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Importing and Organizing Media

Lesson 4 from: Final Cut Pro X

Rob Adams, Vanessa Joy

Importing and Organizing Media

Lesson 4 from: Final Cut Pro X

Rob Adams, Vanessa Joy

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Lesson Info

4. Importing and Organizing Media

Next Lesson: Projects/Timelines

Lesson Info

Importing and Organizing Media

Just want to walk you through sort of my method for how we're going to do this. So when we talk about importing and organizing media focus and really powerful features for we're going for organizing footage, there's many, many different ways we can do this and again, it's all gonna come down to personal preference on how you do it. The method I'm going to show you here is what I do with my footage when I bring it in, it just makes it easier for me to when I'm working. I know how to find things fast, because it's mean, you could just bring footage in and just leave it as is, and you could still go through it, but it helps to organize it into different keyword collections and organize it by tags so you could just type in a word or phrase, and you have the clip that you need so you can organize your imported footage by keywords and tags, and what tags are are words that describe the content of your video clips and you could set tags to whatever you want them to be. All right, we can also ...

batch rename our video clips within final cut pro ten, and that helps us to filter and sort much easier to this is something that I discovered, and I was blown away. By how easily? So rather than going through my finder window to all my video clips that I have maybe in a folder that I took off the memory card, I don't have to go through and rename those files. I could do him by batch, right inside final copper ten so let's have a bunch of files and they're all dealing with birds, okay? I can say, hey, final cut, take all these files and give them new names. I want to call them birds and his thirty clips, birds one through thirty, and I could highlight those clips and set it to do that, and it'll just automatically rename the clips what's nice is it's not renaming the clips outside of the program? It's just renaming the inside follow copper ten so we're not changing any of the, you know, the final cut events or media that's in the events folders, so we're not dealing with any issues for for linking media files later on, so really powerful battery naming, we're going to get into that and we can tag or weaken filter and rate clip so only the best parts of our footage come, you've raided his favorites, and keyword tags can be used to bypass unwanted parts of a video clip, we'll demonstrate this as we move on. Furthermore, bad video clips on these could be entire video clips that we know we're not going to use you. I'm sure you guys have left your camera rolling when you didn't mean to, and then you bring in the final cut, you know, I'll never use that shot. Well, we could just reject that shot, and we'll put it aside and we don't have to look at it without actually deleting it or you can tell a final cut hey, you know what, trash? Just send it to the trash we don't need any more, so the first thing we're gonna do is get organized, and the first step to organization is we're going to organize their footage in finder okay for easy import on and then when we import our media into final cut pro ten, we're going to organize it in phase two. All right? So we have, like, kind of like three faces of organization face one is organizing outside the program face too was organizing inside the program using keyword collections, and we'll get what those are in a few minutes. Then we're going to scheme in radar video clips and go through the parts that we really know we're going to use, and I'll show you a nice, quick keystroke method to do that. On and then we're going to rename some of the clips for even faster sorting and then apply tag so we have a couple different steps here, and like I said before, I will spend a lot of time doing this so let's say I have a wedding at it it's a twenty five minute feature film, and I know it's going to take me seven days that it okay? Because that's generally what it takes on average for me to do one of my features really spent a lot of time making them is close to perfect as it may, I will spend a good half a day to maybe a full day just organizing, um and that actually keeps it from becoming a nine day project. So if I if I'm editing later on and I don't have to go searching around for something that I know was in there is a guy you know, you're going through your media browser going, I know this clip is in here somewhere. Where the heck is it? I can just type in a keyword and boom there it is, and I could pull it down on the my project timeline and start working with it so tags are really, really helpful for doing that, so let's get right to it, we're going to switch back over to the final cut system over here and we're in final cut right now, but we're going to actually go outside of final cut to look in our file struck your son is going to come up here and hide final cut pro, and we have our two hard drives that were inside the terminal right here on the desktop, just for easy finding, I guess you could say and work drive is where work drive is where we're storing all of our media, so I'm gonna click this and right away you're going to see well, that doesn't look like the standard final finder window that's because I went through and spent a lot of time sorting these video clips into folders on been arranging them by labels, which other colored labels to really separate them. So I had a glance I can tell what's what? All right, I highly suggest you develop a system or copy mine to help you keep track of things on drives if you just have a drive that you open up and it just looks like a mash is stuff, you know, it's much harder to kind of go through, you know, where was that folder that have these clips in it I know right at a glance, the green. Are my workshop assets so everything that I know I needed for this workshop on this drive is right here in these green folder. So anything I know these air assets that maybe later on in the workshop, I'm going to important use. I know. Well, if I need my still images, there they are, it's I know it's in a green folder, I could go right to it, and you'll see here that I've actually made finder label the headings here, and the way I did what that was, I went in to find her, and I got a preferences and under labels, I give my individual colored labels titles, all right, so anything that I label is red is going to be for final cut anything I label orange is going to be a job folder, meaning it's a particular shoot or ah, project that I'm doing for a client, greener workshop assets in this case, and I'll change this from, you know, drive to drive just depending on what I need on dh then you know, anything dvd or blue regulated might be purple, so this really helps me to kind of store things out much, much more efficiently, so down here, under the red, we have our remember we talked about this in the first segment this is our final cut events and final cuts product public projects holders we don't ever mess with ease leave him alone but they have to be on the hard drive and they are together and I've got paige is red so I no don't touch him it's my little fella see if anything red I don't touch down here the orange folders on my job folders and these are the two projects we're going primarily be using during the course of this workshop we have the yoga footage from vanessa's yoga promo video for her yoga creative live workshop and then we also have a wedding that I just recently shot and edited, so we have both of those to work with so what we're going to be primarily working with right now are just these job folders, right? Because the footage you're gonna work in this segment is the yoga footage, right? So if I deserve in here, you'll see job folders ciel yoga all right, now watch what happens when I expand this you don't see anything there we go zooming down here a little bit you can see here that I've color coded these folders too, all right, any of you watch my cinema workshop know that this was covered at length because this is how I organize all of my chutes all right, when I get home from a job after I've shot I've set it up exactly like this regardless if it's a wedding or if it's corporate shoot or anything it gets sorted into folders like this the first folder is red and that's footage okay? And underneath that I have my footage separated into b roll let me explain what the role is for people who may not know b roll are basically what their cover shots okay, these air these air clips of video that I'm going to use to tell my story and my main action and my dialogue would be in a new interview format so if I have a talking head somebody talking and then while they're talking they're talking about cupcakes on I cut through some shots of cupcakes those shots of cupcakes are b roll okay, so I've separated my b roll and my main action into separate folders so I have my interview and I've got my b roll and then my b roll is further organized into group shots which your shots of here I can just actually kind of preview thes for you let me zoom out I'll preview one of these for you these are group shots uh vanessa demonstrating yoga techniques and there's more than one person in the shot constitutes it as a group shot then I have solo shots which I know are just vanessa and these are organized into their own folders okay, this just helps me right off the bat when I import this footage as is in this folder structure into final cup for ten, you're going to see what happens final cut pro tens going to keep that folder structure for me and actually tagged these clips based on the folder names, right? Very cool stuff I'll explain in a minute. All right, so my footage is always organized like this let me just show you real quick what a wedding would look like and this is the footage we're going to use tomorrow when we're walking through an entire workflow for a wedding. We have the same similar folder structure here if I dropped down footage lots more happening here though I've got this broken down in today parts I've got a folder for all my ceremony footage and then all my camera operators or gyms and it's all subdivided from there dancing footage from the party's all lumped into one and will explain why later on there are broken down by camera operator but they're all kind of mixed together by camera establishing shots so what we do is we kind of go through and just organized these into sub folders that helped me to keep him organized before I even touched on a copper ten all right, so footage is all broken up like that audio seems sort of thing if I just tree down the audio here I've taken all of my external audio this is audio that's been recorded off camera all right, I do record with my video with with audio on camera but it's mostly for reference. Okay, the audio that I'm really interested in using is recorded off camera and it's stored in folders like this I've actually gone through and renamed all of my audio files, so when I copy the audio files over from the recorder unit onto my media drive or wherever it is I'm going to keep it I go through and actually take the time to rename these clips right this way I know when I import them into final cut I don't have fifteen audio files with all of the same name of one because by default my audio recorders going to name them by numbers all right? So I want to be able to differentiate them right out of the right out of the so that's how I would do that so they're broken down into dae part and they're labeled for what they actually are. I highly encourage you guys get into the habit of doing this it's one of those things that's personal preference but for me this really speeds up my work flow when I get into final cut pro ten let me come back out here and go back into the yoga folder again and you're going to see here footage like we just showed you audio there's on ly one audio clip all right, so I don't have it subdivided into another folder it's just vanessa's interview because that's the only audio we recorded fromthe shoot these other folders here we're going to use later on in fact, I think I already used this one. Yes there's some graphics in here. If you watched venice's promo video on creative live dot com, you might have seen title over her video I designed this in photo shop so I'm keeping it in a graphics folder in my project right just helps me to keep everything in one place and what's nice is final cut is smart when I import all this stuff in the final cut pro ten I ca n't tell final cut hay I'm afraid that one day I might wake up and maybe I had a few too many glasses of wine the night before and I make a mistake and move one of these folders I can actually tell final cut you know what to prevent that when you import this footage I want you to copy all of this stuff into the events holder okay it's doubling our space I know it's taking up more space on the drive but I'd rather have everything localized into final cut pro ten so I don't have missing media later on right, but that's why I organized all this stuff so it's all in one place so that's the graphics folder the plural eyes folder will get into what plural ises later on plural eyes really in a nutshell, is a program that we used to sync up our footage with our audio all right it's a lot harder to do if you have to do it manually. Plural eyes makes it really simple will demonstrate that in this program all right, complete this folder down here is mainly for the final output when I'm done with my project and I exported out to a digital file that I was getting so for example, we gave this this is the file we gave to creative live we uploaded this file to them it's stored in this folder and you'll see here this is vanessa's video for the promo for her workshop. Okay, so that's, what the complete folders for I don't deviate from this system ever. The moment I deviate from this system, I'll pop in another drive. And if it's not the same it's just what happened? It's like, you know everything supposed be regimented and organized and it's not because of me over attentive it's because I just want there to be consistency when you have multiple editors in a studio all working on the same projects are all working together you got to make sure there's organization of the white you're gonna have problems, right? So take the time. Go through and organize your footage. We're going to be working with the c l yo, go footage in this segment. So it's now pre organized for us tow work in final cut pro ten let's, go back in the final cut. We are now ready to start importing our footage before we do that. Let's, check our preferences panel is a couple things we gotta make sure are going on. I clicked preferences here and I go to editing okay, everything that we set up a force still the same way if I click on playback, background rendering is turned on, which means if I import footage and it requires rendering or trans coding or analysis of some kind final cut pro will immediately start doing that. The moment I bring the footage in, if I unchecked this box, it really won't do much to it. It'll just let me important, okay? But at this moment in time I'm gonna let it do what I think it wants to do, and we'll find tune this a little bit later on let me talk for a second about trans coding footage because this kind of goes hand in hand with importing media in the final couple attend, okay dslr shooters raise your hand how many of you were shooting with the lars ok every hand in the studio went up and I would stake a bat that maybe eighty percent of our audience out there watching this is shooting with d s lars that's a guest from wrong sumi but basically that footage that comes out of those cameras is not really meant for it. Okay it's a tsh to sixty four is the kodak that they use all right it's basically a very highly compressed video format. Um it's not the best quality for editing it's if you have a slower system trying to edit that footage natively meaning just take it from the camera bringing in and start editing it you might have performance problems okay? And I don't mean right I'm talking about performance issues but your computer so you wanted convert your footage into a format that s'more easily handled and can be a little bit higher quality when we get into leader stages of editing the color grading so the nice thing about final cut pro ten is it will do that for you in the background okay, couple things you need to know here when we import our footage final cut will ask us do you want me to trans okay, I noticed you have dslr footage here. Do you want me to trans code this footage to apple progress for two two what apple paris for two two is is a is a better quality editing format and it's apple designed so it's designed to work with final cut pro ten by default and don't worry will reiterate this if we have to later on by default final cut pro ten will want to trans code your footage into for progress for two two okay it's only need to know for right now there's another type of trans coating called proxy and what proxy will do is allow youto work with lower resolution versions of your footage for faster editing so if you have ah system that's maybe not as robust as the one we're working on today and you want to work faster without having to worry about playback lagged or or system issues you would want trans code into proxy media okay it's not going to change anything about your original media it's going to create new video clips there about one fourth the quality of your original clips what this playback dialogue here is allowing us to choose once final cut has done that whether we want to edit using our proxy media or we want to edit using our original or optimized pro rez for two to media okay I know that's a mouthful I know it's a lot to digest but basically final cuts asking us do you want me to use the low res version so you can add it faster or do you want me to take a chance and use what you've told me to use which is right out of the camera and and edit it that way it's up to you and by the way, do you want better performance of high quality? Okay, so those parameters are really important before you even import your footage decide that because there's um there's going to be some questions asked of you when we import our footage that you're gonna need to know okay before we go too far beyond where you just were there were some discussions in the chat room zach purnell says wait so he is organizing it and find her right now does the import to find her then final cut or final cut then reorganizes them and finder he said that they're all chatting about always organizing find her first okay, because that everyone else yeah if you bring your if you bring your media into final cut first and then go back into finder an organ and reorganize it follow kat's gonna get pissed we don't want final cut to get pissed. All right? Once things have brought in the final cut, you do not change them anywhere that's it once they're in they're in leave them there especially when we tell final cut hey, copy this media into my final cut events folder and leave it there all right um yeah don't change anything so the workflow is organized outside of final cut first then bring your media in the final cut which is our next step cool all right before we bring in our media we have to tell final cut worry want that media stored do we want to create a new event for our media or do we want to put it into an existing event remember overhearing our event library if I dropped down our work drive which is where our media is stored by click on the route drive it shows me all the clips associated with that hard drive if I click on any one of these events it's just going to show me the files we imported into that event okay so I can add new media to any one of these events that's fine but they have to be associated with an event all right so what I'm going to do here is quick on my work drive because I know that's where I want that's where my immediate is stored that's where my final cut events and final cup projects folders are so I want to bring in my media into an event on that drive so we're going to click work drive and we're gonna come down here to import media this can also be accomplished by command I it's going to open up the media import dialog window all right so what you're basically looking at here is just a different visual representation of your hard drive, ok work clicking on work drive up here in the devices tab or devices segment and we're going to go down because we're going to be working with our now. Well, notice one thing, my color codes, they're gone right? Color codes don't show up in final cut pro ten that's unfortunate. Hopefully one day they will add that back in so I could see my color codes, so I kind of have to search for that folder. Well, there it is. Seo yoga that's the footage we're gonna be working with. Okay, now I can choose to import this entire folder if I do that it's going to import all of this stuff, all right, and it's going to do it in such a way that it will even keyword tag my footage based on what I haven't named here, we'll get to that more in a second, but I don't want to do that just yet. I just want import my footage and my audio from the vanessa's yoga video. All right, so if I just drop down this key tab you see here I have two folders, but we showed you before b roll in vanessa's interview and in my audio tab remember there's on ly one audio clip, and there it is if I highlight a clip in the import window, I can actually go through and skim through it if I want now that's just an audio clip if I come down to one of my video clips and to select one of these I can skim through it or I can press the space bar and play it back I turned up my audio I'll hear the audio that's on there okay? So I could actually go through my shots if I want to and just decide which ones I want to bring in, but since I have already organized these ahead of time and I know these are shots that I'm probably going to end up using for the most part I'm just going to grab the two main folders that I want to bring in which in this case is footage an audio I'm just holding shifting, clicking on it this select another one's of footage and audio if I wanted to bring in my graphics also, I could just click command or hold command and click on it and it'll select that folders well so let's bring in these three will bring in graphics and stills also and you're going to see what happens here when I click import selected all right let's go ahead and do that we're ready to bring it in click import selected oh wow final cut has more questions for me this is paramount. This window right here will determine whether you have a good experience editing or a bad experience editing, all right? Because there's a lot there's some really heavy questions are going to post you right here, let me zoom in on this and just kind of just kind of give you the rundown. We have a couple different options for events final cut wants to know where dude that's where I want this footage to end up when I important into final cut well, I don't want it in this event color correcting grade that's for later in our workshop, I don't want that right now I want it actually to be in a new event, so if I wanted to add it to any one of these existing events, I could do so right here. If I want to create a new event, I click create new event and let's give it a title, make sure you are putting it on the drive that your media is supposed to be long on in this case is our work, dr member, we don't wantto have media on the mac hd or system hard drive, whatever you haven't named, you don't want to have it on the system hard drive, so work, dr that's good, I'm gonna name it let's, just call this day one tutorial right that's gonna be our new event final cut pro I was going to create a new event in the final cut events folder all right and it's gonna be this is gonna be the house the little box where we store all of the media that we bring in down here very important questions as well. The first one is going to ask me his organization or organizing do you want final cut going to say, do you want me to copy all of thiss footage that you're asking me to bring in into the final cut events folder this way if you go moving your directory around if you go moving those color coded folders or you rejected dr or well actually ejected drive would would would really unlike him anyway. Or if you move any of this color coded folders, you'll still have these files in the events folder. Okay, I would highly suggest you do this if you're new to final couple attend are always had this selected all right what's going to happen though when I click import and I have this checked is it's going to start doing that in the background and that's going to end up depending on your system, slowing your system down or just you know you're going to notice that's happening in the background just for the sake of this workshop let's pretend I haven't checked but I'm gonna un check it all right it's a case of do as I say not as I do check it for years when you go home and you start working with footage you definitely want to copy your files in the final cut events folder just prevents things from getting lost we don't want final cut to get pissed. Okay? Import folders as keyword collections if I check this what it's going to do is take these folders and not just the one that says one footage to audio it's going to take each of these folders and the names of the folders are going to be applied teo each of these clips as key words. All right, so this clip which is named m v I zero zero two four if I tell final cut import as keyword collections it's going to apply one dot footage as a keyword tag in the metadata it's going toe apply b roll as a keyword tag it's going toe apply group shots as a keyword tag it's going to work apply c l yoga as a tag so I'm sorry one dot footage not seo because that's outside the one footage directory forgive me so basically all of these cups will have these keyword tags associated with them you'll see what happens in a second when I have that checked it's actually going to put them into an organizational structure called keyword collections will get into that in just a minute. All right, so let's go here back to our dialogue when they don't see what other questions final cut has for us. Let's, just go ahead and grab each of these again and I'm just I'm backtracking here because I want to back out and show you that, so we're gonna keep that selected. We're just going unchecked that pretended checked, transporting this is where we get into where we talked about a few minutes ago about optimized media and proxy media. Okay, this is really important at this stage of the game. Do we want final cut to take these thes these media files and make optimized pro raise for two to media out of them? I would suggest yes, you d'oh okay again, it's going to do it in the background. So depending on your system configuration, it might slow you down, so just take that into consideration before you import your footage you can always pause it once were in final cut, but just take it into consideration because we can always optimize it later on. This is not the end all be all. If you don't do it here, if you don't do your transporting here, we could always go back and do it later on, but it gives you the option to do it if we want to work with one quarter quality video, media or audio video, just click create proxy media, it will create proxy media also in the background. All right, I'm going unchecked them for now because I don't want the system to be doing something in the background during the broadcast. All right, video and audio. These two things are automated controls that it has teo analyze and fix potential problems with your footage in audio. I don't generally let funnel could do this. I find that I like to do my color balancing my color, grading my organization of my files. Any audio problems? I sort of like to dis fix it manually. I feel like I have a lot more control. However, if you want to see what final cut khun due to your footage and audio, by checking these it's not going to hurt you later on to do this because you always turn off ways, turn off any results that it produced off later on. So for the sake of this, I'm not going to turn them on, because, again, this is something that's going to do in the background. All of this stuff is gonna happen in the background, all right, so we want to just take that and take it into consideration when we're working in the program, all right, so we're ready to import our media at this point all I'm going to have selected are is import folders as keyword collections and we're going to assume that these files are being copied well, the question is what happens if we don't slept copy files in that case and you're going to see this final cut is now just pointing to my video files so if they get moved final cut's gonna get pissed right? We don't want final cut to get pissed if one of those gets deleted we're gonna have a missing file so it's just using reference clips it's not actually working with the trans coded media if we I chose to not copy the files but transcoder media when the trans coating is done we don't have to worry about the files being copied because the trans coded media meaning the four to two pro rez and the proxy media automatically gets stored in the final cut events folder again it's another fail safes that final cut has to make sure all of your media stays in one place very cool very good good things that final cut is trying to do all right so let's important so we've selected footage, audio and graphics and stills import folders is keyword collections let's watch what happens this might take a second so important final cut's going togo through its little phases it says processing files for import now dslr users you may or may not in your folder when you take your footage off your memory card you might have some folders with a file type extension dot th em that's a thumbnail file final cut won't import those so if I did that if I imported footage that or folders that had those th em files in here it would just give me a dialog box saying hey, what are these tietjen files we don't we don't use those and I'll just say continue and you just move on so I had I went through I always go to remove him because I don't use them so there's just this is one less step I have to deal with okay so now we have a new event on our work drive so work drive and our new event is called tutorial and look at this these are keyword collections remember I said when we imported it's going to assign keyword tags to that footage well there it is right? So what I have here in the audio folder is an audio file that's our sole audio file but click on this is your a graphics and stills and in here you'll see that graphic for the yoga video and then here's our footage all of our group shots are in a keyword collection called group shots how do we know it's a keyword collection it's got this little blue icon with a key on it that's a key word collection so the folders that I had created to sort my video footage when I imported in the follow car pretended automatically created these bin's so to speak there not really bins they're just keyword collections if I click on the route of tutorial here just like this it will show me all of the video files that are in all of these keyword collections but if I just want to see on ly the group shots there's only my group shots if I want to see only my solo shots of vanessa there's my solo shots of vanessa just the interview there's just my interview clips graphics and stills and audio are in here okay notice how member we went over this in the first segment we sorted things by file type it's sorting them in the event browser here as quick time movies and if I could go on the audio you'll see way form audio it's nice right off the bat we have instant organization in vinyl number ten so important keyword collections is really powerful ofyou already pre sorted your footage really great stuff we can take this much much further okay let's say we really want to get into organization we have a lot of different options let me show you my from my next step what I would generally do in this case now is start re naming some of these files okay because I could if I wanted to I could start going through them and I could start pulling out part to these clips that I really want to use or I could you know, say okay, this is great let's make that a favorite you know? And we're going to get to that all right, but what I want to show you first is something really powerful called apply custom name this is cool so here we go into group shots and we have shots of okay here's vanessa with two other people and they're standing and these are shots of vanessa and people being seated or sitting down this is a close up shot and this is a close up shot and this is a really wide shot I can further break these down into either more keyword collections or just renamed these clips let's do some more keyword collections okay? So let's say I want to set up a keyword collection for all the clips were vanessa and her in her yoga pupils here are seated. All right, I'm just going to go through and I'm just going to clear this rating see this little range that I dragged here? Well, I don't want that song was going to hit option x and let's say I want to take all the ones of them sitting down and put him into their own keyword collection well, I could just grab let me just get rid of that was gonna option except that option except this one too just to remove these rangers so I want the idea here is I want to select the entire clip so all right so they're seated in that one time that I'm gonna click on that I'm gonna hold command and I'm going to find the other ones where they're all sitting okay they're seated there they're not seated anywhere else and we see here the seated in this one it was like the cd to that one they are seated in this one they're laying down in that one that one there getting ready to lay down so we'll leave that alone this one they're seated so let's do that and they're seated in this one too and this one they're just doing a consecration so I've selected these clips now if I want to put them into a different key word collection and I can have as many keyword collections as I want and I just want to say ok let's put all these into their own category I can come down here to my keyword editor you'll see that they're already labeled as group shots because we already have this key word collection entitled group shots but I'm just gonna tag these clips as ceded watch very closely to the clips that I've selected meaning these two right here were the sitting down when I click enter watch what happens it dropped keyword tags on to those clips that I've selected now, it's assigned both the keyword tag of group shots and seeded, and if I zoom out here and go over to the event library, you'll now see that I have a new key word collection called seeded all of the shots of them sitting or now in here, I feel like that does there's like an ooh ooh, that is so cool and let me tell you something. My first started working on this program, and I had to get my clothes back, alright, so traditional video editing programs if you wanted to do that, you would just go okay folder seated and grab a whole bunch of his throw him in there, okay, but you couldn't search for them by that folder or keyword named later on, they would just have to go navigate that folder, drop it down and there's all those clips here, there's actually a filter option, which we're going to get to in a few minutes that allows me just the search for those boom. Even easier way to make this happen and slick quick question related to hear words zack colonel asked if you, when you add keywords, doesn't add them to the original and the proxy optimized version, or just the one you do it, too. All of it okay, so let's say for example to answer that question that I told final cut pro ten when I import my footage optimize all this stuff make it all pro rez and give me give me proxy versions too all right? And when I do a project realistically guys I don't sit here and watch paint dry while it's trance coating in the background if I tell final cut if I know I'm gonna work on a project tomorrow the night before I'll import all my media and say trans coated and I'll walk away and go to sleep and then next morning I'm coming and everything's done so you have two choices you can either do it that way or you can sit and let it do it in the background you can continue to work with the native media which is what we're doing here doesn't matter he work collections or not it's just keep our collections of just showing you what these clips are assigned to us farther groups and these clips may or may not be optimized it just depends on if we've done the trans coating or not that was confusing we'll get there alright but as faras keyword tagging goes that's how we do it little key word icon down here we could also hit command kay excuse me that opens up our keyword window and I could take this another step further I can click that oh, by the way, if you're in a keyword collection and you want to go back to seeing all the clips because right now we're only seething seeing the ones that are tagged seated I can come in here to tutorial on now on back viewing all of my clips okay, so I can create another one for standing I can do one for the one on ones that they're laying down I could do ones where it's just you know venice alone what we already have that it's called solo shots so there's lots of different options here for organizing but this is the part that really blew my mind when I figured it out. All right, so let's say for example I want teo. All right, well, let me let me let me draw a contrast in comparison here let's say I want to search for all of my ceded clips, but I've got like thirty or forty keyword collections and let's just say, for example, this list just goes on and on and on and on and on it is like so many cure collections and every time I want to do that I have to kind of scroll down through the event library here and find the key word collection well, that could get a little bit tedious up here in the top of the event browser there's this nifty little window okay? And this nifty little window up here allows me just allows me to search by typing in here, ok? But the problem with that is when we're just using keyword collections is if I come up here and type seeded it's not going to show me anything even though we've got these organized into a keyword collection called seeded why? Well, that takes us to our filter dialogue. We need to go into our filter dialogue to see why that's not happening well, if I had command f this opens up a panel called the filter dialogue right now what this window will allow me to do is search for things in my event library by certain parameters right now it's on ly searching by text meaning it's on ly searching by file name okay, so it's on ly I'm just gonna exit out of here for a second season kind of see I'm just gonna I'm just gonna remove this if I click this it's on ly searching by these titles envy I so you'll see if I go here and type ceded its not going to show me my cd thing I have to click on the keyword collection, but if I go in to my filter settings and I unchecked text or leavitt checked whateveryou want teo and then come up here to this little plus box and go to key words now I can filter and sort by keywords by un checking and checking these boxes not very efficient I mean I listen I know guys that they use this workflow and it works great for them and they like it that's great I have a different method I like to use so if I wanted to search only by seated I can collect seated here and now you'll notice now it's just showing me my seat eclipse well it's no different than this coming over here in clicking out seeded all right and that you know this this filter or I'm sorry this search box can be so much more powerful if we take a few more steps and do a little bit further organisation of all of our clips so watch this let's go back into the root of our event library and let's look at all of our clips here you notice that the file names of these clips are all what they came out of the camera envy I zero zero two on and the eyes ears there to nine well I want to separate these all and be able to search right here for whatever clips I want to find there's a great little feature called apply a custom name and it's found up here in the modify apply custom named menu all right check this out I'm gonna go appear to apply I'm sorry modified flight custom name I'm gonna go to edit okay, we have this really scary looking dialog box don't let it scare you all this stuff down here don't worry about it yet all this stuff over here don't worry about it yet this is stuff I've actually created most of this, okay? And what I'm doing weddings you notice here that I've got different categories for bride gift bride dressing bride details ceremony and you see these initials easier? The first initial of my camera people that's me so these air all need custom names that I've set up where I actually will go and batch rename my files in my event browser for easy sorting. Check this out, let's say, for example, and I'm going to exit out of here just to illustrate a point let's say, for example, I'm looking at all this footage related to yoga, but I want to be able to search for it by two shot three shot close up I mean, you don't have to do camera angles going anything it could be lying down, it could be seeded it could be any things that may we may have used over here before solo shots, whatever. Check this out, modify, apply custom name edit I'm gonna go up here to the time when it go down here actually, and I'm gonna click on this little plus icon and I'm going get rid of words his current name because I don't want to search by the current file name I want to give it a custom name alright, so I'm gonna come down here to our sex clip info and I'm going to drag up custom name all right, see what says untitled? That means I haven't really typed anything in the custom named thing here yet so that it doesn't know what name it yet it just knows I want to rename my clip something right then I'm also going to add this counter one and what that's going to do is allow me getting a little overzealous there get in there you go that's going to start putting numbers after the custom name so if I've got multiple files that I want to rename I can just give them numbers and rename them all and give them numbers okay? The only other thing I have to do is come down here towards his custom name and typing up let's start creating categories of what we want to name our clips so let's go with siting okay, we want increments to start it won. The first number should be one numeral one sitting okay, good, I come over here and I just rename this sitting so I know what it is when I look at it later on we'll get there in a minute okay, I'm done. I'm going right click duplicate it now I don't have to change this anymore because it's already done so I've just duplicated it here I'm going to give it a new name we're gonna call this one laying down or lying down whatever okay, come down here custom name laying down so a few extra minutes of doing this and I'm setting my stage for some really easy organization later on okay good totally happy with that let's create a couple more let's go let's duplicate it let's see what else do I want categories? My footage by close ups why not close ups come down here close ups boom done next one and I'll do just honestly one more okay, so let's do I don't know um ball because I know this is the way of the yoga ball it's a ball called ball in your ball good done click okay, well just make sure that one saves there you go. We have r four new apply custom named presets I'm gonna click okay and check this out. Let's go here let's find all the clips that are close ups that's close up. Um I'm holding command and I'm going to select other clubs close up uh close up and I may not get him all this is just to illustrate a point okay, watch this zoom back out modify apply custom name close ups watch the file names where you see that yellow box boom renamed it. Okay, so now I've got all these files that are renamed close ups. One close too close of three. Okay, now watch this let's say I'm knee deep in footage over here. Let's say I don't see my close ups come over here. Simply type in here. Close ups, there's all my close ups all right. And let's, take it a step further. Let's, get rid of that let's. Go back in here! Let's! Let's, find the clip that has the ball on it. And again. You know, this works best when you have a lot of media clips. Were not really working with a whole lot of media clips here, but if you really want to make sorting a lot easier, this is the way to do it. Modify apply custom name ball these would be wide shots. Let's, let's, go lying thing we made one for lying down, right? So here's two lying down let's do that apply custom name lying down. All right, so we're buried in this stuff, but you just come up here. You don't have a type of full things type the first couple letters and it's going to find him boom done, lying down ball there's my ball shot so when I'm down here in the project that I'm working and I'm just trying to get things done fast, I don't have to come up here click go through my footage and find things it's like I know I have three ball shots, boom ball, there's all my ball shots, I want to get them all I want all my close ups, there's my close ups, okay, take a little extra time, go through the program and organize things it really, really helps to be much faster and that's just my work flow if you have another work flow out there that works for you a little bit better by all means that's, great it's all about personal preference. This is what I do, and when I'm working with a wedding where I've got ten hours of footage and four camera persons, this is invaluable to me because I can start concentrating on my story and not have to think about every five minutes home where's that shot you up here again. Where is that such a pain? And you'll see tomorrow when I'm editing I've already got my I've already got my applied custom names set up for tomorrow right here and we're going to go through and tag a mall tomorrow, super fast, it's awesome, okay? I felt like we were all just breathing easier. This is going to be so helpful and organizing footage. It's incredible really quick question when you're importing footage from your multiple camera men with the same file name, how do you handle that? Like envy? I underscore zero seventeen or something like that that doesn't really bother final cut too much of your files of the same name, it really doesn't bother it just just final cut nose from the metadata it's a different file so it's not going to replace it or override it or anything like that if you have the same clip and then you try to bring it in and it wouldn't even bother it either. It's a that's pretty resilient like that in pre forgiving when it comes to file names, I would highly suggest what I do and this is why we sort everything out ahead of time in the work. Dr oren, the project folder, the job holder I should say here's, my wedding that we're gonna be working with tomorrow everything is really everything is regimented in the footage folder by camera person so when it brings it in, I'll have thes o these will become keyword collections all of ends photo session will become a keyword collection I want to look in on ly ends photo session click on the keyword collection there's on ly his clips doesn't matter what their named now I can go through and renamed these using apply custom name walking wide shot bride alone shot and I can search for those instantaneously just by using that wonderful little search feature right here. This box is so much more powerful when you use apply custom name all right? So I don't have to worry, I think you were attacking is great don't get me wrong, he were talking is awesome and it creates these awesome keyword collections, but I like to be able to search really fast, you know? Ah, teachable moment, why didn't that work? Okay, I just type ball. Why didn't ball show up in here? Well, I wasn't on the route of the event, I'm in solo shots, what final cuts telling me is, hey, man there's, no shot that you re named ball in this key work collection, you've gotta click out to your mean, I'm mostly here on my main event, and now I can just navigate to any of the ones I want lying down, you know, close ups, that sort of thing, all right, so just make sure that you keep, you know, this selected, so you're viewing all you're searching through all of you, oops. Let's, start working with media up here in the media browser because now it's time to start getting ready for this footage to be edited. So the first thing we have to do is this side what parts of these clips I want to actually use and this is where ratings come in. This is where we start rating clips, his favorites or rejections, okay? And the way this is gonna work is we're just going to go through our footage and a couple different ways too determine the shots were going to use so I'm gonna get some audio here, guys, I'm just gonna have a little bit of sound here, so we can kind of hear what we're doing and I'm going to use this first clip and this is vanessa doing her interview and now she did this like in twenty takes and it's all in one clip, so I'm only in maybe using one take of each of her of each of her her script parts so I need to go through this fast. Well, I can sort of get in here and go scrubbing through um and by the way, just so you know, we could sit in and out points by clicking I actually let me zoom out, you see the keystrokes I set an end point space bar to play it oh two seven out point and it will select a range of clip okay, this is video editing won a one way have to sit ins announce a lot of times to get what we want so let me just play this have to be flexible to do yoga or that it's all about sex okay, let me zoom in see how difficult is it weird to work with this long clip like this? So I'm just gonna use the slider here just zoom in on that clip so I could see a little bit more detail and get a little bit closer up on this so let's start right about here and see where vanessa venice's what nasa says I even had to get cortisone shots and parts of my back because my muscles just wouldn't relax. Okay? So that's a good statements good sound but I want to use right there so I'm going to use keyboard keys j k and l you guys might want to get shot of this over here j k l m my keyboard and it's nice because my little custom keyboard cover has on the jakey reverse on the cake e it's a stop on the forward key it says l alright and I can use my three fingers right here in my index finger middle finger and ring finger just tow go back watch how you navigate through this j to reverse it katie stop I want to play back a hit l e even had to get cortisone shots and parts of my back because my muscles just wouldn't relax kay to stop so I can search through my footage the more times I press jay or l to go forward and backwards the faster it's going to go watch this I'll hit j like three times okay hit l a couple times forward all right so it's going to move a lot faster so j k and l are great for that now we need to set ranges we need to kind of determine what we're going to actually take and use later on right so we have to set in and out points all right? So right on top of keys j k and l are keys I oh eyes set start oh, it's set end so I'm basically going to go to the beginning of that sound by using j k now I'm gonna navigate there use my space bar to play the weight of carrying okay to stop in and back up okay, now I'm at the beginning of her sound bite I'm going ahead I to set the in hit my space bar to play or I could hit l a the weight of carrying all my photo year and then spending my week's slouched of computer was making photography so much less enjoyable for me it's stop the space bar or k? Either one will work hit. Oh, and that's going to set the range. Now you'll notice I have this yellow range over my clip here. Okay? That's, that's, that's in essence, that's basically just going through what we call skimming the footage, picking out shots we want now, this is what's really cool. I know I want to use that, but I also know I want to use another part of venice. Talking over here is well, so I'm just going to come a little further here and I'm going do my j k and l thing again and just kind of found another sound bites what's purcell during this for a four day workshop because it's four mornings we don't want to use that, so I'm going to fast forward, okay? We'll take it from right here. By the way, guys, I'm looking at the way form here and I can kind of tell where she starts and stops talking. It really is helpful. So let's, just start right here. Will hit. Uh l see where she's at in yoga for all right? I know I want to start there. Let's back up and I held to go forward, you'll retire first. And by the way, since I have not set an out point yet you can see that it's a selecting the entire rest of the clip we don't want that so it's a place you are going to address all of the symptoms that photographers had back pain elbow pain hips, knees all your joints great that's my next sound by hit oh, and now I've selected that range as well ok, but watch what happened oh my first one got ovaries it's gone my first one's gone well, why is that? Well, it didn't save it because I didn't hold command down when I selected that second one, so the jake kane elling is great if you're going on ly pull one clip at a time from a file, but if you need to clip, you know to take multiple parts of a clip we need to we need to do it a different way we need to use our mouse so I'm basically me go over here and select that first one just by clicking and dragging over that first sound bite to select a range hold command on this amount you could see the command hold command come down to our next sound bite, which is right here and I just I know by memorization is by looking at it drag over it and now you'll see that too are selected okay, that's awesome because when we're editing later on and going through our clips and we want to be able to pull multiple clips down at the time line that's how you would do it if you could do in one by one to it's all personal preference again, this is the way I like to do it, okay let's take organization to another level right now that we've just gone through and selected a couple of clips here and by the way, that's my entire workflow for going through my footage I'm basically just goingto go through all my clips. J k l e l let's back up start here I go forward but by prayer there we go. Oh, and that's it and I would just keep doing this for all my footage now let's say I do that and I've got all these shots selected here that I know I want to use we'll watch this I can come up here and click and hit the button f on the keyboard and what you're going to notice happen here is going to happen right above this blue line and by the way, this blue line represents the fact that this clip is in a keyword collection or a blue lines on clips like that mean they are part of a keyword collection blue means keyword watch what happens when I pressed the key f now we have a green line that green line means I marked it is a favorite. Ok, this part of the clip is a favorite right? This part of a clip is also a favorite click f come down here, we also selected this part click f ive dis marked those three segments as favorites watch this guy come up here to all clips and click on favorites or hit control f watch the event browser it's on ly showing me my favorite clips, not only is it only showing me my favorite clips it's on ly showing me the part of that huge clip that I selected so it's not showing me all this other stuff that's that's in this clip it's on ly showing me the range that I selected that's really powerful because it means I don't have to look through this large filmstrip view of a video file I could just look at the clips I want to use. So do you guys see the progression of organisation that I've done? I've organized outside of final cut I brought a man I've organized in keyword collections using both the import as keyword collections command and by setting keyword tags using the command okay keyword tag all right and then I will use on apply custom name t get it down even more specific for sorting and now I'm applying favorites that's awesome! I can also key weren't tag these individual clips let's say I just want a keyword tag these I don't want a keyword tag all this other stuff, I just want to keep word tag this stuff let's see, I didn't favor it or I want to take the favorite off right? Come down here, click on this little empty star and now it removed the favorite tag will watch this. I still have those ranges selected, but instead of favoring him, I want to create a keyword collection for those so we'll call these good cuts command okay or good interview or good bites hair, good bites, watch, watch the tag or watch the tag apply right there. Good bites, boom us out of the way! Come down to this other one we could do the same thing now I don't have to type good bites again final cut smart I could drop down this keyword shortcuts, and it saves all the keyword tags that I've used already. It also saves any of the ones that might have implied during import so I can come over here and just click this to bring it up there or just click uh, control three so vice click that it applies the tag that range now it's create its own keyword collection for good bites so there's many you could see there's many, many different things that you could do to organize your footage there's a lots of different ways we can do it so it's up to you to decide what works for you this is my method I organize outside of final cut I do keyword collections first inside final cut when I import I do apply custom name and then I do do my tagging apply custom name and then keyword filtering like this so there's a lot of different ways to do this it just all depends on how you want to do it. I will pause now for questions because that was a lot and I know there's many, many different things ways you can do that so let's let's give an opportunity for questions absolutely great information but they're definitely a couple questions for clarification mostly, stephen martin would like to know does the custom name feature renamed the master files on the working drive or just the final cut pro ten structure within the front on ly re names in the program? It doesn't even rename the file in the final could events folder so five trans coded media of all of my media files it doesn't rename anything outside of final cut all it does is renamed what you're seeing here in the event browser that's it nothing else just just right here a question from inca if you have all of this custom ization and your work dr collapses and you have to re import the original raw files this final cut pro match the original files with these customized filings and keywords automatically yes if you okay it's your grass skirt question let's say we did all this work and we'll get to you let's say we did all this work and our drive failed but we had a backup that was organized exactly the same way what you should you should always have a backup on a separate dry maybe even in a separate place not not in your home or office yes you khun re link event files we can basically re create the event by re importing the media and then relinking files there's a whole process that goes along to it the short answer is yes you can relate yeah I'm just wondering when your previewing you're video and audio files or you're just doing those in quick time and itunes or previously out I mean outside of ah yeah your organism basically is yeah I just use a quick preview and that's why I love max yeah it just kind of select one of these collect any file and I get this hit space bar and it plays it I have another question that trans coding one when you're converting to pro as four point two two or whatever it's called to two. Yeah. Um do you then have three copies of your files? So do you delete the original windsor? Um, I wouldn't. You could essentially, um you run the risk of pissing final cut pro off. Well, here's in actuality, the way it works. Okay, so let's say I bring in a bunch of dslr footage and I tell final cut transcoder. Give me all pro raise. It will create the progress files on. Let me show you where it goes work, dr final cut events. Okay. Um, yoga, trance coded media. If I've created for two to its stores in this folder called high quality media that's where it stores, they divide double click this all new brand new quicktime files. All right, so yes, if I went and deleted all my originals, final cut would go. No problem. Dude, I got you covered. Here's all your transcoder media right here. You won't get any red clips in final cup or ten red clips or bad if you ever see red clips and follicle pretend it means final cuts missing something or you move something in piss monica pro off. We don't want to piss monica pro off it's become a mantra, alright, so basically, in a nutshell, transcoder media will stay here and that's fantastic if we've created proxy media it will also have a folder for proxy media, which I don't have proxy media here you have another folder for proxy media and then all your proxy media files are also separate. So that's a great segue way too. It actually leads me to teach something they will come back to questions real quick. So let's say, for example, me, let me find something that has proxy media you can kind of see. I think this project does. Okay? Yes. If I click on a clip here in my event browser and I look over here at my inspector window, it says for this clip available media representations, original proxy what that means is it's telling me. Okay, dude, I've got all of your referencing your original footage because you have not yet transported the four to two and you told me to make you proxy file so here's your proxy files, okay, you have them at your disposal, which means in my project, if I come down here a minute soaping up something that we're going tomorrow. Okay, if I come up here into final cut pro preferences member of this window that we were shown you earlier, where recon toggle back and forth between using proxy or original and optimized, if I click proxy final cuts going to switch over to my proxy media now I'm looking at the low reds files here, so it's not going to look nearly as good as if I'm using my original or optimized media on day three, we're going to explore this a little bit more because we always want to be using optimized media before we finalize our project. Okay, you can edit and proxy to your heart's content, and it will speed up your work flow. But before you export that project, you better go back to your optimized to original media. Otherwise you'll have problems, but yes, it will create new copies of your files and store them in the final cut events folder. Did that answer your question that the seven minute explanation? Alex cotton from plain springs palm springs sorry. When? Using favorite clips. Toe edit. Can you roll out more of the cliff? If you decide you want it later as far as a favorite. Well, what you could do. You know what? I don't even show your rejections. Let's, do that too. All right. So let's, say, for example, let's, go back into our tutorial footage just for easier and let's go into something different. Let's, go! Hey, let's, use our filter let's, go into a ball, all right, so all right, so let's say I'm gonna use my j k l m just find the part of the clip I want to you so I'm gonna answer this guy's question to second. So let's, start our clip right here in j k l ng and I for import I'm gonna play it forward and stop it right there is what I want my clip to stop on its end now I've selected my range, right? So let's, zoom in here so you can see I'm gonna hit f and it would actually help like this because you see a little better when I hit f now I've got the green line. So what his question is, can I extend that green line? Yes and no, you can come back in here, select the range again, move the range, expanded to where you want it and then hit f again, it'll add that additional part to the favorite. Okay, so when I go into my favorites, if I view just my favorites, it'll show you that expanded range. Okay, now the one thing I didn't show you before was rejected rejections let's say, for example, let's, just go back into the root of our tutorial footage here has come back up to where the actual video files are let's say, I don't want this quip I know I'm not going to use it for some because I like this one better let's say alright, hypothetically speaking, I don't want this one if I hit delete on my keyboard, it is not going to remove the file from final cut it's not gonna put it in the trash it's gonna market as rejected. Watch the clip when I hit delete the big delete key on my keyboard delete put a red line over it that's a rejection that basically means okay, I don't want to see that clip if I come up here and go to hide rejected its going to remove that one clip let's say I selected a range of clips I know I don't want all of these and I hit delete they disappeared. Why? Because I'm only looking, I told that hide my rejected clips, I goto all clips there they are again so it didn't remove didn't delete them. The only way you can delete a file out of your media browser and out of your final cut project or event altogether is to right click on it and go to move to trash. Okay if I say if I say trash this file, it will pull it and any reference of it in trans coded media, proxy media and original and just move it to the trash we don't want to do that generally speaking, if you can avoid doing that that's fine, but if you know it's like, okay, it's, a clip, I know I'm never going to use and you want to trash it. By all means, you can do that, okay, but rejections are great and you can remove any ratings. So let's say you accidentally rejected these nine clips walking. Just come down here, click on the empty star and it un rates them and these ratings a really cool I can look att, ok, hide the rejected clips or I could say, you know what? Show me only my favorites or show me on ly the rejected clips what ones of I rejected? Or maybe I want to go back and use one of these or show me all the clips that don't have any ratings whatsoever. And it will do that for you as well. So pretty powerful filtering methods. Once we have things keyword tagged and renamed via personal preference.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Client Communication and Business Pack.zip
Discount Code.jpg
FCPX Day 1.pdf
FCPX Day 2.pdf
FCPX Day 3.pdf
Vendor Resource Guide.pdf
Video-Presets.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Crispino Dourado
 

I've been using FCP since 2013 or so I thought! Until I went through the lessons here and boy was I hooked on! I've learned a ton of stuff that I can use from this course! Really awesome course for beginners to professionals and a must for wedding cinematographers! I loved every bit of this course! Thank you.

Ryan Pierson
 

Rob Adams and Vanessa Joy are incredible speakers and thoughtful educators. In three days, they take you through the basics of editing theory and explain everything you need to know to dive into FCP X. Rob even details how to do advanced color grading at a pace that is clear and easy to understand. Without a doubt, this course has done more to improve my personal and professional use of FCP X than five years of experience working with video and audio. A+ great course.

Charlie
 

Simply brilliant! I had no idea where to start with FCP and even though I am now using an updated version... this course has been invaluable!!! Thank you Rob and Vanessa!

Student Work

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