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Workflow for sports highlight in FCPX
Here is the challenge. Put together a highlight with best goals, hits, saves and defense from a collection of 6 lacrosse games, each roughly 1 hour in length and made of of many clips. During the season each game was edited down to a 5 to 8 minute video report and these include most of the desired shots. Here is where I miss multiple tracks. In FCPX, I would have multiple projects and tracks open and drag desired clips to a new track or I would go through a summary and drag all the shots to a bin and then load the bin to a new track. If I had edited initially in the event file and used keywords I might have been able to do something similar. However, I prefer to edit in the time line, which is fine for the game summaries, but doesn’t seem to adapt to the year end highlights.
So I need to collect all the goals, all the hits, etc in separate sets and then choose the best. Generally the order is randomized, ie no longer in a time sequence unlike the game reports. Maybe there is a way to make four new projects, goal, hits, stops, defense and collect the appropriate clips in them.
Suggestions?
Claude -
22 Replies
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Do you have a timecode skriptlist for the games (e.g.a list that says at 13:12:12 is a goal?)?
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No. At this point the clips are not labeled in any way.
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Easiest practise would have been if you would have key-worded the original clips according the highlights. Goals, misses, good play etc. whatever you need.
This way you could call up only the sections of a game you want to combine for either summary or highlights.But I understand you haven’t done this because it is not your preferred workflow.
You can’t drag edited clips to the original or a new event. But you can do the following: highlight the clip in your edit (with the pointer over the clip hit C, or click on it), than hit shift-F to match select the range of the clip in the original event it is coming from, than hit command-K to assign a keyword to it (e.g. Goal) once you done this for your best moments throughout your edits you can select the keyword selection in the event and either drag them all down to a new project or do it one by one making a new order which is not time based.
Alternatively you can just multi select (command click) clips from your summary edits, than copy-past them into a new project and edit to your desired order. of course this will create gabs but they are easily deleted.
That’s the 2 options I can think of. May not be all 🙂
Best Carsten
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Go through the projects and copy and paste what’s good into one project. Rearrange and trim as you like.
All the best,
Tom
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Thanks. Although it would have been better to keyword from the beginning, your approach at least explains how to work backward from an edited project to keyword the parts of clips that are desired. I will give it a shot.
Next year I will have to keyword from the beginning. I just find selecting the 5 to 10 seconds I want to keep out of a clip 60 seconds long or so, awkward in the event window. I may be doing it wrong, but there is a lack of precision in choosing the in and out points in the event layout.
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Thanks Tom. That had occurred to me. Is there a way to have the two projects “visible” at the same time to cut an paste between or do you have to swap projects each time? I am probably doing something the hard way. That is not unusual for me working in FCPX.
The other challenge for me, is I want to sort the clips into at least 4 different sets, goals, hits, stops, defense. It seems clear FCPX is set up to do this database work with keywords, if it is done at the start of the editing. Anyway, I can do it with brute force, just was wishing for a more elegant solution.
Claude -
If I’m reading it right, I would just duplicate the project then cut OUT everything that is not a goal or hit leaving only the high lights.
No need to paste or go back and forth to that old project.
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At the moment, there are essentially six projects where the clips are edited and ordered roughly in time to show the flow of the games, one project for each of the six games. The goal is to make a seventh project where selected clips that no longer have any ordering in time, but are reordered into the different categories. I think I can just paste all 6 into one project, one at a time, and then rearrange and select as needed. Or as suggested above, use the edited games to go back and relabel goals, hits etc.
This remapping is an obvious database manipulation, but the lesson is, think ahead and adjust the workflow to the the constraints of FCPX.
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You don’t even have to think of it as keywording. I never use the key wording per se. I created keyword collections (pretend they’re bins) and just drag clips into them. The beauty being it really is a database. You can highlight two bins (keyword collections) and get the result of the two combined.
So you’d make your 4 keyword collections. Then shift+f the clips in the timeline, then drag them to the keyword collection. I guess it’d be nice if you could drag them from the timeline.
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I find the keyboard shortcut of command-[ and command-] (the square brackets to the right of P on the keyboard) very handy when switching between projects. You can’t see 2 projects at a time but by using the command you don’t have to go via the project browser. Load all the projects you need (double click) and then you can go back and force using the keyboard command.
Another tip. When creating keyword selections you don’t have to be accurate! They do not behave like sub-clips in FCP7 where you are limited to the length once the sub clip is made. After editing a keyword selection into your timeline you have access to the whole clip that it is coming from, meaning you can trim past the initial keyword boundries without restrictions. So if you key wording from a long clip you can be fairly rough and do not have to worry that you can’t manipulate the clip once it is in the project.
Best Carsten
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