A lot has been written on the subject of how to share Final Cut Pro X (FCP X) projects. Some say it can’t be done. Others say it can be done, just with caveats. I’m here to tell you that after much experimentation, I have figured out how to make FCP X do pretty near precisely what FCP 7 does for media management.

Let me set up what I need to do. My upcoming project, Month of the Novel Season 2, is planned to be edited on FCP X by two editors, myself and my co-editor Ruth. We are both long-time users of FCP 7, and we used it to edit Season 1 of the show. Before we could switch to FCP X, I needed to find out if a few things were still possible. Here’s our workflow from Season 1 that we’re hoping to keep for Season 2:

• Shoot the series in Georgia. While there, load the footage to Ruth’s computer.
• I travel back to my home state, Illinois, with a copy of the project and media on my external drive.
• Ruth and I share project files back and forth as we cut episodes and review each other’s work, making changes on either end.

Ruth and I are very collaborative editors. We often make changes to each other’s edits, and we tend to divide work according to individual strengths when it comes to creating additional media such as titles, visual effects, and so forth.

This posed a problem where FCP X was concerned. I had been led to believe from the sharing tutorials I’d found that it was impossible to add media to a shared project after initially copying the event. I didn’t want to deal with making a new event to send every time I added another file to the project, but that seemed to be the only option. But it’s not! I recently spent a few hours extensively testing how FCP X handles sharing, simulating two different computers with a couple of external hard drives that I could completely unmount. Here’s what I found out.

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