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Searching for Specific Marker in Event Browser Clips
Hello all,
As someone who works in long form documentary, in FCP 7 I used markers for browser clips extensively. On a one hour clip I could have dozens marking a word spoken, a beautiful shot, a nice camera move, where the audio drops out, where it comes back, etc. In FCP 7, though limited in certain ways, I could search for a piece of text in a marker that I remember writing (or is the name of one of the subjects for example), and the program would take me directly to that marker. (Granted, for some dumb reason the disclosure triangle had to be open to reveal the markers, but this was invaluable.
This is something that is handled quite well by FCP X in the timeline using the timeline index. But if you search for text in the browser, what is returned is THE CLIP, not the specific marker, or markers with that text. This is pretty useless for the situation I describe, as it would be if this was how it worked in the timeline. I know what clip the marker is in. That’s the clip I’m searching.
Has anyone found this to be an issue as well? Is there something I’m missing? Is there a workaround where a search can return the moment in time and not the entire clip?
Thanks in advance for the help!
Chris
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28 Replies
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I believe what you are looking for is the range selection. You can set keywords for a range of frames.
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What version are you using? If I name a bunch of markers and name them test 1, test 2, test 3, and do a text search for “test” using Cmd-F in the browser, it finds the markers.
All the best,
Tom
“Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press
Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2012 “Complete Training for FCPX” from Class on Demand -
Hi Tom,
Thanks for responding. I have the latest, 10.0.3. From my own tests, I think you are mistaken — unless, of course, I am. 🙂
In the browser, a search for “test” in the example you provide, finds a CLIP that has a marker with the word “test” somewhere on it — not the marker itself.
This is very different. It would be alright if there were just a few markers on any given clip and find what you need at a glance, but that is not the situation that I am describing. For a long form documentary, such as one I am working on now, an hour long clip has dozens of markers. If you have a clip with dozens of markers and what you want to do is go right to a particular moment that is marked by marker with the word “test” in it, this search functionality won’t serve. All it does is return the clip itself. And I already know the marker is on the clip. That’s why I was trying to search for it there. What I want is to find the marker; to go to the marker.
The crazy thing is that the timeline index does exactly this for the timeline. It has a list of all the markers. Type “test” in the search field and only the markers with that word remain in the list. Click one and you go to that spot in the timeline. Beautiful. But I can’t do the same thing with a clip in the browser? This is doubly crazy, since it’s way more valuable there than in the timeline.
Please tell me I’m wrong or that there’s something I can do that gives me this functionality. I really like FCPX, but this is a feature I rely on so much that I can’t see myself working with the program on any long form doc without it.
Chris
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I think Jason’s answer is more correct. You should not be using markers as you did in legacy versions. You should probably be using keywords over ranges. The metadata in FCP is very differently managed than earlier versions. If you really want to use the marker method, you can drop the long clip into a blank project and search the timeline index.
All the best,
Tom
“Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press
Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2012 “Complete Training for FCPX” from Class on Demand -
Hi Tom, hi Jason,
Thanks again for engaging with me on this.
Unfortunately Jason’s idea doesn’t work for this situation. Keywords create what I think of as virtual bins, categories under which a variety of ranges or clips can be quickly located. I am not looking for a category of material. I am looking for a specific moment in time.
Say, for example, I want to find that moment in a 30 minute clip where Julie raises her eyebrow, or that moment where she says “I hate you!” If I tag a moment like that with a keyword that describes just that moment, what I get is a single range inside a keyword collection named, let us say, “Julie, I hate you”. A “collection” of a single range. This is the key issue. I’m not looking for every time Julie says something important (which is what a keyword collection is great for — “Important Julie Quotes”), I’m looking for particular moments, a moment when “Tom kicks a rock.” If I continue to tag specific moments such as these in a 30 minute clip (shot for a documentary, for example) with keywords, my Event Library could fill up with dozens of keyword collections with a single range inside them.
And even then the search function will not bring me to those moments. The search function does not return keyword collections; it returns whole clips. Search for “hate you” and it finds and reveals the clip in the browser that has those keywords somewhere on it. I have to scroll down looking by eye for the keyword “Julie, I hate you!” amidst all the other keywords, markers and favorites. And to use the “Tom kicks a rock” keyword collection in the Event Library to locate that moment, I would have to find the keyword collection in the event library and click on it. Then the range would appear in the browser. But with dozens of such single-moment keyword collections created in the event library to tag the various moments in that 30 minute clip that I need to tag, I would again have to scroll through all of them by eye to find it.
Again, think of the timeline index. It can take me to a moment in time by searching for text that I have entered into a marker to describe or “mark” a single, unique moment. It can take me right to that quote I’m looking for.
It’s an issue of specific-moment search needs vs. category search needs. If I want to review all the instances when Julie laughs inside an entire event or an hour long clip, a keyword collection is a thing of beauty.
But if I want to find that brief moment, the moment when Julie hesitates when Tom asks her to marry him — or better yet a moment in some unrelated situation where she hesitates about something else, but I want to use that moment to make it look like she hesitates at first when Tom asks her, if I’ve marked such a moment with a marker or a keyword (and I have no idea where in the hell it is), a search of “Julie hesitates” won’t take me to Julie hesitating. It reveals the 30 minute clip as a whole with the marker or keyword that tagged her hesitation buried amidst three dozen other markers, keywords and favorites.
One might argue that FCP X does things differently and one just needs to get one’s head around the paradigm, but that’s not going to help me get the job done. I’m not stuck thinking about things in the old way. I love FCP X and what it can do. But this functionality is off-the-charts critical for my work. Tools are for solving problems. We can’t just limit ourselves to problems that a particular tool can solve.
I more than suspect that there is no workaround and we will have to see if enough people need this functionality that it comes to Apple’s attention. All they would need to do to solve it would be to make the Timeline Index contextual, like the Inspector. So it would function for both the timeline and a browser clip, becoming active for one or the other depending on which window was active. Or they could create a “Browser Index.”
Then it would be problem solved.
Thanks again for engaging on this. Any other thoughts that might help me find a solution in the meantime are, of course, much appreciated.
Chris
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On a recent project, I did exactly what tom described…I’m more comfortable with markers and love the marker index.
The range selection at browser level is foreign and also it adds a new keyword for each new one u set…whether that be a quote or thought…if u add a ton of unique keywords, that list seems like it could get pretty unweilding…
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Yea, thats what I meant by the list of keywords getting “unweilding”
I’m interested in seeing what ideas others come up with.
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Yeah I didn’t really take note of Tom’s point that “If you really want to use the marker method, you can drop the long clip into a blank project and search the timeline index.”
It’s a nice idea, though it has one small problem and two big ones.
To clarify what we’re talking about, this means reviewing your markers on a clip in a timeline with the index, hitting shift-F if you find a moment you’re interested in, selecting the range in the browser clip version, switching to the project you’re actually working on, and inserting or connecting the range where your playhead is waiting. That’s not bad; it’s really only two steps more than you’d have to do if you could just search a browser clip and find the marker there (the two extra steps: match frame & switching to the project you’re working on).
The extra steps are the small problem. The first big problem is: say you’re reviewing your markers in the timeline and you want to add one, change one or delete one. Those changes are not made in the browser clip. They are two separate clips now. This is something I am constantly doing when I am reviewing material and something that needs to be possible to do.
One interesting side note about this: there’s a function that actually opens a browser clip in a timeline such that it is the browser clip itself that is open there. If you right click on a clip in the browser and select “open in timeline” it opens there — and the path indicates that it is the browser clip itself. You would think that any markers you add or subtract or change here would affect the clip in the browser, as they are supposed to be the same, but alas no. It functions as if it were a new timeline clip.
Perhaps this is a bug and something the engineers were thinking this functionality should be used for. Any interested parties should write Apple about that. I will.
The other big problem is that often I want to find a moment that I know I marked somewhere in the 30 hours of material for, say, a documentary that I am editing. But I don’t remember on which clip it lives. I can’t use the place-a-clip-in-a-timeline method to search the entire event. Unless I place all the clips of the event into a project and then search.
It would be nice if Apple could add back this functionality for browser clips. It would not be hard to do. The simple way is to allow you to do a search in the browser that doesn’t only return entire clips that have text somewhere on a marker that you want, but also highlights the first instance of that text (or even keyword), so that the image is queued in the viewer. Then allows you to search forward for other instances. Old school. But I can’t do what I need as things stand.
And the better way would be to have the timeline index work for both the timeline and the browser (perhaps it’s name changing dynamically depending on which window was active). That way I could search every clip for that moment I am looking for and not have to do any extra steps to get it into my project.
Chris
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I hope ur feature requests are as elloquently written as ur creative cow posts! 🙂
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Thanks Jason, that’s a very nice thing to say.
I’ve been looking more at the feature where you can open a clip in the timeline by right clicking on it and choosing “open in timeline”. It’s not just the case that afterwards you can add markers to the clip in either the browser or the timeline and not have them appear in the other copy — the change you make to the version in the timeline are persistent even after you restart the program.
Here’s what I mean, and it’s VERY strange: you’ve done what I describe. The program is open again. The clip in the browser does not have any of the markers you added in the timeline version before. Right click the browser clip, choose open in timeline, and the other version of the clip opens up in the timeline — with all the markers that you added to it last time still there.
It’s as if there is some second, ghost copy of the clip that exists in an “open in timeline” alternate dimension.
That’s a bug. That’s gotta be unintentional.
Chris
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