Adding ‘Favorite’ to a clip on the timeline

[Oliver Peters]

Drag the sequence to a new bin… Oh wait, that was FCP 7! ;-). Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Do you only want to Favorite the range used in the timeline or can you live with the full clip? If the latter, then you could duplicate the project plus used clips into a new event.

Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Lazarus Rico]

yep old habits die hard! 🙂

ideally, just favorite the range used in the timeline.

[Bill Davis]

[Lazarus Rico] “The reason I ask is I have a sequence of shortlisted clips on a timeline and would like to only be able to see those clips in the Event browser when I start a new timeline to do my fine edit…”

You’re free to work any way you like, but I’d observe that like many people, you’re trying to work in X roughly the same way you worked in a standard timeline program like Legacy or Premier – and that’s NOT the most efficient way to do things in X.

In X, the storyline is downstream of the Event Browser in terms of metadata flow.

So you’re working LATE in the flow, if you insist on continuing to create storylines as workspaces.

I know the allure. It’s easy to visualize and it feels comfortable.

But it does not leverage the unique strengths of X fully.

See if you can get used to doing ALL your preparation work using the amazing tools in the event browser. You can often literally pre-edit the vast majority of a typical project – including doing selects – without ANY need to create a storyline at all.

I’d advise learning to arrange your Event Browser using the clip appearance tools so that you “think” of it’s display as your “initial timelines” If you do that, you’ll discover that you can “call up” these new “virtual timelines” (actually just event browser arrangements) in a whole host of ways with all sorts of searching and filtering via keywords.

Until you get used to this new workflow, just jumping into downstream storylines in order to “pre-edit will put you in positions like you are now – trying to do things like mark Favorites in a place (the storyline) where those decisions are less useful – rather than up in the Event Bfowser where the same FAVORITE decision will not only be “saved” for subsequent work, but will remain available for all your subsequent projects.

I often do 50%, 70% or even 90% of my editing work directly in the event browser, before I ever get to the Storyline. Not always (some programs require a lot of traditional “timeline” work even in X.) but often enough so that I think of Event Browser work as every bit as important if not MORE so than the work I do in my timelines.

If you see the EB as simply a “stop” before you get to your “real editing” – you’re likely missing a huge part of what makes X so fast and efficient.

Hope that helps.

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[Oliver Peters]

[Bill Davis] “If you see the EB as simply a “stop” before you get to your “real editing” – you’re likely missing a huge part of what makes X so fast and efficient.”

So what you are saying, is that he can’t do the function he’s asking about. Or is there a way to create Favorites based on the ranges in the timeline?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Michael Garber]

No, you can’t favorite clips in the timeline. You could make a compound clip of everything in the timeline and then favorite those sections of the compound clip in the event browser. After editing those favorites from the compound clip into the timeline, you could then break them apart (or not). However, I wouldn’t recommend doing it this way.

Like Bill, I would opt to follow the built-in workflow and use the event browser to favorite clips. It’s a much cleaner approach. Then filter the view by Favorites only (ctrl-f). To see all specific clips together, give them a common keyword.

When using favorites, I treat them more like circled takes. I no longer use them as faux subclips or like extended marker ranges. Their purpose is solely to make something stand out.

I recommend using the Reject clip command (delete), as well. It gets unnecessary clips or ranges of clips out of the way.

Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company
Blog: GARBERSHOP
My Moviola Webinar on Cutting News in FCP X

[Lazarus Rico]

Thanks Bill.

I know it’s the old way of picking out shots by selecting in and outs and then putting them on the timeline but the reason for which I did it was just to get an overview of how it all looked.

Probably a more efficient way to do it by key wording beforehand but it’s a short promo and I was hoping the keywording or ‘favoriting’ could be decided from a command whilst in the timeline – would seem logical to be able to go back ‘upstream’ on the workflow when it comes to metadata (well you can but it requires Shift -F) .

Oliver’s suggestion worked well (thanks!) and by copying only the used clips to a new event I got only the clips I needed in the event and the ins and outs.

Now I can key word them in more detail.

[Jacob Brown]

Just curious, is hitting shift-f and then hitting f really that hard? it’s two key strokes to favorite something from timeline, or am I missing something.

but Bill I have to second what you wrote here. it’s amazing the clarity you have going into an empty timeline when you’ve already organized and favorited your selects in the event browser stage.

[Oliver Peters]

FWIW – I find the Favorites process not to be very useful, except for whole clips. I’ve done ranged Favorites on commercials and it’s fine there. I’m now cutting a feature film and I find it to be completely useless in my workflow, because it greatly impedes my cutting speed. Of course, I never used subclips all that much, except in the film transfer days, when each file was a 10 min. roll.

IMHO, the problem with X is it imposes one workflow as the optimum approach, while other mature NLEs are more versatile in accommodating multiple working styles.

And yes, Shift-F plus F is very painful if you have 1,000 clips on a timeline.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Michael Garber]

Oliver-

Curious to know how favorites are getting in the way on the feature? How are they slowing the process down for you?

Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company
Blog: GARBERSHOP
My Moviola Webinar on Cutting News in FCP X

[Jacob Brown]

Oliver,

For my feature I basically create a keyword for scenes or groups of scenes that all go together.

Then I view the clips within that keyword sorted by scene. The FCPX basically groups all the takes for a given shot for me and I just favorite the relevant parts of each take. Then when I’m ready to start editing I can switch to viewing favorites only and get nice blow up versions of each in event viewer.

Next time I plan on making the DIT enter the scene meta data in camera so that I don’t even have to do the set up myself in FCPX haha!!!

Jacob