Working with material on existing projects

[Bill Davis]

alice,

as you come to understand the way X works, you’ll realize that what you’re trying to do is actually pretty simple.

You’ll start by going to your projects, one at a time, and finding the clip ranges you want to use. Click on the clip and hit Shift F to “Reveal in Event Browser” In the EB, apply a Tag to the clip range you like – perhaps something like “Alice Project A” or similar.

When you’ve gone through all your original projects, tagging the clips with a constant term, you can just click on that particular keyword collection and it will assemble ALL the clips with that tag on them into a single display window.

Group select them and drag them into a new project and you’ve essentially pulled selects from multiple projects into a new timeline.

Keywords (tags) are incredibly powerful in X. This is just one simple example.

Have fun.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bret Williams]

Bill, you’re kidding right? But you do have me thinking, can we select a range in the project view from the timelines there? That’d be pretty slick.

Me, I’d just do the slices where needed and copy and paste. You can always go back and delete the slice.

[Alice Barci]

Hey Bill,

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately that won’t work for me since the footage I’m working with in the projects is already synced, and I don’t want to re-do all that by working off the clips in the events. It also seems a little more complicated thn just copying and pasting.

Thanks also Bret for your suggestion.

In the end, however, my problem remains that when copy-pasting I find that the footage in the new project timeline won’t play smoothly. It’s incredibly jumpy and unwatchable. I’m not sure what’s going on there. Any ideas?

[Kyle Bass]

It’s probably because they’re unrendered. When you copy and paste into a new project, you will need to re-render those parts. You can tell what is unrendered by the orange bars above your footage in the timeline.

What about turning the other projects into compound clips, blading, then copy-pasting those pieces into your new project? If you don’t want to mess up the original projects, just duplicate them (Duplicate Project Only) then perform this trick on the duplicated versions. Then do a “Break Apart Clip Items” on the compound clips you copied over.

[Bret Williams]

Sounds like the projects don’t match to me. Codec? Frame rate?

[Bill Davis]

[Bret Williams] “Me, I’d just do the slices where needed and copy and paste. You can always go back and delete the slice.”

Bret,

When you copy and paste, you’ve making a temporary decision and not saving it. except in the expression preserved in the timeline that you’d have to go find and re-open in order to capture the state of your decision. That’s how LEGACY worked. All decisions buried in closed projects.

In X, you have the option to save your decisions in the event library and make them available to ALL subsequent edits. It’s how X builds a useful library of previous decisions for the user.

I can’t imagine someone editing and not wanting to take advantage of that very central improvement in the software design.

When you ID a range and keyword it, you’re simply making a decision you can SAVE for re-use at any time.

Work in the timeline is temporary and fleeting. Work done in the EB is saved and re-useable. I can’t think of a good reason I’d want to make an editing decision and not want to preserve that decision for later use if it was easy to do so. And it is very, VERY easy in X.

Simple as that.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Jim Waterwash]

Working in the EB is great until you start having to break apart your clips within your projects, just to keep the project files from being so bloated that they don’t bog down your system. And once you break apart your clips, you loose references to intermediate compound clips in your EB (like those you may have used to sync external audio), as well as your painstakingly created keywords.

When my project files get over about 100 MB, everything gets very sluggish so I always keep an eye on that file size, reducing my use of compound clips as much as possible. Until they allow compound clips to be used as they were envisioned, nothing is VERY easy or intuitive in my opinion.

[Alban Egger]

Jim…I don´t know what the maximum was but my current event has 235 MB and it is not sluggish at all.

[Jim Waterwash]

I was told that the source media size did not matter and that it was just the quantity of compound clips within a project, that should be restricted. 35 compound clips added to a project from event browser keywords, was enough to bloat and bring my specific project to a crawl. I still suspect that the original source media length can play a role, as does the use of nested clips.

I’m starting to think that the people that are using fcpx with no problems, are simply not using compound clips as organizational units, but just maybe as containers for a few special situations. I have worked on simple projects with absolutely no issues at all.

For the record, I have seen my project file get way above 200 MB at times, almost a gig once, but usually with a force quit ending. I really don’t understand what they are trying to store in that project file to make it so big, if the media and render files are located in their own locations. Whatever it is, that file size or the processing that is going on within it, has been the source of my woes and slow performance that I spent a huge amount of time trying to diagnose. I’ve only been able to remedy it by breaking apart all my compound clips that originally came from the EB via keywords. Interestingly, if I turn them back into compound clips, the project file size does not expand and my system does not slow, but by then, I’ve lost all the useful linkages back to the EB.

[Alice Barci]

Bill, it seems to me that what you are describing is what fcp used to be able to do with the “make independent clip” option. What I would have formerly done was select the sections I wanted to use, turn them into independent clips and store them in folders in the browser (WITH synced sound and corresponding B camera shots) and then use them in the timeline as needed. Ideally that is what I want to be doing now as well. How does that work in x? Applying keywords to clips sounds like a savvy tool, but physically dropping things in folders seems like a more convenient way to work (that requires only tying a single keyword – the folder name). Like calling my main Folder “Interviews”, my sub folder “Frank” and my clips “Frank talks about ladies”, “Frank blows his nose”, “blank stare” or whatever they may be. So convenient, so simple.

Sorry if I’m just not “getting it.”