General question about how people are logging and organizing footage

[Tony Sarafoski]

[Michael Garber] “What I don’t like with this is that you have to twirl down to see the names of the favorites.”

Oh I feel your pain Michel. I just completed a project which involved long testimonial interviews, and all I wanted to do was be able to rename my favourites and drop them in a keyword collection. Unfortunately all I got was the original clip name, and had to toggel to see the amended favourite name. You should have heard the colourful words come out of my mouth :-/

what’s worst, I though ha… I can get around this, I’ll just add that custom name to a note which each clips should hold it’s own custom notes. We’ll exactly, “each clip” holds notes not each favourite. Try it, add a few favourites to one clip, drop this in a keyword collection and try adding some notes… POW.. right in the kisser. So much for metadata! Sorry I’m just having a blond moment 🙂

Actually come to think of it, I recently had another issue with the same project where I’d already built my project, but then needed to change the file names of the clips in the timeline to reflect the clip name in the event. This was possible in 7 but not in X 🙁 I did manage to manually make changes clip by clip, but let me tell you it wasn’t fun. Hopefully Apple see name change as a worthy need and maybe, just maybe add this on a future update :-/

[Tony Sarafoski]

Doh! I’ll correct myself, you can add custom notes to favourites and keywords, but you have to toggle the clip to see them. I guess renaming the favourite is easier in this case.

Hey btw, not sure you know this shortcut, but if you select a bunch of clips in a keyword collection, press the right arrow key, which will toggle all clips to show favourites/keywords added.

[Michael Garber]

Hey Tony,

Thanks for your insight. Yes I am aware of the right to untwirl. But you have to select all and do it each time you select a keyword “folder”. Grumble.

Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company

[Tony Sarafoski]

Hmm… interesting, didn’t realise that either… Oh FCPX is so fun at times :-/

[Jeffrey Carter]

To tag interviews, I’ve been using markers and naming them (use option + m and you can go straight to typing in info). It’s faster because I’ve found trying to type anything in the notes or other columns to be slow and fiddly. If you use the inspector, as soon as you click in it ‘nothing selected’ appears. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Granted there’s no range markers, but it seems a quicker way to add info.

[Michael Garber]

Thanks, Jeffrey. Much agreed on the limitations. Good to know that I’m not crazy and that the issues I am experiencing seem to be echoed in the responses so far. 😉

Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company

[Jeremy Garchow]

I use favorites for marking ranges.

It used to be that renaming favorites meant that the text wasn’t searchable. This has changed in 10.0.4 it seems. The text that you enter for favorites is now searchable. I have 10.0.1 installed on a test machine, and the favorites text is not searchable.

I do agree with the marker statement, it is much easier to start typing right away. With favorites, you can select the favorite in the browser and hit enter and it allow you to change the name. The problem is the favorite isn’t selected for you right after you hit f. I have requested this to Apple.

If I know that I want a more descriptive name and don’t want to modify the favorite name, I add a marker in that range. What’s nice about markers is that the get transferred to the Project. “mm” will also allow you to type in the marker, in case option-m isn’t convent enough, but the playhead must be stopped when hitting mm. Option-m will stop the playhead for you.

In short, personally, I use favorites to generically mark ranges (and also hold on to those ranges in case I move on to another clip), and markers to enter descriptive text mostly because those markers will travel with the clips as I edit.

You might find that another way works better, it’s just the way I seem to have been doing things.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

I should also add that I sometime clear my favorites from a clip, so I don’t put much “weight” in naming them.

Again, it’s just my method and not the “only” method, obviously.

Jeremy

[Michael Garber]

You bring up a good point about favorites. It’s very easy to hit U to deselect them. It feels like the software doesn’t really “want” you to name them. I always feel uneasy about spending a lot of time adding specific info to favorites since they can easy be deleted and you might not be able to bring them back if you didn’t realize you hit U.

Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Michael Garber] “It feels like the software doesn’t really “want” you to name them. “

I agree. As I mentioned in earlier versions of the software, you couldn’t search the favorite names. I did leave feedback about that, and apparently it changed so I must not have been the only one. It’s a good thing as the more you can search the better, I say, as well as flexibility and more than one way of working.

I do use favorites in a more transitory method, but that’s just me. I use them like I used in/outs in FCP7, but then again, i have the choice on whether to keep them or not, and of course I can have multiple sets of ins and outs per clip. For interviews/dialogue, I usually keep them. For broll/cutaways, perhaps not.

Also, you cannot overlap favorite ranges, so sometimes clearing them is necessary.

I find that markers give me a better descriptor, and they follow along in the edit as well (timeline index, et al).

Jeremy