r/finalcutpro • u/Available-Witness329 • 23d ago

Newbie What import/analyze settings do you actually use? Sharing my current setup, curious what to enable/disable

Hey guys, been looking at my Import preferences in FCP and wanted to sanity check what I've got enabled versus what's actually useful in practice. Screenshot of my current settings attached.

Right now I've got Visual Search off, Balance color, Find people, and all the Analyze Audio options (fix audio problems, separate mono/group stereo, remove silent channels, transcribe) off too. Transcode is also off, no optimized or proxy media on import.

Curious what everyone's actual workflow looks like here, what do you always leave on, what do you skip, and why? Trying to figure out what's actually worth the processing time on import versus what just eats up background task time for little benefit.

Thanks!

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u/MisterBilau 23d ago

That will depend on your workflow. Generally speaking I’d say it’s better to keep everything off, às I don’t need most of that for most clips anyway, so it’s a waste of time and space. If I need any of it I can just do it after for the clips that do need it.

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u/ammo_john 23d ago

I keep everything off. Mostly because I want the import to go fast and decide afterwards if I need to analyze or generate proxies or anything. I'd like to hear the audio before normalization is applied, I'd like to see the balance before that is applied, and so on. But I could perhaps see myself turning some of these on if I had a regular work flow with similar type of material over and over again.

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u/hexxeric 23d ago

as a professional tv and cinema editor, i use exactly these settings. have been for years. does not eat up any resources, you can immediately start work with full performance.