay-2" based on the tag: "Rating is Favourites"

NOW comes the bad news: when you merge these two events, the smart collections BOTH disappear instead of merging into one based on the tag "Favourites". Keyword collections carried over in merged events, but smart collections don´t. Apparently you need to have unique smart collections for every event. 

So we are just asking ourselves if we ever use smart collections, because you never know if and when you need a merge of events. Workaround would be to put a keyword on every smart collection before merging events.