- [Nick] Welcome to Final Cut Pro X Weekly.
I'm Nick, no Jeff this week.
We're going to talk about
making keyword collections work for you.
Organization from the system level and beyond.
Some of the key concepts are
the importance of organization
and naming conventions right when you start your project.
We'll look at keywords at the system level.
Creating and planning default keywords with a team
so that everyone's on the same page.
Making sure Final Cut Pro is set up correctly.
And of course keyword collections specifically for selects.
Let's dive into it.
To start off this week's show,
the first thing I want to do is give you a resource.
Head to justinmcclure/gyst.
This is a great resource
to sort of see how people organize video projects.
And while it isn't Final Cut Pro X centric,
the same collaborative workflows between,
in some cases GFX artists, video editors,
motion graphic designers,
can be equally applied to Final Cut Pro X.
My favorite part about it is is they have interviews
with people working in the creative industry.
And it talks about how they organize their video files.
And they even share with you their naming conventions
and their folder structure at the system level.
For instance, I'm here in the download folder
where I've downloaded one of the people from GYST,
this gentleman right here.
And if you take a look here you can see
how he organizes his productions
from the pre-planning stages to editorial
and how he organizes his sequences.
He uses the Adobe ecosystem
which we call Projects in this case, for Final Cuts.
And you get a sense for how everything
is organized at that level.
And it's just going to up your game because these same folders
can be imported into Final Cut,
if we were to organize it this way, as keyword collections.
Now on top of just sitting down
to decide on your folder structure,
let me hop into one of my media drives here
where I have a folder of Samsung 10 footage.
Inside the subfolder, I can see all of my video clips.
And if we take a look, I've just taken the time
to watch most of this media, here through QuickTime.
It just allows me to look at it
without going inside my video editor.
And a few things you might see
is that I color coded and tagged these.
Not to mention added additional tags
so they would be brought in as keyword collections.
I could also take the time to rename these files
for collaborative workflow
to make sure that everyone is on the same page
for when these videos were shot,
you can kind of see the timecode,
as well as the project that we're referencing.
Putting some thought into naming conventions,
while it seems tedious,
is going to save you time along the way,
where we start to get into the process
of being able to find material later.
Your ripple effects of organization
in the long run of setting up a strategy
will save you time throughout
your entire post-production process.
In Final Cut I already have a library opened up
where we have a default event
as well as all the clips inside of that event.
And a common thing to do is to select a series of clips
and then associate them with a keyword collection.
If I selected these two clips,
one way to achieve that task would be to press command + k.
And rather than do this individually to clips,
what I would suggest is
to actually plug in a series of keyboard shortcuts.
So the idea is from control + 1 to control + 9
you could populate a list identifying your footage
and then tagging that footage to be part
of these keyword collections/folders inside of Final Cut.
For instance, maybe I want to differentiate
between my interior and my exterior shots.
On top of this I want to show
my golden hour shots in a separate folder,
not to mention morning, evening,
and then I might want to even start to identify location.
Some of these might be in a park.
I'll move this over to the side and start to scroll.
I can see these additional shots are off a plane.
And maybe even information
about people that might be in the shot.
The advantage to entering these keyboard shortcuts
is number one you can share that list
with other editors you may be collaborating with.
And when the time comes right,
you can select a series of clips,
such as these two which are at that golden hour,
pressing command + k and simply applying that shortcut key.
If this is something that you're doing for a client
where you have similar material
week after week or month after month,
this is going to be easily transferred to memory
and save you a lot of time
in the keyword collection process.
So pre-populating your keyword collection area
with keyboard shortcuts
will save you a lot of time in the long run.
Some of you may have learned
in my Final Cut Essential class,
not only can you apply keywords
to an entire part of your clip,
but also to a portion of your clip.
And there's an advantage to creating a range in, range out
along your clip and after you check your selection,
potentially by pressing
the question mark key to play into out,
you can create a new keyword collection
specifically for your selects.
While there are other ways of attempting to do this
by creating favorites and then having a favorite section,
where you can just bring up your selects,
there's an advantage to having this
within a keyword collection as well.
So you can have multiple ways
for people to access content within a library.
Especially in a shared workflow.
One of my favorite things about keywords
is that in the past, with Final Cut's bin system,
in many cases you would have to copy and paste
multiple assets to several bins
in order to have them exist in those bins.
With clips in Final Cut, you can select a clip
and it can remain part of several keyword collections.
And just with the same idea of keyword collections,
having a keyword collection and a favorites section,
this is going to make it easier
for someone to find that material.
Just like a YouTube video where someone
has to do a search and based on that search,
they're led to that video,
based on the keywords someone tagged it.
The process is similar here in Final Cut.
That's it for this week's episode
of Final Cut Pro X Weekly.
I'm Nick and see you soon.