Combining projects in FCPX

[Phil Lowe]

Doesn’t sound like a very “news friendly” solution to me. Who has time to keyword when you’re cutting under heavy deadline pressure?

SMH.

[Jeff Kirkland]

The great thing about FCPX is its flexibility. You can import clips to the browser, quickly skim through them and cut them straight to a timeline, You could string all the clips into an empty ccmpound clip and do what you’ve always done. Or you could add keywords to make stuff easier to find later. Whatever works for you and makes the shot you’re looking for easier to find.

The one thing pretty much everyone finds, once they embrace the FCPX way of doing things, is that you can edit much faster in FCPX than you can on a traditional NLE.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Phil Lowe]

Thanks, Jeff. It sounds like throwing all the clips into a compound clip with the ability to log timecode and edit from that is the solution I’ll want for editing news. Whether I’ll ever come around to an FCPX way of thinking is highly doubtful. Too many years invested in Avid Newscutter and Media Composer, the latter of which I still use for paid and unpaid freelance work. Much faster for me. 😉

[Joseph Steiner]

My goal is to create a one project which will combine short portions of several projects. I copied all of them to one library. Made a snapshot of each. Edited the first one. How do I put the next project in the same timeline for edit? Thanks.

[Joe Marler]

[Phil Lowe] “”200 clips…speed review” them by simply skimming…bring that timeline into the viewer, set an in & out to cut into a different timeline that I’m working on….Who has time to keyword when you’re cutting under heavy deadline pressure”

In FCP X the skimmer and event browser are designed for this (hence the names). It is extremely fast. One way or another you have to examine the material. Why import it to an initial timeline for this? Within the event browser you can skim, set I/O points, mark favorites and rejects.

You don’t have to keyword anything. For your case maybe simply using favorites and rejects is enough. Just make sure you have Skimming and Audio Skimming enabled.

Note: this process is marking *ranges* not clips, and they remain marked in the browser and can be selectively shown by clicking on “Favorites” in the filter drop-down at top left of the browser. In the browser they can be viewed as a list, sorted by various criteria, bulk added to the timeline, etc. Other editing software without this capability may have to edit ranges into an intermediary timeline but that is not needed with FCP X.

While FCP X is designed to work that way, there are two methods of editing into an intermediate timeline then putting that in a final timeline. (1) Make intermediate timeline into a compound clip (which places it into the browser) create final project timeline and add compound clip from browser. (2) As of 10.2 you can edit a timeline and essentially re-inject that into the browser via a Library Smart Collection. Use: File>New Library Smart Collection, then double-click on it and give the filter criteria Used Media. The search scope will be restricted to the current project but span all events in the library. Any edits to that project timeline will be reflected back to that Library Smart Collection and visible in the browser. When finished editing that intermediate timeline, you could then tag those clips in the Library Smart Collection, switch to a final project, query those tags and put them in the final timeline. I’m not recommending that workflow, but you could do it.

You can keep track of what clips you’ve used or not used in the timeline with Used Media Ranges:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa9TvpBpRcA

If you wanted to use keywords this can be done very quickly:

MacBreak Studio “Warp Speed Keywording”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJ4J41JaZk

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[Phil Lowe]

In FCP X the skimmer and event browser are designed for this (hence the names). It is extremely fast.

The idea behind placing every clip on an intermediate timeline is to be able to scrub/”skim” them all without having to go back to the bin to pull up another clip. It’s especially useful for B-Rolling a sequence quickly. Every time you have to pull an individual clip into the browser – I don’t care how fast you can “skim” it once there – it’s wasting time. People who have never edited for news don’t understand how critical every second can be. A few seconds can mean the difference between making or missing deadline.

Personally, I don’t care at all for Apple’s new editing paradigm but since I have to use it for editing news soon, I need it to work for what I do.

[Joe Marler]

[Phil Lowe] “Every time you have to pull an individual clip into the browser – I don’t care how fast you can “skim” it once there – it’s wasting time.”

Can you explain what you mean here? In FCP X you don’t generally “pull individual clips” into the browser — you import everything — it’s *all* visible in the browser. Then you rapidly skim through it and make range selections.

Do you mean initially examining material external to FCP X, importing individual clips as you find them? That can be done and it formerly was the common practice. However it’s usually not the optimal workflow with FCP X.

That became the common practice when import was expensive due to transcoding and when editing software was slow and had limited ability to scan through material. With FCP X that’s no longer the case.

The best procedure is often to just import *everything* and use “leave files in place” and turn off all the import analysis options. It won’t transcode anything or take up extra space. It is very fast.

I have used all kinds of external tools to scan through video material but IMO the best approach (with FCP X) is just import everything. It avoids redundant evaluation passes, and the skimming ability is faster than any other tool I’ve seen. It doesn’t take up space because it’s not transcoding anything. Once your selects are done you can easily copy only the used material to another library to archive that (if required).

[Phil Lowe]

In FCP X you don’t generally “pull individual clips” into the browser — you import everything — it’s *all* visible in the browser.

Yes, and whether you have a couple dozen or a couple hundred clips, you have to go through each one individually and “skim” to find the shot you want. If they are all in the same (compound) clip, you have only a single clip you have to scrub through. Making a compound clip is the closest thing I’ve found to creating an intermediate sequence and cutting from that. I’m trying to eliminate the time it takes to view individual clips by placing them all on a single timeline. Compound clips seem to be the best answer for me in an otherwise (IMHO) ghastly interface.

By the way, Avid has had the ability to preview and scrub clips in the bin for years – much like the default FCP X browser view now – and I never liked that approach either, because you still have to view the clips one at a time instead of having them all viewable as a single clip, which is what putting them all on a sequence (or compound clip) gives you.

[Jeff Kirkland]

Maybe I’m just missing something but the workflow that Phil is describing just sounds like an artificial way of doing what the FCPX browser is presenting you with by default.

The clips are in the Browser window, sorted and grouped whatever way you want, you can see a thumbnail at whatever interval you set so visually you can quickly jump to whatever you’re looking for. In the default view, with grouping off, all the clips are essentially strung out one after the other in chronological order, so you just skim through the clips, set in and out points, hit the ‘e’ key to edit that selection to the timeline, and repeat.

I can’t for the life of me think how the extra step of stringing the clips out into a timeline could possibly be any faster than that.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Phil Lowe]

you can see a thumbnail at whatever interval you set

I work in text (list) mode. Always have. Always will.

And Jeff, check out this link at the 3:08 mark and watch him scroll down and drag, scroll down and drag, and scroll down and drag. This is the workflow I’m trying to avoid by having all the clips on one sequence:

https://youtu.be/H2Vv8D63fqs?t=184

One more thing: the guy in the video I linked uses separate events like bins. I think I’m going to organize all my media – by type (bites, b-roll, etc) into compound clips to do the same thing, much as I do now with Avid, putting different types of media in different sequences.

P.S. Watching him drop voice tracks from the browser was just painful. That’s how to do it in Windows Movie Maker! 😉 Way faster to record all the tracks straight to the timeline and clean them up there.