- [Nick] Hi, welcome to Final Cut Pro X Weekly.
I'm Nick. And Jeff's not here this week.
We're going to talk about using the Finder
for easy organization, or making the Finder
work for you this week.
Some of our key topics include
previewing clips with the Finder.
We're going to add some color tags and info tags to our clips
to better have them organized.
We're going to take a look at an application called Automator
and how we might be able to use it for renaming
or adding data to our clips at the Finder level.
And last, but not least, how we can use the information
that we entered at the Finder level
inside of Finder Cut Pro X.
So I'm going to close out of here and head to my Finder.
And on my desktop I have a folder here
called Finder Organize, and within it two folders I created
for some of my Northern Lights footage
from Finland, Iceland, and Norway.
And some footage of waterfalls.
Now, one thing that's great about the Finder level,
especially if you have MP4s or MOV files,
anything that the Finder can see,
and of course you can select a clip
and you can press the spacebar to play it back.
And I'm just going to do that here on my last shot here,
or my second to last shot in the project.
(noise from video clip)
So we can see that clip and get a sense for what it is.
And one thing that's really cool about this,
instead of bringing the final cut, is that we're
not tempted to edit.
One of the most important things,
especially if you're becoming familiar with your material,
is to watch it without making a decision about it right away
as in, it will allow you to see all of the material
before making any decisions.
So the Finder level is sort of just this
almost protection barrier from you starting
to make edit decisions right away
in a Final Cut Pro X project, where one of the first stages
is just to watch what you have, and then you can
make some decisions on how to edit that later.
Another thing you can do inside the finder is,
on clips, you can add tags to them.
And with a clip selected, you you could see here
the ability to add a tag.
And in fact, I'm just going to add the tag. "Northern Lights".
And then just after this, cause I know
this was filmed in Tromso, I'll add the word "Tromso".
And then this Finder tag is now added to that clip.
And I've already added some actual tags
to some of the clips here inside this project.
You can see "Northern Lights in Finland"
for some of the shots.
And this information is going to be useful
inside of Final Cut because it will eventually
turn into key words.
Now, you might have a lot of clips that exist
in a given folder, from a certain day shoot,
and you can use tags instead to split it up
for the type of content it is, such as maybe a close up
or a medium shot or establishing shot, and still use
all this information inside of Final Cut,
and get familiar with your clips here at the Finder level.
Now, there's also this program
inside the Mac OS called "Automator".
And one of the things you could do in Automator
is, first of all, I did a search up here for Finder
inside this app that you can find in the application folder,
and I'm going to get specified Finder items.
I'm going to point it, on my system,
to my Finder Organize folder, to my Waterfalls folder,
and grab these two clips.
What I'd like to is I'd like to rename them.
I'd like to preface this with a warning.
The warning is sometimes you don't want to change
the original names that come from your camera.
And that is to make sure that they are brought in,
or imported, correctly into your non-linear editor.
It's very important that you maintain
the original camera files in many work flows,
especially collaborative ones.
So before you rename these files just make sure
that you have a camera backup of the original names.
Now, what I'm going to do is add another Finder action,
and that action, I'm going to type in the word, "name".
And one of those actions, it says,
is to rename Finder items,
which I'm going to add after getting specific files.
I'll choose to add that.
And one of those actions is to add text to the existing name
and I'd just like to add the word "waterfalls"
after the original name from the camera,
and that's exactly what I'll do by pressing "_waterfall".
You can see that it's not going to be hyphened
after the item name.
Now when you add something like "Rename Finder",
because of the warning, what it does is it
also copies Finder items to another location.
What this does is it prevents you
from making changes to the original.
It's just a backup here that the Mac OS is doing
to make sure that you really don't mess the original file.
So not only is it going to rename,
or add to the name of these clips,
it's actually going to make a copy,
and right now, based on its settings,
spit it out and put it on the desktop.
I'm not going to do that in this case
cause I'm sure my footage is going to be fine
for this particular example,
so I'm going to minus the copy
and I'm now going to run these two actions.
So I'm going to click "Run" and the folder action
will not receive input when run inside Automator.
That's okay, that's fine, I'm just going to choose OK right now
and you can see here that it's run those two actions
and the work flow is complete within less than a second.
If I go back to the Finder into my "Waterfalls" folder,
you should see here that those two files
have now the new name "waterfall" appended to the end of it.
Something that you can do at the Finder level,
but you want to be careful that you still have a backup
of your original camera files with their original names,
for importing in other work flows.
Now, last but not least, let me head back
in the Final Cut for the first time in this movie.
And what we're going to do is go to the file "Import, Media"
and we're going to import some of those clips
that I added tags to.
So I have some of those Norther Lights clips
and I'll just grab a bunch of them,
some of them I know I added some tags to,
and make sure that I take these Finder tags
and turn them into Keyword collections.
I will leave the files in place in my drive
and keep all the default settings that I have here,
and I'm going to choose to import those selected.
You should see that under Footage Event
I now have two new keyword collections
containing some of the clips that I added those keywords to,
and some of my organization is off to a good start.
That's it for Final Cut Pro X Weekly this week.
I'm Nick. Thanks for tuning in.