Do you ever feel overwhelmed
by all the footage you have for a video project,
to the point of not even knowing where to start.
Today, we’ll take a look at some of the tools in Final Cut Pro
you can use to organize your footage,
so you know exactly what you have, where you can find it,
and filter it out so you see exactly what you need, when you need it.
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Before you start your edit,
take a bit of time to go through,
review, and organize your footage.
This allows you to see exactly what you have,
what else you need, and when it comes time for your edit,
an organized library allows you to filter out your media,
so only the clips you need are in front of you.
First step to organizing media,
is before you even import your files into Final Cut Pro.
When you transfer your media files
from your memory card to your hard drive,
take a few minutes to organize it into folders.
This can be as simple as having one folder for your A-Roll
and one for your B-Roll,
or as complex as having separate folders
for different days of shooting, different cameras and so on.
When you import your media into Final Cut pro,
in the import window, make sure Keywords from Folders option is selected.
This will add the folder names as keywords to your clips,
and organize your media into keyword collections.
Selecting one of these, will only show the clips in that folder.
Next, let’s take a look at what I feel,
is the most useful feature in organizing clips.
In Final Cut Pro, you can select an entire clip,
or just a specific part of a clip,
and mark it as favourite, or reject it.
First let’s take a look at marking favourites.
Skim over your clips in the media browser,
and, when you find a clip you like, select it,
and from the menu bar select Mark
and Favourite.
This marks this entire clip as a favourite,
signified by the green line at the top of the thumbnail image.
You can also favourite only a specific part of a clip.
Skim over your clip, and use the I and O keys
to mark the start and end of your selection.
Press F on your keyboard to mark this selection as favourite.
Alternately, instead of using the I and O keys,
you can just use your mouse to click and drag out a selection,
and press F to mark it as favourite.
To view your marked selections,
at the top of the media browser window,
open the Clip Filtering dropdown menu
and select Favourites.
This filters out your media, and only displays clips you marked.
And if you marked multiple selections in one clip,
each selection is displayed as a separate clip.
To go back to seeing all your clips,
from the clip filtering dropdown,
you can either choose to display all clips,
or select the default Hide Rejected option.
If you come across a clip, or a part of a clip
you know you’re not going to use in your project,
you can reject it.
Select a clip, or a selection in a clip,
and press Delete to mark it as rejected.
This doesn’t actually delete the clip,
just hides it from the media browser.
If you press Control C to display all clips,
you can see your rejected clip is still there,
signified by a red line at the top of the clip thumbnail.
When I record my videos,
I normally record my video and audio separately,
and just sync them after import.
This makes a new synced clip,
and this is where the reject feature comes in very handy.
I can hide my original clips to hide them,
so I don’t accidentally use them,
while still keeping them in my media browser,
as source clips for my synchronized clip.
Let’s go back to keyword collections.
You can have Final Cut Pro make keyword collections
from folder names and tags,
but you can also make them manually.
Select a clip in your timeline,
and press Command K to bring up the Keyword window.
As you can see, this clip already has a keyword applied to it,
but you can add as many keywords as you want.
So if we add another keyword to our clip,
this clip will now show up in both keyword collections.
If you have lots of clips in your library,
you can speed this up my using keyword shortcuts.
Press Command K to bring up the keyword editor,
and click the disclosure triangle for keyword shortcuts.
Here, you can enter up to 9 keywords
that are assigned to keyboard shortcuts.
To add a clip to one of these keyword collections,
you just select the clip,
and type in the assigned keyboard shortcut.
Now, when you’re editing your project,
and need to add a top down shot,
instead of searching through every clip,
you just select the top down keyword collection,
and all you see is the clips you tagged for it.
And last, let’s take a look at smart collections in Final Cut Pro.
With these, you add one or more rules to your smart collection,
and Final Cut Pro filters out your clips,
and displays only the clips that meet your criteria.
To make a smart collection, from the Menu bar select File,
New, and Smart Collection,
or use the keyboard shortcut Option Command N.
Give this smart collection a name,
and double click on it to set the parameters.
We’ll use this one to display just the still images.
Click the Plus button in the top right corner,
select Media Type, and set this to Stills.
Just like that, we have a smart collection with only still images.
Let’s make another smart collection,
but this time a bit more complicated.
Say we want to display just the B-Roll clips,
only the ones filmed in 4K,
and only the ones we chose as Favourites.
Press Option Command N to make a new smart collection,
and give it a name.
Double click it to to set the rules.
For the first rule, we’ll narrow our clips down to just B-Roll.
Hit the plus button, select Keywords,
de-select everything,
and just select B-Roll.
Next, let’s narrow this down some more
to include just the 4K clips.
Hit the plus button to add another rule,
select Format Info,
and say the Video Frame Size,
Is,
3840 by 2160.
And last, let’s narrow this down to just the clips
we selected as favourites.
Add another rule,
select Ratings, and Favourites.
We just set this smart collection to display
only our favourite B-Roll clips, that were filmed in 4K.
And, as you can see, this was very simple to do.
Investing a little bit of time into organizing media before you start your edit,
whether you keep it simple and just mark the clips you like as favourites,
or dive right into it and make a bunch of smart collections,
will have a huge payoff when you’re editing your project.
You’ll know what you have for footage to work with,
and exactly where to find it,
so time wasted looking for clips will be minimal.
Do you use any of these tools for organizing media in Final Cut Pro?
Or do you have a better system in place?
I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you back here next week.