Searching for Specific Marker in Event Browser Clips

[Jason Brown]

[Chris Faber] “I want to find that moment in a 30 minute clip where Julie raises her eyebrow”

I have been playing with this a bit and I think “Favorites” – keyboard shortcut – F – may help. I found that you can set an in/out and mark it with favorite, rename that fav and it’s searchable in the event browser…but lives inside of the clip, not making itself a keyword. it’s selectable, searchable and you can simply drag it down to the timeline with the correct in/outs. It’s a pretty clean workflow and might solve your problem.

I believe it’s Andy Neil who made the tutorial that walks you through this technique.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/neil_andy/FCPX-Storylines-1/video-tutorial

[Chris Faber]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for writing this post.

Yeah, I tried this already, but it has the same problem that markers have: a search for what you are looking for returns the whole clip, not the favorite itself. So say you have a long clip with many named favorites on it, as well as a bunch of keywords, and you’re looking to find the favorite you remember labeling “The monkey squats and laughs.” You remember that moment and only that moment will do. If you search for “Monkey squats,” you just get the same long clip you could already be staring at ’cause you’re already pretty sure it was on that clip. Then you still have to do the same thing you would have had to do anyway: scroll through it looking for that favorite by eye.

This is not very helpful.

What we need is to be able to jump to that moment in time when we search for it, to have the favorite selected when it’s found. That would queue the first image of that favorite into the viewer. Then I could hit play to review it and see if it’s as great as I remember, or if I should go try to find the moment when the baboon squats instead.

It’s what we would want for markers, as well: we want the search function to take us directly to the marker we’re looking for. It’s true that using favorites for this would be better because you would have the range set already — but it works for neither markers nor favorites. Unlike favorites, with markers I can move from one to the other in a clip rapidly using Control-‘, but if I have dozens of markers (which I often have in my documentary work), it’s still a huge pain.

In Final Cut 7 markers were searchable in this way, although with a limitation. The disclosure triangle revealing or hiding the markers on a clip or clips in the browser had to be open for those markers to be searchable. I’m working on a documentary right now. For an hour of material I have 150 markers or more. In FCP X I’d have to scroll through them or Control-‘ my way through one by one to find my moment. I have 40 hours of material, so FCP X could at least find me the particular hour the moment was on by returning that clip when I search, which is nice as far as it goes, which is not very far.

This problem also exists when using the notes field. A search returns the clip with the note somewhere on it, not the moment with that note. I am surprised that more editors aren’t up in arms about this. While many did not use markers to label and search for moments, I know many who used note fields for this. I think not many editors with long clips that need detailed marking have made the effort, or did and simply bolted the moment they realized this couldn’t be done any more.

It’s a deal killer for me — and I love FCP X otherwise. I’ll use it for small projects, but for big ones I’m going to have to move to something else. Premiere also doesn’t allow searchable markers in browser clips. I’m hoping that this will change in CS6. If not, I’ll have to move to AVID, which does have the feature — or to Lightworks when it comes out for the Mac. It also has this feature.

All the best,

Chris

[Ri Stewart]

I just wanted to pipe in here that as of 10.0.7, markers are not searchable in the Event Library.

Yes, I was so shocked I dropped my $800 for a support contract with Apple to find out if this could possibly be true.

We make documentaries, and we often have multi-cam, multi-sound shoots that we compile in Pluraleyes, and create compound clips for editing. (Not multicam, as they are not xml’able) We used to call them nested in FCP7.

I was super excited about the meta data capabilities of FCPX, especially compared to the lack of it in Premiere Pro. Premiere feels like I am using a PC from the 80’s.

Keywords become out of control in a hurry on a feature doc with FCPX. Flawed logic for bigger projects.

So we set markers in our compound clip in the Event Library. But the search feature doesn’t go to the marker, but to the clip.

I thought this would be a perfect workflow, as I am using a little program called “Marker” that takes the XML file and gives me a dialogue cue sheet. Thought it would save a few grand in transcription costs, plus our clips are all tagged, ready for quick finding. Last feature we did was transcriptions with Movie Notetaker > PDF >iPad to find timecode of things our editing team wanted to put together. At least we could search instead of looking thru 100 pages of paper!

Anyhow, I called Apple, and it’s true. You can’t search the markers, but they say it’s ridiculous and promised me my very own release. I hope it happens next week.

As a work around, by dragging the compound clip into a new project, it keeps the markers which are searchable. But, no more drag and drop your selected range to your timeline… now you have to cut and paste and move back and forth between projects.

Perhaps my paper way entering timecode is faster?

Bluedot Productions
https://www.bluedotproductions.com

[Michael Angelo]

Almost 2 years later and it seems many of these rudimentary long form editing features are still missing please send in those product enhancement requests!!

MARKER TEXT SHOULD BE SEARCHABLE BEYOND JUST FINDING THE CLIP
A text search should highlight the text found in the markers just like a web page search in say safari where the found words are highlighted and you can use a back forward arrow to cue.

KEYWORD FILTER SEARCH WINDOW LIMITATION
The keyword filter search window is so limited in size it makes long form editing so very difficult to manage once you get past 30 keywords. The window needs to scale, this is killing the most powerful editing feature of the software, relational database editing!

UNDO MARK
C’mon apple, the undo command should undo the last mark, sometimes it takes a minute to find that right mark and one accidental button push and you can’t get it back. This is editing 101

The more I use FCPX the more it seems the development team is either ignoring long form editors or no one really has long form expertise. Hopefully if we keep sending those product enhancement requests someone will listen as the overall concept of FCPX is heading into the future

MA

“A life without cause is a life without effect.” -Dildano

[David Steiner]

Hi!
Still no solution to find clip markers positions?

Incidentally, if I “open in timeline” a master clip, then position the playhead somewhere (perhaps searching the “video track clip markers” inside the clip), is there a way to sync that playhead to the browser to I can edit from there?

Cheers
D.

[Chris Faber]

So here I am three years after my original post on this and despite my comment that this issue was a deal killer, I am using FCPX as my NLE for my business.

Here’s the best workaround/solution that I have, using the fewest keystrokes that I can manage to think of:

• Be in list view.
• Mark in/out or range select the area you want.
• Hit the F key, which creates a favorite labelled “Favorite.” The Favorite is semi-selected under the clip after you do this. Which is to say that in the list of favorites or markers on the clip it’s got a grayness to it.
• Hit Tab. This fully selects that favorite.
• Hit Enter to make “Favorite” editable. Type the description, or paraphrase/quote the interviewee, or whatever.
• Do this for all your media.

As a reminder, what we are looking to do here is separate from the functionality that keyword collections provide. Those give you another form of organization and search-ability — but not the ability to search for one specific moment in time. Perhaps the thing you remember and want to search for is when someone said “he hates compassion.” And you need to find it in 20 hours of footage (or even two hours of footage). If that’s the only time you remember ever having used that word, it would be absurd to think you would want to have created a keyword collection for this. Or you used the word “compassion” in a number of different contexts: 1) “He hates compassion” 2) “Wow, what a compassionate response” 3) “a compassionate look”; three instances. You’d still never think to create a keyword collection for compassion, nor would it make sense to do so.

But you know you used that word when some guy said he hates compassion, you don’t remember who it was, you don’t remember where it was, and you need to find it.

Favorites are searchable and can be filtered. You type “compassion” in the search field and filter for favorites. Matching favorites show up. Sort of.

What you actually get is a list of the moments, the favorites — but the name of the favorites are not visible. What you are looking at are, say, twenty copies of the name of the clip that has the favorites hidden under them, like this:

> Bobby’s Int.
> Bobby’s Int.
> Bobby’s Int.
> Bobby’s Int.
> Bobby’s Int.
> Joe’s Int.
> Joe’s Int.
> Joe’s Int.
> Joe’s Int.

The named favorites you’re looking for are under each of these. There is a solution to this that works pretty well, but first a small rant:

This is absurd. There is simply no justification for presenting the favorites in this way. I can only think that the coders imagine everyone will look at favorites in Filmstrip view — and decide simply on the basis of the thumbnail, because even in Filmstrip view all the favorites have the name of the clips under them — not the favorites. Or perhaps they don’t think people will even name the favorites. I don’t know. I do know that markers are not a usable solution at all, because you can’t filter for them.

Please, everyone, write to Apple with a feature request: when sorting for favorites SHOW THE NAMES OF THE FAVORITES in the filtered results, not the clip names. Then you’d just see a list of the favorites, with your text right there. One simple change to what is currently a ridiculous implementation and problem solved.

There is a workaround in the meantime. To the left of all the clip names is a disclosure triangle. Click one, you see what’s underneath. This is an obvious thing. But doing that one by one in a long list of them is a pain and time consuming, so do this:

Select all. Hit the right arrow key on your keyboard. All the disclosure triangles open up at once to reveal the favorites underneath.

So what am I still complaining about? It’s just two more keyboard strokes than it would be otherwise. What’s the big deal?

Well, you continue to see the clip names, which is unnecessary because they are just the same names over and over again and don’t add information, and you also see keywords associated with the clips, and markers if you have them, all of which are visual clutter that slow you down when all you want to do is read/scan the favorites. They also take up vertical space, meaning you can see less of them all at once than you would be able to otherwise.

Also, it’s just dumb. It bugs me.

As I think about it, though, having one clip name, under which your matching favorites for that clip are listed — the name of the clip just once — would be a good idea. So what you would see is a clip name (again, just once for that clip) with the favorites of that clip that match your search criteria listed under it — and nothing else. And while we’re at it, let’s have the clip names pop up with the disclosure triangle already open, revealing a nice clean list of just the favorites that match (i.e. that have “compassion”) under it. To easily distinguish this presentation of information from a normal list of the clip when not filtered by a search term, perhaps it would be necessary to indicate that the clip is filtered.

It could look like this:

▽ Bobby’s Int. (Filtered)

* I hate compassion
* I don’t really hate compassion
* compassion is what my life is all about

Chris Faber
Faber Productions
http://www.faberproductions.com

[Brian Seegmiller]

I don’t see why you can’t make a keyword a phrase instead of one word. Maybe I am oversimplifying it but it works for me. I would have keyword phrases like these for example.

Joseph laughs
Sam cries from rejection
street cat
dog in car

If you want to be more generic you can use one keyword for all the laughs and put that on a folder entitled laughs.

These would be keyword phrases. Remember you can also use folders to put your keywords.

A folder for Joseph’s keywords
A folder for the dog keywords
A folder for Sam’s keywords

For me this works. I am not saying there is not room for improvement like the searchable markers. I use markers for different things like change of a person I am interviewing or change in location not for specifics of the interview.

[Michael Angelo]

PS Unlike the event area, the timeline index is FANTASTIC, searchable markers, chapters, todo etc. You can also view JUST keywords or JUST markers etc simplifying complex logging scenarios plus text searches allow you to cue to the marker and clip position, absolutely perfect.

So I mentioned this to one of the higher ups at Apple “why not put this SAME functionality found in the timeline index into the event viewer?” Normally when I mention fixes to the Apple developers the response is always, “we know about that problem, we are working on it along with many other challenges as best we can with regard to priority”. I get it, they are dealing with lots of things. But this time he said “wow, that’s a great idea”.

Praying this get’s implemented, especially for long form projects, as searching in a sea of markers inside long hour plus clips for a word is so painful, usually just edit the clips into a temporary project timeline just so we can use the timeline index, less than ideal.

Meanwhile FCPX is young and awesome, hopefully keeps improving and Apple listens to it’s user base.

Harvest the compromises…

[Mauricio Lleras]

So I came here wondering if 10.3 had solved this ludicrous issue when searching for markers
and or favorites. Has it? I’m still on 10.2 but will be starting shortly a doc on 10.3
and was wondering about logging strategies regarding that issue.

In the meantime, if it hasn’t I have found a workaround that works using favorites:
as others have posted, you can hit F to favorite, then tab twice to enter the favorite name
and hit enter again so the name sticks.
NOW, if you THEN KEYWORD THE FAVORITE
it will be properly searchable and when performing the search it will be the only result,
NOT the whole clip.
But, in order for this to work two things need to get done:
– apply the keyword AFTER you have tagged and named the favorite.
– conduct the search SELECTING FIRST the keyword collection it lives in (otherwise the search returns the whole clip as mentioned before).

So an example to be clear:
in a 30 minute clip named DAY 1, try loggin different moments that you like for broll use.
So hit F, enter favorite name, and THEN apply the keyword BROLL.
Do this for every moment.

Now, if you go to the BROLL keyword collection,
you will see a bunch of DAY 1 iterations that correspond to all your favorites.
If you now do a search by hitting command F for something like LAMP,
which let’s say you only have one of,
the filter will work accordingly and then the only clip displayed
will be the favorite range corresponding to LAMP (even though it still is named DAY 1…),
and not the whole clip.

Again, if you do the search at the event or library level this won’t work.
And again, if you first apply the keyword and then the favorite it won’t work either.

Granted, it’s clumsy too and I really can’t believe they haven’t fixed this yet
(PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME THEY HAVE IN THE LATEST VERSION!!!)
but it can work and be of use to others who I know must be as desperate as I
to get a cleaner solution to this problem,
which by the way still doesn’t solve using markers.

Anyway, hope this helps but if you got news for me please post as fast as you can,
I’m diving in soon!
Thanks

[Mauricio Lleras]

So I came here wondering if 10.3 had solved this ludicrous issue when searching for markers
and or favorites. Has it? I’m still on 10.2 but will be starting shortly a doc on 10.3
and was wondering about logging strategies regarding that issue.

In the meantime, if it hasn’t I have found a workaround that works using favorites:
as others have posted, you can hit F to favorite, then tab twice to enter the favorite name
and hit enter again so the name sticks.
NOW, if you THEN KEYWORD THE FAVORITE
it will be properly searchable and when performing the search it will be the only result,
NOT the whole clip.
But, in order for this to work two things need to get done:
– apply the keyword AFTER you have tagged and named the favorite.
– conduct the search SELECTING FIRST the keyword collection it lives in (otherwise the search returns the whole clip as mentioned before).

So an example to be clear:
in a 30 minute clip named DAY 1, try loggin different moments that you like for broll use.
So hit F, enter favorite name, and THEN apply the keyword BROLL.
Do this for every moment.

Now, if you go to the BROLL keyword collection,
you will see a bunch of DAY 1 iterations that correspond to all your favorites.
If you now do a search by hitting command F for something like LAMP,
which let’s say you only have one of,
the filter will work accordingly and then the only clip displayed
will be the trimmed favorite range corresponding to LAMP (even though it still is named DAY 1…),
and not the whole clip.

Again, if you do the search at the event or library level this won’t work.
And again, if you first apply the keyword and then the favorite it won’t work either.

Granted, it’s clumsy too and I really can’t believe they haven’t fixed this yet
(PLEASE SOMEONE TELL ME THEY HAVE IN THE LATEST VERSION!!!)
but it can work and be of use to others who I know must be as desperate as I
to get a cleaner solution to this problem,
which by the way still doesn’t solve using markers.

Anyway, hope this helps but if you got news for me please post as fast as you can,
I’m diving in soon!
Thanks

By the way,
to make the workaround less cumbersome,
you can tag and name all of your favorites,
then select them all and then apply the keyword to them all
in one step (instead of everytime you do a favorite)
and it will work too.