Unused clips

[T. Payton]

There is not a way to do that automatically in FCP X at the moment. This has been discussed several times before here on this forum. It is worth a search. However depending on what you want here are some options off the top of my head:

1 – Use the “favorite” workflow, i.e. mark all your favorites first, before you bring them to the timeline.
2- If you are one for punishment, one by one, hit shift-f on each clip on your timeline to show it in your browser then either favorite it, or assign a keyword like “used”
3 – Duplicate a project with “used media only”. It will create a new event with just your used footage.
4 – Export a FCPXML of your project, and import. It will do the same as #3.
5 – Just start deleting clips from your event, you’ll see a warning if it is used or not. This is probably even more painful than #2.
6 – Console yourself with the fact that you couldn’t do this without media management in FCP 7 either.

This seems like a straightforward thing to implement in the programming, so request it (I have), although there would be a complication by the fact that media from one event could be used over many projects.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Mark Morache]

The shift-f brings up the clip, with the in/out range selected in the event browser.

I’ve found that I can easily run through my timeline, hit shift-f then hit the delete key to “reject” the range. Now it’s a simple matter of hitting ctl-h to hide the rejected clips.

You might be using the clip rejection another way, but I like this. The ability to leave not just the unused clips in my event browser, but the unused portions of the clips is fairly astounding.

Of course, how freaking easy would it be for Apple to let me just select “hide used” in the drop down menu?

Hopefully that will come early 2012, along with our multicam and the external monitor.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[T. Payton]

Mark – you’re posts are always great and they crack me up. Glad to be tag-teaming with you.

One thing we both forgot to mention is your Event Browser needs to be in icon view for it to show just the range when using shift – f.

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Frank Valtellina]

Thanks to everyone, but I think that Mark’s solution is great. The boring thing is only that you have to select clips one by one or you know a trick for that? 😉

[Mark Morache]

I just tried this, and it works great….

Open up your timeline index. It will list every clip you have in your timeline.

Click the first clip in the index, hit shift-f, and that clip will be range-selected in the event browser. Now hit the delete key to “reject” it.

Repeat this and you’ll have the entire timeline done pretty quick: select, shift-f, delete, select, shift-f, delete.

Now the trick is to keep everything updated as you go. If you remove a clip from your timeline, you will need to manually “unreject” it to add it back to your unused list.

ANOTHER TRICK: If you don’t want to use the “rejected” option, because you use that as part of another workflow for yourself, you can create a keyword “used”, then assign it to one of the keyboard shortcuts (control-1 for example). Now go through the shift-f procedure as above, except instead of hitting delete, hit control-1 to assign that range the keyword “used”

Now you can create a smart collection with the option of Keyword, “does not contain”, and “Used”, and you will have a bin with everything except the used portions.

You can further modify the smart collection to only show you certain kinds of clips. You can select the smart collection bin and press cmd-d to duplicate the smart collection and create as many specially modified “unused” bins as you need.

All of this will be unneccesary with the addition of the “show unused” option which will no doubt be included in a future version.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Frank Valtellina]

Thank Mark, I hope in the next release will be included, on the clip thumbnail in the browser, a mark that show immediatly the clips used in timeline so you are able to know which clip is already used during editing… without select more options in the browser menu. I am confident they will do a good job

[Micah Brown]

Found a work around to this issue:

First Select All of the clips in your timeline (Cmd+A)
then open the Inspector window (CMD+4)
Under the ‘Info’ tab there is a user definable field labled ‘Camera Name’
In this field name your camera ‘Used Clips’ or ‘Used’ or ‘Used Footage’ whatever helps you
Go to your footage bin in the top right corner click on the Magnifying Glass, this will bring up the Filter Dialog box
Uncheck the Default ‘Text’ Filter
Next Click on the ‘+’ icon to add a filter
In the dropdown menu select ‘Format Info’
Click the first dropdown menu and select ‘Camera Name’ then either ‘includes’ or ‘does not include’ depending on whether you want to hide or show your used media
Finally, fill in the user definable field with the Camera Name you defined earlier in the Inspector (used, used clips, used footage, etc.)

and bam you either see or hide you used clips in the bin and can now work with just those clips or all but those clips.

[Jamie H.]

Micah, that’s brilliant. Thank you! Although I sincerely hope FCPX soon adds a way to show/hide or visually mark clips that are NOT used in the timeline (similar to how PPro does it in their thumbnail view), this is a great workaround. When I get projects (events) back from my editors I want to quickly see what they did NOT use and make sure it wasn’t important. This helps.

[Ron Priest]

I realize this post was started way back before version 10.0.1 but you can now use the undocumented command Ctrl-U to display or filter the clips (or portions of) in your browser that are currently unused in your loaded project. It’s just the opposite from the “View Used” Clips command which displays an orange line in the browser clip.

Ron Priest
Videographer
Louisville, KY