Merging Keywords

[T. Payton]

I’m not aware of a super clean way of pulling this off, however, here is a quick stab at this:

1 – On your Edit machine, create your “master” even, pull in your media, etc. Now mark all the clips you need to give to your assistant with a keyword like “To Be Keyworded” or TBK. Now move all those to an event on the external drive (you don’t need to move everything just the clips marked TBK.) by selecting the clips themselves (very important) in the Event Browser and dragging them to the even on your external drive. The event on the external drive doesn’t need to have the same name, it will just bring in the keywords as needed.

2 – Give your external drive to the assistant editor. Have him keyword everything and remove the TBK from all the clips. Stress the fact that every clip must have a keyword.

3- When your assistant is done, plug in the external drive and then select all the clips in the event browser and copy them to your “master” event. You’ll notice that it won’t have to actually copy anything to the master event, because the master event already contains the clips.

4-In the master event, select the TBK keyword collection, and then in the event browser command-backspace all the clips to delete them. Don’t worry, you won’t loose anything because you’ll be just removing extra references to the clips as you duplicated them in step 3.

Some other thoughts:
Alternatively, you can setup some master keywords and drag the keyword collection names themselves to an event. This won’t copy the media at all, just he keywords to another event.

You can also have your assistant editors capture footage to external drives using the same technique and then copy them to your master event as needed. All the copying will happen in the background so you can actually start editing as soon as you copy them over to the master event.

BTW. Merging events will do much the same thing as steps 3 but if it were me I would do it manually.

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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque