FCPX Text Search

[Craig Seeman]

Click on the magnifying glass in the search area and you well get a popup box with keyword and text search. Have you tried that?

[Trevor Meier]

Yes, what I mean is that text search doesn’t search the text within keywords.

As in your example, doing a text-only search for “Horse” will not find clips that have the keyword “Horses”.

[Craig Seeman]

But keyword and text searches can easily be combined. They’re separate metadata but doing a combined search is very simple. If you’re looking for Horses just search for it as Keyword and as text (if you placed it in notes for example) and you will get both.

Keywords and Text notes/names are separate metadata.
At least to me it’s no different than naming a shot Scene 24 and searching for 24 and also expecting to find all shots that have 24 in the timecode number. It’s different metadata.

You can do a combined search for keywords and text so it’s not much of an issue for me.

[Trevor Meier]

I agree it’s nice to be able to differentiate between keyword metadata and generic text search. The problem, really, is that there is no sub-clipping in addition to keywording. While I agree that keywording is an amazing facility, it falls short as a scheme to uniquely identify clips. A single clip name is insufficient for identifying long clips that contain more than one subject.

Right now, keywording is our only tool for name-based subclipping, and so in this context the inability to search within the text of keywords becomes problematic. Using keywords to create subclips will result in a large number of unique keywords. In this situation an editor needs a facility to search for text within the keywords.

Let’s use interviews from your screenshot as an example. To break up the long interview, you range-keyword individual sections with a name that uniquely identifies it. So let’s say, in the first interview, the jockey says “The horse was running very fast.” A second interview with the trainer has him state “The jockey had his horse running, they were going fast.”

Using keywords to subclip, the range from the first interview would be keyworded something like [jockey] and [horse running very fast]. The range from the second interview would be tagged [trainer] and [jockey had horse running fast].

Then, in my events browser, I could have a smart collection (or search) for the text-within-keyword “running” and get the appropriate clips.

However, this doesn’t work in the current system. I would either have to manually check each keyword in the search dialog (untenable when there are a large number of unique keywords, as there will be when using keywords to subclip). Or, I would have to keyword topically and lose my ability to uniquely identify clips by their keyword (such as keywording each with [horse, fast, running])

[Jean-françois Robichaud]

It just comes down to using the wrong tool to achieve what you want. Keywords are useful when they are short and multiple:

– “Horse” is a good keyword; there will be many instances of “Horse” in your event, and you can create a collection that contains all instances.
– “the horse was running very fast” isn’t a good keyword. It’s too specific, it’s only going to have one instance, so making it into a keyword isn’t efficient.

Rather than creating keywords with very long sentences, use the Notes column. First make a selection within your clip and either create a favourite (hit F) or assign a relevant, simple keyword to hit (such as “jockey”). Then write whatever you need in the Notes column for that particular selection. Notes are searchable through text searches. I think this is exactly the behaviour you are looking for.

[Nick Toth]

See if this works for you. Select your ranges and make them favorites. Show clips in list view and enable the notes column. I moved it so that it would be next to the “clip name” column. Add the description to the Notes next to Favorite. When you search for text that is in that note it will be found. In the first example I searched the word “jockey”. In the second example I searched the word “running”. You will see the results below.

NT

[Matthew Schickler]

@Nick — thanks for this tip. I had been looking for a way of browsing the clips “by notes”. Didn’t even occur to me that all of the metadata information would be displayable in the list view. Very nice!

One small gripe — while you can add your own custom metadata fields to the database, it doesn’t look like those fields are text searchable. For now, it looks like Notes (or some other built-in text field) is the way to go. Would be nice to add a custom metadata field, e.g., called “Transcript”, and put a transcript of the clip dialogue in there.

[Trevor Meier]

Works well… except, try this: select a range that overlaps those two favourites. Press F. Now look at your notes field. Gonzo.

[Trevor Meier]

Fair enough… the problem is that the notes field requires stopped playback and a lot of clicks. Keywords are fast and can be edited while playback continues – great for logging IMO… when really this could be remedied by a true subclipping feature and/or the ability to search the text of keywords.

[Craig Seeman]

[Trevor Meier] “Now look at your notes field. Gonzo.”

So you have Hunter S. Thompson writing your notes? Wow that easter egg is better than Bruce the Yak!

You can’t overlap Favorites with another Favorite. It will add to the range instead. That’s why you might consider keywords. Keyword ranges can overlap but Favorites can’t.