Reccomended setup/workflow for music video in FCPX

[Sam Comer]

Use Keyword Collections. Click Command-K to bring up the keyword collection window. Then fill in the fields with whatever keywords you want. “Partybus” … “Band shots” … “Closeups” … whatever. The select the corresponding clips and assign the keyword to those clips. Then you will have essentially subfolders, or “Bins” as we called them in FCP legacy.

Another option would be to put the clips of each type into their own folders in the finder. When you import your files into the Event Browser, click “Import folders as keyword collections” and it will do the same thing.

[Jim Kehoe]

Thanks a lot Sam! Worked excellent! If you have any other tips for music video workflow let me know. I’m just dropping the wav file in and cutting around it.

[Charlie Austin]

Or, if all your shots/scenes have common names and are numbered (party bus-x, band shots – x closeupA-x) Create a Smart Collection for each name, and all the shots will just end up there without you needing to do anything else, even if you import new shots with those names…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Bill Davis]

Beyond what others are saying about keywords…

Step one in any music video is to understand that the TIMING of the piece is going to be set by the music track. So start there.

Question one for me is whether you have any live footage of the band playing/lip syncing to the track. If you’ve shot that kind of coverage – START your edit working with it.

Use X’s Multicam suite to synchronize any and all takes of live performance to the music bed. Then you can do a 1st cut by switching to your various takes to build a “live edit” totally in sync with the song.

This will automatically build you a storyline where the multi-cam 1st cut switch and your music track are embedded together.

You can then start working in your storyline to make adjustments with your initial performance shots.

When you’re happy with that – dive in and use connected clips to build alternative shots over that base.

The strength of this is that magnetism and the primary storyline will keep the entire song totally in sync and you literally cannot mess it up with any insert or cutaway.

If the storyboard is such where the music and the visuals do not have any performance sync elements, just put the music track in your primary storyline and attach your visuals to it via connected clips.

I’d probably build one secondary storyline starting with the first frame and use that as my shot workspace – looking to get a rough cut that way, then connect additional cutaways as necessary after that point.

Whichever way you work, this is precisely the type of edit where the magnetic timeline will be your VERY best friend.

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[Sam Comer]

Yep! to Bill Davis –

The last video I edited was done in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. Took forever. I laid down all the video tracks on top of each other, on top of the audio track. Then used markers to help sync up the tracks. Not only did this take a while, but it was a really messy timeline. I’m really looking forward to using FCPx and the multicam function for my next one. Should be a piece of cake.

[Jim Kehoe]

Agree bill! I love fcpx, just been getting into it! Question for Sam and the experienced fcpx Gods… So say I have 20 clips shot for a music video, 15 of them are the band singing the song all the way through and 5 of the clips are 1 minute clips of part of the song, how does the “synch” feature work with all these to the actual WAV file of the song? Right now I’m just dragging and lining up the clips to the song which is working but takes a while… Anyways, any suggestions are highly appreciated!

Jim

[David Powell]

Jim, When you import your footage, do so by creating a keyword for each angle. Drag all the footage from angle 1 in the finder into the “angle 1” keyword. Now “select all” then go to the inspector and name the angle. Repeat the same with all other angles that need to be synched including the sound (as a separate angle). Now at the event level select all of the footage and create a multi clip and select the option that separates them by angle name.

If the sound is decent then they should sync up with no problem, and the names will reflect in your angle editor as well as your multicam monitor when you’re editing.

[Jim Kehoe]

Hey David! That is a great idea, now do i organize all of this inside final cut, or the finder window on my mac (outside of fcpx)? as far as naming the angles folders, etc.

[David Powell]

Doesn’t really matter so long as you have organized to the extent of which I’ve already laid out. The keywording is just to help keep the angles separated. Each angle being named in the inspector is what really matters.