How to Organize Footage in Final Cut Pro X

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Created on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 02:49

Without a doubt, where Final Cut Pro X shines is in the organization and management of your footage. The importance of this can not be understated. I contend that 80% of editing takes place during this part of the process; while watching, organizing, and marking clips. This is the period where you learn what you have, decide what's good, what's bad, and what will work when the right situation presents itself. You hear a line of dialogue you love, see a beautiful camera move, catch someone in an emotional moment. You start to think of ways you might want to use these moments in the story you will create for the audience you want to reach. This is as true for a documentary as it is for a narrative piece or a corporate video. Our organization of the material reflects the needs we think we may have for these moments. During this process a nascent story has begun to take shape before a single cut has been made.

Most often we come to an editing project knowing its outlines and its goals. But the story lives in the specific moments that are chosen and how they are layered and juxtaposed. Even if we've been a part of the process from the get-go, participated in concept generation, captured B-roll and conducted interviews ourselves, the must be discovered in the material that was actually captured.

Maybe you find a piece of video that has three golden aspects: there's a great camera move in one moment, a strong emotional display, and a line that's delivered that tells an important part of the story. It's most likely you will use this moment for all three of these reasons, but perhaps not. Perhaps just for the first two. You might use the moment for any or all of those aspects. But will you be able to find that moment again when when it would be perfect to use it?

Final Cut Pro X's way of helping us store and find the nuggets of gold and silver is completely different from earlier versions. It's powerful and easy to use and learn. It's called keyword collections.

A keyword collection is created the first time a keyword is applied to a clip or a clip range. Every subsequent time that same keyword is applied, something very easy to do, those clips and ranges are added to the keyword collections. And if you tag them with more than one keyword they drop neatly into other keyword collections. This is incredibly fast and efficient.

What's also great is that when you are looking at a clip in list view you can see all the tags it has. This reminds you what the value of the clip or range is; it tells you at a glance all the reasons you felt it had value when you first saw it. This is fantastic.

In my opinion, markers continue to have the value of adding specific detail; if the keyword collection is a category that a few or many clips and ranges are organized under, the marker tells me at a glance what that clip or moment actually is.

In this regard, there is a caveat to my enthusiasm for Apple's new organization tools. I feel they have to some degree neglected markers in this first iteration of the program. I don't miss the ability to use different colored markers; I think those functioned as a general category organizational tool, like bins or keyword collections, and can be jettisoned. And the new ability to mark items as needing to be done or finished is a useful idea.

What I miss is the ability to see all the markers I've placed on any given clip -- and just the markers -- all at once when the clip is in the Viewer or in list view in Event Browser. In Final Cut 7, there was a nice trick where you could right click in the Current Timecode Field and see a list of your markers on a clip loaded into the Viewer. Click on any one of them and you would jump straight to that marker and be able to play from that spot. You could also see all your markers in a list in the browser. You could see all the detailed moments all at once.

As it happens, FCP X has this functionality in the timeline. Using the Timeline Index you can see a list of what you have in the timeline filtered by various categories: video, audio, titles, keyword collections, markers, to-do items, etc. This is very useful because it can take you to something you need to find, or show you how many of a particular kind of clip you are using. It can, for example, tell you how many times you are using one person's interview as opposed to another's. With markers, you can jump to moments you've marked as needing work, for example. But there is no similar functionality for the clips in the Event Browser, where, specifically for markers, it would be helpful.

What I can do, using list view in the Event Browser, is see markers and keywords at the same time. This is okay and I can work with it. But in this view the list is crowded if there are a number of keywords and markers. I can see only so many before the list of clips is cut off at the bottom and I need to scroll to see them. It would be great to be able to filter the list so that I can see only markers, the same way I can in the timeline.

This is a loss of functionality, which is something that we see often in Final Cut X. It's two steps forward and one step back. As frustrating as this is at times, the pros still outweigh the cons. It is much faster and more efficient to organize clips in Final Cut X than in previous versions. It is easier to find and use material I need when I need it. I can only hope that among the many things Apple will do to improve the program will be the ability to filter clips in list view in the browser so that we have an unobstructed view of markers alone.

One more critique of the organizational tools: Apple's ratings system is too simplistic. It gives us just three options: reject, neutral, favorite. In iTunes you can rate a song on a five star scale. Why does a professional editing application not have as many options? In the past, I used Final Cut 7's ability to color a clip five different ways to mark clips as bad, okay, good, great and used. The world is not black and white and neither are the moments of the world we capture on video.

A workaround is to use rejected for "bad" clips, and create keyword collections of "good," "gold" and "Used."  You can assume that if you have reviewed your material and have not marked a clip that that material is so-so. There is still a loss of functionality here. When coloring clips in FCP 7, I could see at a glance, while just looking at a list of clips, what category each lived under. Now I have to visit the keyword collection to see my good and golden clips, or look at them in list view in the event browser with their disclosure triangles open. If I could actually color them, as before, I'd have no need to open them up to see their keywords.  It's not as good.

I don't use "Favorites."  In list view, marking a clip as "Favorite" has no more value than marking it "good" or "gold" because I can also only see if a clip or a range is a "Favorite" when I've selected the clip.  It has even less value to use it, because "good" and "gold" make finer distinctions than the single "Favorite" category. Even in Filmstrip view, you have to select a clip to see if it is a favorite or not, a poor substitute for glancing at a list of clips and seeing their relative values all at once, and not as helpful as looking at a list of "gold" clips, and "good" clips in keyword collections.

Once favorites offer a larger range of choices -- and if those choices can mark clips in a way that we can see their values at a glance, without having to select clips or open their discosure triangles, then Apple will have something fantastic.

Two steps forward. One step back.  And then... more steps forward?