Adding keywords - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

- Keywords are a great way to organize clips in Final Cut Pro X and help draw clarity to some of the abstract names automatically given from cameras. Applying them in Final Cut Pro X is easy and discovering a few tricks can help you save a ton of time when trying to find footage later. We've created keyword collections based on the folders they came from on the system as well as tags. Let's start to create our own keywords inside of Final Cut Pro X. In order to see all of the clips that exist in my project, what I'm going to do is select the Clay Assets event. This allows me to see everything that we imported within one view. Now you may notice that some clips have multiple film strips. This is really based on the default settings for how clips are supposed to appear within this particular view. For any reason that you see a list view basically means that you want to come over here and change your list view and toggle to film strip view. The next important thing is this clip's appearance. In my settings right now, every film strip that you see divided by this black line between clips represents 30 seconds of time. If we want to have a better overview of all of the clips in our project, we can simply drag this slider all the way to the left so now every clip is just represented by one film strip. I also want you to note that all of the clips in my project are currently not grouped by anything. It's set to None. You may see in this view that they are basically organized by a Content Created Date, but let's just choose None in this instance. And let's make sure that we also have waveforms on for our clips so we can see which clips have sound and which ones do not. Now that I've changed that clip appearance, I'm going to give this a little click and let's go to the Window menu to Workspaces and actually go to the Organize Workspace. Really handy space for us to begin creating keyword collections. First thing that we can do is start to skim over our clips to become familiar with them. And as you see, you'll see some very many similarities between multiple shots here. Some of them are organized based on the fact that they have a cup on them, but we can definitely take this b-roll footage and organize it even further in our view. I'm going to head over here to shot 701. I can see here there is a lot of mixed lighting in this scenario, indoor and outdoor lighting. I want to select this clip and then click on the key icon to add a third keyword to this clip called Mixed Lighting. Once I press the return key, that keyword is now applied to that clip and in fact I can even see a new keyword collection over here to the side containing my Mixed Lighting clip. To continue this process I'm going to look for additional clips that might have this mixed lighting just so that I'm aware of it. As I continue to skim over some of these clips I can see that the beginning of shot 301 also has mixed lighting so I'll select it and drag it into the Mixed Lighting keyword collection. So that was one way to create a keyword collection that we saw there and then drag a clip into that existing keyword collection. And take a look at shot 001. We can see here that there's a nice little dolly shot and in fact, I also think this could act as a really good hero shot at the end of our piece. I'm going to select this shot and add a keyword to it. I'll just call it Hero. Once I press the return key, yet again another keyword collection gets created and that clip now exists inside of it. Going back to the Clay Assets event, sometimes you're going to notice that your hero shots are only a fraction of your clip. So I really love this perspective shot of the main protagonist putting the cup in the kiln. Where I'd really like to focus is on the main character as she pulls out a cup. One way to do that would be to focus on the area that we're really interested in, that's when she opens the lid. And I can quickly click and drag to make a selection of that area. With this selected, just this section, I could take it and drag it to my hero keyword collection. I could also just use this in and out point with it selected and go to the key icon and create a keyword collection only based on that section. The important takeaway here is that you can actually have keyword collections with just the portion of a clip. We just saw that right here with shot 016. In fact, if I have it selected, and let's switch over to List view for a second, I can see its duration matches the in and out point that I added on to that clip. So there you have it, a few different ways of creating keyword collections inside of Final Cut Pro X for your video.