FCP X 10.1 keywords & smart collections

[Oliver Peters]

I have been of the belief – and I continue to believe with 10.1 – that you are best off to have the fewest possible events. I think it is the best for the database overall. Currently I would suggest to group events by type. So events for Footage, Graphics, Music/SFX, Sequences.

Oliver

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

[Tony West]

[Oliver Peters] “Currently I would suggest to group events by type. So events for Footage, Graphics, Music/SFX, Sequences.”

I actually have done that,

Music
B-roll
VO
Motion

and such

but I still like the subjects in their own events, the reason is in this doc there are a lot of files that come along with each person such as government documents, case forms and their pics and such.

(I first started this when people were complaining about events getting corrupted and I wanted to separate them. Have not heard about that happening in a while, knock on wood)

Let’s look at Denise for an example below.

She has over 150 elements in her event alone and she is only one of 40 subjects so far.

I simply click on her name

Then I click on work history and I’m there.

I measure speed in number of clicks.

I can run through over 1500 files in 2 clicks with no typing.

For me it’s working great and the system has had no problem handling all these events.

[Craig Seeman]

Least people forget. Avid is a hardware vendor as well. Blackmagic is for that matter too (consider Resolve’s popularity).

Apple’s motive… if you like FCPX you HAVE to use it on a Mac. If you like Avid and Premiere Pro you can certainly move to a Windows only PC.

Adobe is software and service (and PPro isn’t the biggest piece of that pie either) and, with no hardware to sell, they’re now taking your subscription payment.

[Bret Williams]

This is the only reason I can see to have events still. It could be accomplished in a single event with a folder or the interviewee instead, BUT, the keywords within that folder couldn’t be the same as keywords within another folder. That’s the only gotcha. So if you wanted to have keywords for each interviewee that are generic like documents, pics, etc. then in a single event environment you could accomplish this exactly the same way, but you’d simply have to give the keyword collections names like Interviewee 1 pics, interviewee 1 docs, etc.

I think likely it’s the amount of clips that is the big problem, not the number of events. Sure less events would be a little less overhead, but here’s hoping it’s all about the total number of clips nowadays.

[Charlie Austin]

[tony west] “I do miss seeing the HD icon in the window that showed what drive my event was on.”

FWIW, if you think of libraries as analogous to the HD icons that contained your 10.0 Events, everything works pretty much exactly the same. KW collections always needed to be in an Event. I don’t recall being able to select a Drive in the browser pre 10.1 and search for KW collections in the various events on that drive… At least I never did… could you?

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Tony West]

No, I was really talking about just being able to see the HD Icon in the event browser window.

See how I could see TB 1 and TB2 icon below?

Now you can’t tell by looking what drive things are on unless you label it that in the name, but that’s extra typing.

Not the end of the world, I just liked it better the other way.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Charlie Austin] “FWIW, if you think of libraries as analogous to the HD icons that contained your 10.0 Events, everything works pretty much exactly the same.”

That’s the problem. It should work better, or at least have more flexibility instead of the same, and arguably less.

Besides much easier Finder interaction, and mount/unmount, what is the point of a Library if it’s going to treat Events as separate entities? We already had that ‘capability’, you know?

[Mark Verkerk]

Jeremy, interesting discussion but as I understand it you can search for keywords at the Library level across multiple Events but you need, in your example to type Tony or West in a Keyword field in the Search Box.

Click on the magnifying glass icon in the Search Field or type Cmd-F with the Browser selected, then with the ‘plus’ button top right create a Keyword field. Just typing directly into the Search Field gives by default a Text search, which searches only text in the Name, Notes, Markers or Favorites fields – so not keywords.

What would be nice is at the Library level to then be able to save that search as a Smart Collection – only possible at Event level so far…

btw i still see a use in having multiple events when working with large libraries, especially with heavy files like r3d. By only having to load the clips from a single event at one time the software works much more smoothly (at least on my 2011 MacPro). Having to load all the clips in the library in one go slows things down significantly.

Mark

[Hans Douma]

Oliver, as soon as you work with lots of events, you definitely need a way to search all of them for certain keywords. Keyword collections only exist at the event level and NOT at the library level. If you have only one or maybe even 5 events, you can expand the events and show the kw-collections but with any serious amount of events this is not gonna work.

I agree (smart) keyword collections should exist at the library level