FCPX IN’s & OUT’s Confused with use of Keyword & Smart collections

[Alban Egger]

[Jason Jenkins] “You can use whatever folder structure makes sense to you, but with keywords, I don’t see the point in using that many folders.”

That probably depends on the project one is doing.
For example I almost always have 3 folders in my setup for documentary work; (the Folder name starts with AAA)
1. Import Reel or Camera#
2. Relative Time: Shooting day or this can be winter, summer etc or qualifying, training, final or rehearsal, stage act 1
3. the actual keyword collection

The reason to use folders for me is to find quick reference in the alphabetic order.
E.g., if you have 60 keywords and 4 of them are the four seasons, you´ll keep fighting to find “winter” between the “windy” and the “winwinsituation”…..If you make a Folder AAAseasons, you will always find your winter on top of all keywords. I think if you have many keywords it is nice to have 6-10 that are general, but tight enough to allow to get a quick overview.

I can see why some people want to have their ordering-system in a way so they can find packages of keywords that belong together in folders. so if you sort Mammals from Fish….it is faster with folders.

Of course in the above example it doesn´t make too much sense, because there are not too many keywords. But onc you have dozens of keywords it makes sense.

[Fred Jackson]

Dear ALL, thank you for your very valued assistance here in the forum, your advice has really helped me to begin to get my head around the the power and versatility of using Keyword collections.

I think the bit that initially got me confused was thinking that for each Keyword collection generated there would be a “separate” set of 9 shortcut Keys. You have now all given me some different ideas to play around with.

Thanks & Regards

Fred