Review: Library Manager for Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Rundown

Review: Library Manager for Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Rundown

March, 2014

Library Manager for Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Rundown
By Richard Taylor

The 3rd party Final Cut Pro X app development community is alive and well. The latest entry into this field is the much needed Final Cut Library Manager from Arctic Whiteness.

This no-brainer $9 app keeps track of all of your Final Cut Libraries whether they are from a disk or in a folder, online or offline. This is a master window to view of all of your Libraries at one glance. Its interface is packed with features and some might not be obvious. I'm going to go over the features that I find most useful in this rundown.

You can check each Volume on or off to show or hide its Libraries.

You can sort the Libraries by name, Last Modified and Size.

You can add individual Folders by dragging or using the + button in the lower left hand corner.

You can remove and eject Libraries from the list that you don't want to see and also force a manual rescan. By default it uses the Spotlight index.

Right click on a Library and you can choose to open it in Final Cut Pro with other Libraries or open only that Library in Final Cut Pro. You can also choose to show the Library in the Finder.

You can see how much free space you have on a given Volume and on which Volume the Library is located.

Everything is color coded; Blue=Optimized, Purple=Proxy, Pink=Stabilized, Green=Render, Yellow=Shared

You can turn on the Shared and Stabilized media options from the View > Displayed Columns menu.

New to version 1.5 is the ability to read or add notes or Comments to a Library. Click on the pencil icon for a Library to access the Comments field. This is the same as "Get Info" in the Finder.

You can see if you have render, optimized or proxy files available in a given Library. The check boxes are white if you have these files versus gray if you don't.

You can delete these files individually by checking the item and clicking the trashcan icon. You can see the potential space savings if you choose to trash these files.

This app also has a search field and the ability to go full screen.

I have dozens of hard drives and even more Libraries scattered across all of them. This app is my must-have Master Library Index and generated media manager for all of my online and offline Libraries.

You can download a trial version to take Final Cut Library Manager for a test drive and watch a video tutorial here.

Richard Taylor is an Editor/Producer and an Apple Certified Trainer for Final Cut Pro X from the Washington DC/Baltimore Maryland area. He can be reached via his Final Cut Pro X website FCPX.TV or on Twitter @RichardTaylorTV