Most artists have it easy—a painter grabs a brush, some paint and goes straight for the canvas. A writer grabs a pen and paper (or keyboard) and starts writing. A graphic artist grabs a tablet and starts drawing. If only it were that easy for video editors!
Well before an editor can start doing any actual work, we've got to spend a good amount of time getting organized and importing our media. The act of importing is simply the process of bringing our media inside FCPX and making the program aware of its existence. It's very similar to dragging a song file into iTunes—the song file already existed in some capacity, but by dropping it into iTunes, we're making iTunes aware that it exists. The same goes for FCPX in most cases.
Unlike the digital music world, however, which only has a small handful of file formats, the digital video world has dozens, and the process for importing these different media types can vary greatly. And, to top it all off, we have many options to consider as to how we want FCPX to process and handle that media as it is imported!
FCPX can import many kinds of media, but there are many factors that must be considered before doing so to determine the best workflow for a project, and where there's a will there's a way—even if FCPX can't immediately import certain file types or projects from other programs, this chapter will help explain workarounds to do the impossible!