Organizing Media in the Workspace

About The Workspace

Creative finishing projects are often complex endeavors. Multiple artists may perform many different tasks before sharing the results with other users for further development. In such heavily-collaborative environments, it is critical to keep these operations carefully separated in order to avoid the accidental overwriting of hours of creative effort.

To safeguard work, Flame Premium is divided into the following components:

• The Workspace, a user-specific area where creative tasks are performed and media can be stored and organized locally.
• Shared Libraries, where source and finished media can be safely made available to other flame-family systems and applications connected to the same project.

Each user is assigned their own Workspace upon opening a project. In the Workspace, they can undertake any and all creative activities without the possibility of altering anyone else's work.

The Workspace is then further divided into:

• The Desktop, where creative finishing work is performed.
• The Libraries folder, for storing source media and safely saving work.

For complete information on all Flame Premium components and their hierarchy, see About the Structure of Projects.

Managing Media in Desktops and Libraries

A standard practice is to first create an organized series of folders in the libraries and then import the required project footage directly into them. Clips are then copied to the Desktop as needed.

Clips can also be directly imported to any reel in the Desktop, with the exception of a reel on a saved Batch group iteration.

Note: When importing a 3DS, FBX, PSD or Particles file, the application automatically creates a new schematic reel within the current Batch Group, placing all imported textures in the dedicated reel.

Through the Media panel, clips and even entire reels are easily moved by simply dragging and dropping them to a new location. Clips and reels can equally be cut, copy or pasted by right-clicking the target and selecting the desired operation.

Note: Because libraries are used as storage for raw sources and finished material, dragging a clip or reel from a library to a Desktop location will copy the target rather than move it, in order to avoid any inadvertent loss of work.

Editing Clips in a Library

To protect raw and finished material from accidental alteration, all editing functions for clips in libraries are turned off by default. Should it become necessary to edit a clip directly in a library, disable Preferences > General tab > Protect from Editing.

Once this option disabled, the following operations can be freely performed on clips in all libraries:

• Editing of a source clip (Trim, Slip, Cut, etc.)
• Timeline FX operations (Add, Delete, Modify, etc.)
• Batch FX operations.
• Opening a clip as a sequence.

You can, however, copy a segment out of a sequence in the following situations:

• The clip is located in a Library and Protect From Editing is enabled.
• The clip is locked.
• The clip is located in a Shared Library and you do not have the exclusive write access.