From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

Organizing video and audio into rolls - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Final Cut Pro X 10.6 Essential Training

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Organizing video and audio into rolls

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- [Instructor] In the last movie, we took a deep dive into working in list view and how we could organize our clips based on certain data by clicking on a column that displays by default in Final Cut and even right-clicking on a column and adding additional information or taking information away that we might not want to see in our column layout. In this movie, it's all about roles and video and audio roles are very unique to Final Cut Pro X. When you import video or audio into a given project what you need to know is that they get defined a roll by default. And these roles can be helpful for finding clips in the timeline as well as keeping us organized all the way to export. To see this a little bit clearer I want to switch my views to thumbstrip view, add in filmstrip view under your Chocolate Media event, right-click any video clip and go to assign the video roles and notice that they're given the default role, Video. The only other role assigned to video clips would be Titles and that's when you add Titles to a project. Now, audio roles in particular, the same remains true. If you actually go back to the Chocolate Media event, you right-click a video clip, the audio portion attached to some of these clips where you see the wave form, are assigned an audio role. In this particular case, it's Dialogue. The cool thing is we can assign video clips or audio sources a role and this is going to make for easier selections in the Final Cut Pro X timeline, especially when it comes to audio. We can actually organize things into lanes based on their role classification. Doing this in the browser is not the only time you can do this. You can do this in the timeline, but it's good to know we can do it here and in this particular case, let's go to the Interviews keyword collection and let's right-click any of these clips and go to Assign Video Roles, Edit Roles. Next to Video Roles in the Media tab, we can add additional Video Roles. We can actually even add subroles to our video category. In this case, I'm going to add a subrole and this subrole is just going to be for my Interview Clips. And then yet, I'm going to add an additional subrole for my Broll. Now, keep in mind, you can create new video roles if that's what you see fit, but you can also do the same thing for audio. Subroles for different types of dialogue, effects and music and even additional roles for things such as SFX if you want to change that from effects that you have. Now that I've created these new subroles, I'm going to press Apply. I'm going to select all of the interviews inside this keyword collection by selecting one and then pressing command, a to make it a universal selection. If I right-click on any of these clips and then choose to Assign Video Roles, I'll now have them as part of my Interview Clips video subrole. Now, here's a cool thing and to see this we have to go into a Final Cut Pro timeline. So I want to create one fairly quickly to just give you an overview of how this looks and how this could helpful, especially when we get into the next chapter and start to have different types of material in a timeline. I'll head to my File menu and go to New to create a new project. I'll call this My First FCPX Project and note that it's going to be saved in the Chocolate Media event and that it's properties are going to be based on that of the first video clip that I drop into it. Let's choose OK. You might have seen that all of these clips are 1280X720, but I'm just going to select the first one and then command, click the second one and drag them into the Final Cut Pro X timeline. So it's not quite evident the video roles that they are assigned to, but there is something in the timeline called the timeline Index which we'll see a little bit later in another movie. You can click on the Index button to get there. One part of this Index is a tab called the Roles tab where you can see the two roles associated with the clips here in the timeline. One of those is the Video role which I'll expand and you'll see that if I click on Video Clips, all of these clips come selected. Now, picture a project with a couple hours worth of media and you have interview clips spread throughout. For you to make a universal selection of all those interview clips and potentially do a universal change is that much easier by identifying the roles that you associate with them. So, rather than having everything with video, you can consider adding subroles and this same effect becomes equally as powerful by assigning audio or audio subroles to audio content and it's going to trickle all the way down to export where the assignment of these audio roles will allow you to place audio into lanes and then select these lanes or export certain lanes for a further audio post-production process. So this has been an overview of how you can organize with video and audio roles in the Final Cut Pro X browser. Now, keep in mind, we'll come back to this as we go throughout this course, so stay tuned.

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