From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

Organizing footage with keywords - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

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Organizing footage with keywords

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- [Instructor] In the last chapter, we looked at keeping our files organized on the OS, different types of importing strategies, the difference between leaving files in place versus copying them to a library, as well as we saw certain processes. So when we had a certain object checked, key word collections were created and clips were automatically placed inside those keyword collections. In fact, if I press this closure triangle, I will reveal some of those keyword collections that we created. Now since we're talking about organization inside of Final Cut in this chapter, I want everyone to start on the same page. So what we're going to do is select my first library, if you were continuing me from the last chapter, we're going to head to the file menu and give this library a close by selecting the appropriate option. Now, let's open a new library that's contained within the exercise files if you have them by clicking on open library. We can choose to locate where this is saved on your system. Onto the desktop, if I go to my Final Cut for 10.4.7 Essential Training, I'll see that I have a chapter three organize library and this is what I'd like to select. Once I choose open, if you are on a new version of the software, it might ask you to update this library, which we can select. And after this screen loads, you may see a lot of red, but don't panic. All we have to do is relink to the necessary media files. The steps involved to do this is to select the chapter three organize library. Once that's selected, you simply want to go and select one clip within the library, followed by pressing Command A to select all subsequent clips, so I have every single clip selected within my chapter three organize library. From here, I'm going to go to the file menu and we should see an option called the relink files. By clicking on locate all, heading to the desktop, and selecting the exercise files folder, we definitely want to select this and not inside another folder. We can choose to accept this, it's going to verify compatibility, and then we can choose to relink all of these files. And we should see that within a matter of a few seconds, everything is going to be connected within our chapter three organize library. Excellent, now that we've done all this, it's time to start to organize our clips, but before we do, let's take a few housekeeping steps so that we're all on the same page. First of all, as we begin to organize, let's select the chocolate media event, so we can see everything contained within that event, and you might see that certain clips are associated with a specific date. In order to hide the date that you might be seeing within your event, you can head up here to the clip appearance and filtering menu. You might see that my slider here for the time watch is set all the way to the left, which means I see everything as one film strip. The other thing that you'll want to do is change the group by to none. Now, in fact, you can look at all of the clips, you'll see that they're not grouped by a specific sorting order. One great thing about seeing everything as a thumbnail, is we get to see potentially the type of media that's here and I can clearly identify by this thumbnail that this happens to be an interview clip. In order to double check, I could of course select that interview clip, and from this point in time if I press the space bar, it allows me to play back this clip. - I will convince the world to buy chocolate the world. - There was no avocado truffle this time, he hade made ones. - [Instructor] Space bar also allows you to stop. If you are interested in playing this clip from the beginning, click on the forward slash. - So the avocados are full and we, when we moved in-- - [Instructor] Again, if I press the space bar, that's going to stop playback, but the forward slash key, or what I commonly refer to as the question mark key, because it will allow you to play from in to out. So I would like to find any clip with a thumbnail of these two people speaking to be placed in a specific keyword collection. One way to create keyword collections is to select the clip that you'd like to add a keyword to, and simply head to the key icon here at the top left of the interface. By clicking on this, we can now enter a keyword for the selected clip. And since I want this to be part of an interviews, I'll type in the word interviews. The minute you press on return, you'll notice a new keyword collection created underneath the selected event of chocolate media event. Since I want to place other interview clips inside of here, what I'm going to choose to do is close the keyword collection and simply find these other interview clips by their thumbnail badges. I could easily select one and then drag it to the interview keyword collection and then you'll see there that it's been applied and is within that collection. Pretty easy to do. When you have a keyword collection selected, it's only going to show you the clips that are in the keyword, but if you ever need to see all of the media contained within an event, select the event, or select the library to see all of the clips inside the library at any point in time. I'm going to head down and find additional thumbnail clips. In fact, I'm going to click on them, followed by Command click the other clips. Take a second and do that to any remaining thumbnails where you see the two people talking or the close up of Jim talking to camera. Once you're done adding clips to the interview keyword collection, under the interviews keyword collection with it selected, we should see that in fact, there happened to be 18 clips that should populate inside of there. Let's make a subsequent keyword collection in a different way. Select your chocolate media event and go to the file menu, and from there choose new keyword collection. Let's give this the name B roll for B roll footage. Let's head back to the chocolate media event. And as you begin to look through the project, you should see a bunch of clips of Jim mixing the avocado, we could select the series of those clips by selecting the first mixing clip, followed by shift clicking the last mixing clip, with this series of clips selected, I'm simply going to drag this to the B roll keyword collection and if I look inside, I see now that I have eight clips. Feel free to drag other B roll clips inside that collection as you choose. One thing that I like to do is when I'm in a collaborative workflow, is to prepare a keyword collection list for all of the people who are involved in the production so that we're all on the same page of where to find specific assets. I see here that I have a lot of still clips inside my project. Since I would like the series of stills to be part of a keyword collection, let's pretend that I'm going to prepare a list ahead of time. One way to do that is to actually click on the key icon. And you'll see just underneath where we could enter a keyword, is a keyword shortcut list. And right now, if I press Control One, any clip will be added to the interviews keyword. Let's actually make Control Two our B roll list that we've already created. In fact, it just comes up once I enter that, and Control Three, stills within our project. And once I press on Return, this doesn't actually add a keyword to my selected clip. All I've done is set up a keyboard shortcut to apply to a selected still. Now to see this in action, I want to just deselect and select a series of stills here in my project by clicking and shift clicking that selection since I know all of these are stills. This is a great start. And I'll press Control Three and see now that I have a keyword collection of stills inside my chocolate media event. So there are a few different ways of creating keyword collections and I want to encourage you to continue to add clips to the B roll keyword collection and any stills that you find. We're going to pick it up in the next chapter and see how we can actually apply a keyword to only a portion of a clip.

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