Exporting a Completed project for color correction without original Media

You will want to media manage your project, which basically reduces it to just the regions of the source media that you are actually using (with handles preferably).  Unfortunately, I am not certain that you can do this in FCPX (somebody please correct me if I am wrong).  So the very first step is to get your project out of FCPX and into Premiere (or better yet, edit your project in Premiere - but hey, I work for Adobe, so you'd expect me to say that - right? ).  Unfortunately, FCPX uses a propriety XML format that is not compatible with Premiere Pro. There is a clever workflow that uses Davinci Resolve as an in-between.  You import the FCPXML and then export a standard XML that PPro understands.  This is a bit tricky and unreliable in my experience but it's free so worth a try. There is a great paid tool that I recommend called XtoCC which can convert your FCPXML into a standard XML PPro can understand.  Once it's in PPro you can use the Project Manager to Consolidate and Transcode your source media, reducing it to just the regions of the source clips that actually got used.  For a 1 minute video it could just be a few hundred MBs - totally dropboxable (did I invent a new word?). Your editor will have to do this on their end I assume.  Zip up the whole folder that this process generates and dropbox it.  You get a PPro project with all the media, graphics, audio etc. and you're off to the races.  You would then color correct and create the final deliverables on your end.

There are several different ways to approach this.  If you are talking about short 1-minute videos, I bet you could avoid having to transfer/ship all the raw content.

Here is a very manual, but easy to understand approach.

1. Have him disable all graphics and render out a flattened movie file in a high-quality format (Prores 4444, probably 422 is good enough for a web series) - this is your "Clean" version (without graphics)
2. Also render out a movie with all the graphics and everything for your reference (can be less quality, small file - it's just for your reference) some editor choose to burn in timecode to this version, but you probably don't need to - this is your "Dirty" version (with graphics)
3. Dropbox/ google drive/ whatever - get these two files
4. If it's truly a 1-minute video, you can probably "notch" the file by hand
   1. drop the Clean version it into PPro onto V1
   2. drop the Dirty version into PPro onto V2 - but turn the visibility off with the track eyeball
   3. go through the Clean version and manually add an edit with the blade tool at every edit point. You are just going to find these the good old fashioned manual way - just watch the video.
   4. if there are transitions, add a dissolve that is the same length as the original transition.
5. Now you can color correct each individual clip.  The transitions you put in there will dissolve the color correction effect between the clips too.
6. Throughout this process, you can always compare to the dirty version by turning the track visibility back on V2 - but be sure it gets turned off before you render.
7. Render out your masterpiece and send it back to the editor
8. He then lays back in the graphics and renders out the final version.
9. Collect Emmy!

This is by no means the only way to do it, but possibly the easiest with the least amount of messing about with media management, XMLs and such.  Of course, if you really want to go that route, I can explain a few different approaches. Naturally, the manual notching approach only makes sense for very short pieces.  If there are tons of edits, it's going to get really old really fast - at that point and XML solution will be essential.

If you send a project (xml) without media project will be offline and un-editable.