A Trio of Saves

Here’s an easy weekend shortcut and I realize most people know all about CMD S for “save” (who hasn’t been burned by this?), but let’s take a moment today to consider all three “save” commands in Final Cut Pro. First, the obvious:

The next one is good old “save as” (a fairly universal Mac shortcut) which enables you to save an iteration of your project (after the jump, I’ll share my own strategy for saving using the “autosave” feature and iterative “save as” saves):

The last of our trio is the lesser known, but often handy “save all” which saves all open projects if you happen to have multiple projects open:

What this also tells us is worth remembering: if you do have a couple of projects open (and maybe you do not want to save one), hitting the traditional CMD S will only save the project that has focus (is open on top) at the moment. That’s pro-level knowledge.

After the jump, a note on one man’s project saving strategy…

Of course you should be using the “Autosave Vault” feature (which you can access and configure via the User Preferences pane (shortcut: OPT Q), and here are my own settings:

• Save a copy every 5 minutes yes, it’s worth it–how many minutes of work are you willing to redo?  If you are a keyboard shortcutter, 5 minutes is a lot of work!
• Keep at most 40 copies per project (the default)
• Maximum of 25 projects (again, the default)
• Here’s the biggie: try to set your Autosave Vault location on a different disk from the one you are using for your project! If the disk goes bad, you then restore from the autosave and can easily recapture the media and recover.

Then, once that is all set up, I do a “Save As” (SHIFT CMD S) at every major stage of the edit or every day, whichever comes first–that kicks off a new autosave folder and gives you even more redundancy.