Markers in Final Cut Pro X are great for identifying specific areas that need work.
Keyboard shortcuts make them even faster.
To add a marker to a clip on the primary storyline, you don't need to select it first, it will
be added to any clip that has the active ball indicator on it.
So here to add a marker I can just tap the "m" key.
Tapping the "m" key again opens that marker so I can edit it.
I'll call this one check color correction.
I'll also change this marker type to a To Do marker
and then hit return.
If the playhead is over a connected clip, the marker will be added to that connected
clip.
I'll undo that.
To add the marker to a clip on the primary storyline underneath a connected clip, you can tap the
"c" key and then tap "m" and I'll undo that.
To add a marker to any clip under the playhead, hold the command key down and tap the down
arrow to get to the clip you want and then tap the "m" key
and I'll undo that.
An even better way to add a marker, rather than adding it and then opening it is to press
option+"m" which will both add the marker and open it for editing.
I'll say replace this shot and also change it to a To Do marker.
And I'll add one more marker here without identifying it.
Once you've added markers to your project, the timeline index becomes very useful.
Shift+command+2 to open it.
I'll select Tags and by default, everything is selected so we see all of our keyword collections
but we can choose to look at regular markers, selecting any of them will jump to that marker
in the timeline or we can look at our incomplete To Do items.
I'll make this column a little wider and selecting either of those jumps right to that marker.
So they're great for producer notes or your own notes when you identify things you need
to change if you don't want to do it right at the time.
You can then go through the timeline index, select each of these, and make your changes.
Once your changes are complete, clicking on this area of the marker moves it from incomplete
to completed.
The marker color changes to green in the timeline and if you go to the completed marker section
of the timeline index, you'll see it here.
So once completed you can go back and check your work.
Markers are also useful for cutting to the beat in video.
Here I have a music track and I want to use markers to identify key beat points to cut
to.
So, I'll start by playback and tap the "m" key to the beat.
Once my markers are in place, I've zoomed in a little bit here, I'll tap "s" to enable
skimming.
I'll tap shift+"s" to disable audio skimming because we don't need to hear anything I just
want to be able to skim here and I'll also tap the "n" key to enable snapping so that
I snap to each of these markers.
Once I've done that it's very to easy to snap to a marker, I don't even need to worry about
the playhead location.
I'll snap to a marker, tap "i", snap to another marker tap "o", and then I can begin to cut
in my video to exactly match these beat points.
I'll move the cursor over this clip, I don't even need to select it, and press "q" to edit
it in.
Now I set my clip appearance to be audio only I can change that now with command+option
and up and down arrow.
"i"
"o"
skim in the browser
and "q"
"i"
"o"
skim in the browser
and "q"
I can very quickly begin to identify key beat points that I want to include in the video.
Now usually at some point, I want to start taking advantage of the magnetic timeline
when I want to reorganize my shots or trim them or move them beyond the beat because I don't
always want to cut directly to the beat.
So after I've established some anchor clips, on exactly where I want them to be on the
beat what I'll usually do is select these connected clips, then press option+command+down
arrow to move them to the primary storyline.
Doing so automatically moves my music track down as a connected clip to a gap clip at
the beginning.
Now because my clips on the primary storyline, it's easy for me to reorganize them
and I can still use these gap clips in order to do replace settings.
For instance, I'll skim to this gap clip, press command+b to blade it, and now I can
do a replace edit on the gap clip under the playhead by skimming to the clip I want to
use and pressing option+r.
So I can take advantage of markers by editing as connected clips and then by editing as
part of the primary storyline.
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