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Help editing sports reels in FCPX
Hello,
I’m head of post production for a small sports video company. We’ve been clinging to FCP7 for as long as possible, but we’d like to switch now and I could really use your help with editing in FCPX. Thank you ahead of time for bearing with me.
In FCP7 we would Ingest footage for a game from the card (named as we L&T) > Create a Sequence named “Team A vs Team B” > Compress a deliverable version for the client. Upon viewing the client would give us the Timecode for their best plays i.e. “1:10 Goal, 2:14 Assist” We would then create a QT Reference file from that sequence and subclip the players highlights according to those provided times ranking them in the name of the subclip 1-5 (5= Best, 1= Worst) i.e. “#11 5 GOAL” and “#11 1 Terrible mistake” Once all subclips from all games are pulled and placed in their own bin i.e “#11 Smith – Stiker”, a players reel could be assembled from Best to Worst by sorting those subclips by name. The 5’s would be first in the order, the 1’s last.
NOW, with FCPX I’m having trouble seeing how I can use this new program to accomplish the same goal. I’ve spent hours already getting a grasp on how FCPX works (metadata based) but I’m struggling. Currently in FCPX we are importing game footage to a new event > Creating a new project “Team A vs Team B” > Compressing the deliverable for the client. They provide the times. Once I have the specific timecodes for the players highlights, what’s the best way to designate those clips so I can sort them both by Player number (as there may be multiple players per game), Ranking of play 1-5 and see the play description i.e. “Goal, Assist, …” in the event browser?
What I’ve tried:
1. Creating a compound clip from the Project “Team A vs Team B” > marking each highlight as a Favorite > Renaming the favorite “Player Number – Play Rank – Description” When I filter for Favorites containing “#11” and create a new smart collection all the clips are there, but are organized based on the name of the parent clip and not by the Favorite name and in thumbnail view the Favorites are all named based on the Parent clip name so I can’t see the play description at all.
2. Applying the player number as a Keyword, the keyword collection then contains that players clips but again has useless names based on the Compound clip that it was pulled from. I need to see the play description in the event browser.Please help, thank you
Ben
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5 Replies
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If the Project is the entire raw clip of the game- why not keyword that directly instead of placing it onto a timeline and making it into a compound clip? Also remember that clips can exist in multiple keyword collections and smart collections. So you could create a smart collection that was looking for all players from one team and then you’d get the entire team in that collection automatically.
I’d actually want to sit down and look at your edit to give you a suggestion of how to best use FCPX. But yes, it’s a lot more powerful than timecode i/o and bins from FCPX.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training -
Here an experienced FCP X editor does a complete explanatory walk through of an actual production job. He emphasizes the metadata organizing features of FCP and need to organize material before editing. Maybe some of what he says would be beneficial.
Note he was using FCP 10.0.8, which is before the new library scheme. However most of what he says applies to the current version.
https://fcpxposure.com/video-editing-with-fcpx-at-the-aipp-2013/
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Noah: Each Game project consists of 20-30 clips each 1-3 minutes in length, hence the compound clip approach. Thanks so much for the offer to look into my edit. I’d really appreciate that, I will share some screenshots early this coming week.
Joe: Thank you for that video, I’m going to watch it and share my thoughts.
Preliminarily I feel Keywords are the answer and I see the power in them, but how to display relevant information in a keyword collection rather than just the parent clip name is my current issue. Or a change of mindset to accomplish the same goal. Any other suggestions? Also other relevant training videos, I will likely watch them all
Ben
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Maybe these instructional videos will help: “Warp-Speed Key-Wording in FCP X”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJ4J41JaZk
Used Media Range Improvements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS4o0nVlGas
Power of the timeline index: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soN3NtPWW-E
Using the range tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT8HuQ4gLZw
Smarter smart collections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLPnK_vvk0w
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Ben,
For your type of work, X is going to rock your world. A year from now if you do this right, you’ll wonder why you ever edited any other way.
Biggest thing to avoid is to think you can recreate your workflows from FCP Legacy in X. If you find yourself thinking “I used to do (process) in FCP Legacy, now how do I do THAT in X?) you’re off track.
Respectfully, Do NOT try to learn X piecemeal by watching random videos unless you want to absorbe it over a year or two. It’s a cohesive editing system, and skipping around will leave you with knowledge gaps that will just slow you down.
Get training for yourself or hire someone (preferably someone Apple Certified) who understands the program fully to guide you into it. You’ll learn better, and more thoroughly and be editing faster that way.
It’s great and likely a perfect solution for your type of practice, based on what you’ve posted here.
My 2 cents is to dive in and do your practice retraining properly. I believe you’ll be very glad you did.
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.
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