keywording strategy

[Bob Woodhead]

Perhaps not elegant, but you could use a “preliminary” keyword first, like “meta_add”. Add this keyword to your clip selection, then use a smart folder that shows only clips with keyword “meta_add” (as they’ve disappeared from your “not keyworded” smart folder). Now you’re viewing just your new set of clips. Add more keywords. When you’re done, select all the clips in “meta_add” smart folder, and delete the temp keyword “meta_add”. This empties the “meta_add” smart folder and frees it up for your next set of clips.

[Mathew Farrell]

You do yourself a discredit sir – that is a most elegant solution given that the software doesn’t work in the way I want.

By way of homage, I’ll use the exact keyword “meta_add”.

If I took your logic further, I could add several layers such as “no_shot_type”, which I later remove when I’ve populated shot types, which I wouldn’t bother to do on my first pass. “No_Location”, etc.

I love it.

Mathew Farrell
flowstate.com.au

[Bob Woodhead]

And if you find your Event is getting cluttered with “utility” keywords, just create a folder in the Event, and dump the clutter in there, never to see the light of day again.

It wold be awesome if Apple would publish specific FCPX hooks into Automator so we could go really crazy with personalized solutions.

[Mathew Farrell]

Yup.

I’ve already got this implemented now. FWIW, I added “AA ” before all of my utility keywords so they appear at the start of the keyword string. This makes it easy to delete them when no longer required.

“ZZ ” would have worked equally.

Mathew Farrell
flowstate.com.au

[Craig Seeman]

Have you used Favorites yet?

You can Favorite all clips that don’t have keywords.
Make a Smart Collection of Favorited clips.
Keyword clips in the Favorite Smart Collection. As you are done with a selection, perhaps after some number of keywords. Un Favorite them, controlling their disappearance from that Smart Collection.

In some respects it’s a variation on Bob’s suggestion but instead of using a “meta” keyword, you’re using Favorite which has a very easy Un Favorite (un rate) option.

[Mathew Farrell]

Thanks Craig, that’s another very appealing workflow. The benefit of favourites, as you say, is it’s SOOOO much simpler to remove the favourites tag. The obvious downside is that one can no longer use the ‘favourite’ as a rating. Personally, I haven’t tagged many favourites yet in this project, but my intent is to be tagging some in these early passes.
A workaround that just occurred to me is to use favourites as you suggest, for my ‘no keywords manually added’ tag, and actually add a keyword called ‘favourite’ as a positive rating.
That ‘favourite’ keyword could remain forever, or, when the logging has been completed (i.e. no clips are tagged ‘favourite’ any longer), select all clips with the keyword ‘favourite’, tag them as favourites then kill the keyword.
The Bob and Mat No_Meta family of keywords, by contrast, has more control (e.g. No_Location versus No_ShotType), but is a bit slower to manage. Hmmm.

As yet another alternative, is there a good way to replicate my actual directory structure within FCPX? If so, then I could trash all the automated directory structure keywords and would be free to use the existing Keywords: Do Not Exist filter as Apple intended. Even if this is possible, Bob and Craig’s solutions are great tricks in the bag that can be used in parallel for metadata filtering and control within the confines of the toolset.

Mathew Farrell
flowstate.com.au

[Craig Seeman]

If you’re just using Favorites to help organize for Keywording, once you’re done assigning keywords you can then un-rate all the clips and start using Favorites as you normally would with their new intent.