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Random Clip Shuffle
Hello,
Does anyone know if it’s possible to get FCP to randomly rearrange clips in a timeline?
I’m cutting an opening montage for a piece about a music festival – I’ve distilled my footage down to a pull-reel of useful clips, and before I can arrange them meaningfully I need to choose the music to cut the montage to. So purely for the purpose of auditioning different music options, I always find myself throwing together an effectively random configuration of my pre-selected clips. But today I’m feeling lazy and wondering if I can’t maybe download some plug-in that will do this for me – shuffle my sequence like a deck of cards (once I’ve made the music decision I’ll start the edit again from scratch.)
Any ideas?
Jordan
PS I’m FCP 6.0.5 on a MacPro running 10.4.11.
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8 Replies
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If I had to do that, I might duplicate all the clips to a new folder, and then in Automator rename the duplicates using a random number generator, then pull them into a new bin and sort them by their random names.
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Another thought: export a batch list, bring that into Excel, and in one of the blank columns, use Excel random number generator function RAND. Then save as tab delimited text, reimport, reconnect and sort by the random column.
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That’s some pretty ingenious lateral thinking you’ve got going there. I’m not well-versed enough in Automator or Excel for it to be worth exploring those options this afternoon, but i’ll remember them if I ever have to randomise on a larger scale. Though surely it would only work seamlessly if I was only taking one shot from each clip – in practice, one clip might be a band’s performance, from which I’m pulling several shots.
It does surprise me that there doesn’t seem to be a way to execute this theoretically pretty simple command within FCP.
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Does your word processor have a random word arrangement option?
Figure out how many clips you have. Then divide that by 6. For example, if you have 36 clips, the result would be 6.
Get six dice. Roll them. Add the number up, and type that in a comment field. Do this for every clip. Then sort by the column you put the random numbers.
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Again very clever – this will randomise clips in my browser, but I can’t think how to adapt the principle to randomise a sequence, when several clips in the sequence are taken from a single clip in the browser.
Thanks for the brainpower on this – I hope I’m not distracting you from real work.
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You make subclips of all the section of master clips you want to use, and put them in their own bin. Then you randomize them and sort. Then you select them all and drag them into a sequence, where they will appear in the order you sorted them.
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Dammit Steven that’s so crazy it just might work. Thanks!
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hello
a way to do that is to put all the clips you want to randomize into a folder in fcp. now browse the folder by duration, that will randomize the clips by duration. drag them to your timeline and you are kind of randomized right there.
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