FCPX Command Line?

[Bret Williams]

You want to edit video through a command line interface?

[Loren Risker]

Right now I’m making a slideshow. I’d like to grab every transition from the 03:00-09:00 and make it last 40 frames, and change the duration of each clip to 12 seconds. Would be nice to tell FCPX to do that with a command.

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OutOfFocus.TV – Original series, music videos, mini-docs.

[Bret Williams]

Highlight all the transitions you want. The index is wonderful for this. Press cmd+d type duration. Press enter. Same for clips I think.

[Bret Williams]

Oops- ctrl D

[Loren Risker]

But that still requires clicking every transition, right?

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OutOfFocus.TV – Original series, music videos, mini-docs.

[Bret Williams]

Not in the index. You can have it just display titles, dissolves, etc, then you can select all or select a portion (select then shift select) and then press ctrl D and set the duration.

[Bill Davis]

You can also simply select any number of clips or transitions via the TL Index or drag select or command select, then just double click the HUD to show 0:00:00 – whereupon any duration you enter will be inherited by anything you’ve batch selected.

Lots of ways to do duration batching in X.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Loren Risker]

Thanks for the tip, that is useful.

I still think there’s a ton of things I’d use a CLI for, and it seems like it should be easily possible.

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OutOfFocus.TV – Original series, music videos, mini-docs.

[Bill Davis]

[Loren Risker] “But that still requires clicking every transition, right?

One of the “thinking changes” I’ve done as a result of learning FCP-X and becoming used to it’s database centric” editing system is to become more orderly in my approach to some types of complex edits.

Here’s a visual example.

I’m currently editing an awards show piece that brings in literally hundreds of clips that need to be sorted and displayed in groups. Each “winner submission” needs a lower third. At one point, the producer asked that I extend the length of the lower thirds that hold the attribution info.

So I needed to select ALL the lower thirds (purple clips) in order to universally extend them from 5sec to 7sec.

As you can see from this screen cap, I had already done some connected clip work, so the titles were spread around a bit.

With that pretty choppy timeline in play I used the Timeline Index to help me isolate and select JUST the lower thirds.

But for the REST of my storyline…

– which had titles against the clips, but ONLY titles, there was no need to use the TI, because I could just do a standard selection rectangle drag select since all the titles were clear on the storyline.

X is Exactly like Legacy and all other NLEs in this way. There are MANY ways to get individual actions accomplished. The key is understanding how the functions work and where it makes more sense to use one approach over another.

I have to say the more I use the Timeline Index in X, the more I see it’s potential to make all sorts of editing tasks easier. For example, when the show producer asked me to check to see if she had used (or had NOT used) a particular clip, it just took a half second search in the TI to get a definitive answer.

I know X isn’t the only software that doest this, but the “live links” between the database and the storyline are a solid part of how X often drives a lot of complexity out of common editing tasks.

FWIW

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.