The most effective way to setup FCPX from the start.

When you first purchase FCPX and start it up, what are the best settings/most common settings that are used to give you the best results. For example in the Editing tab of Preferences, is it better to turn on 'background rendering' or not? what are the advantages of doing this and what are the disadvantages? Do you use proxy or optimised media, which is better and why would you use one instead of the other? When you import, do you have a 'Transcoding' option ticked, if so which one and what are the benefits of each?

This stuff seems really hard to find out and I couldn't find a posting in the forum here discussing this.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks

Cruise the user manual for a bit.

My recommendations, and everyone has millions of reasons for different suggestions, all valid.
- Turn off background rendering
- Show detailed trimming feedback, turn on
- Show reference waveforms
- Pre and Post roll both set to 2 seconds
- Player Background set to Black, unless you're compositing and aligning things, then switch to checkerboard
- Turn off both dropped frame warnings, as most systems are going to drop a frame here or there no matter what
- Import settings only apply to items dragged to an Event or Timeline from a Finder window
- Add the Save Current Frame back into Destinations

But, different environments require different set ups.

Should you use Proxy, Optimized, or Original media? That's an in depth question. What type of work are you editing, what type of cameras, what Mac hardware?