New to FRV, wondering how to combine this with my PhotoMechanic

I am very new to Fast Raw Viewer.  I've been using PhotoMechanic since as long as I can remember, and I have mostly switched from using Lightroom to using PhotoLab 4.  I've been watching all the videos about FRV, and I have two or three more to watch - tomorrow.
From what I've seen so far, it looks like when I come home from taking photos, the first thing to do would be to evaluate them in FRV, and do the "culling".  Once I've done that, I would probably want to use Photo Mechanic Plus to copy the good images to a folder in an organized location on my computer.  This includes renaming the folders, renaming the images, and copyng over the metadata that I would already have edited.
 
My first question - is what I just wrote reasonable, or am I missing something?
 
At some point I would want to start editing in PhotoLab 4, but if I understand the videos correctly, I can do the "raw editing" in FRV, saving the information along with the images.  This would presumably optimize the image, getting the images ready for my custom editing in PL4 - cropping, straightening, adjusting the image to look its best, adding my watermark, and finally noise reduction.  Last step is to export the image, both to my Smugmug Photo Gallery ( m.smugmug.com ), and to pass on to others.
 
Second question - is what I just wrote correct?  Can I use FRV to adjust the raw image, so it's ready for me to polish in PL4 ?

Dear Sir:

To your first question, yes, what you are suggesting is indeed a reasonable approach.

FastRawViewer sets "editing" parameters as XMP sidecar entries. DxO PhotoLab doesn't expect any of those parametric edits in XMP files, and will probably ignore them.

mikemyers's picture

Thank you.  So very simply put, FRV is for evaluating and culling my images.  Presumably rejected images will go into a new folder on my memory card, and when I ingest images from the card, I will exclude the folder with the rejects.
All I will be doing is evaluating, and learning.  At the end of the process, the (better) images will get ingested same as always.
Thanks!

m.smugmug.com

Dear Sir:

Because of reliability issues (readers, cables, drivers, etc), I prefer not to write to cards out of camera. When culling, I use FastRawViewer to copy the images that I need from the card to a folder on a disk; and of course backup the whole content of the card to some permanent storage (in my case, FreeNAS servers, one local, one remote).

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