How to create folders of clips

[Richard Cavell]

Hi, everyone. I'm currently shooting footage for a series of TV/video projects. It's the kind where I'm going to end up with hundreds of hours of footage and use only a small percentage of it. I want to sort this footage by multiple criteria. For example, I want to be able to search for "all footage shot on 19 March", or "all footage containing images of John", or "all footage that uses the dolly". Trying to think of unique filenames and paths for my footage is quite difficult, so I'm doing it by the principal subject of the footage, and the date. (eg ~/Movies/Raw Footage/John/19 March/John walking.mov)

My workplace uses FCP X, although I haven't had a chance to get really familiar with it yet. We're still in footage-getting mode. I'm tempted to set up hard or soft links, so that for example, a "19 March" directory will contain soft links to all such footage, or a "dolly shots" directory will contain soft links to all dolly footage, etc. This means that there will be multiple paths by which to access some footage.

Or should I be doing this in FCP X? Should I be importing all footage and then tagging them somehow within FCP X?

Richard

[William Hohauser]

The first thing is to sort the footage into macro category folders on the hard drive and import those into FCPX as folders with the "Import folder as keywords" box checked. After that you can open the keyword short cut window in FCPX and assign keywords to keystrokes and go thru the footage to create additional keyword subsets.

[Lee Faulkner]

Well you should really be importing footage to Events that make sense on the macro level... Shoot day, card number, location,.... Or in theory you could just put everything into one Event called Doco or whatever.

Then go through the footage clip by clip, click on the keyword icon in the tool bar, and type in Keywords for each clip. As many as you want... Names places, scene numbers, shot size ... Whatever.

Each keyword will now show up as a 'folder' in your Event. Click on it to see only those clips with that key word association.

Lee

[David Chapman]

Lee's method is really what you want to do. I have a feeling some of the sorting in the Finder level is left over from Bins in Final Cut pro 7 and previous. On the drive, you will have your media organized into folders for cards (or tapes you ingested). That way you know which "card" they came from. You will then do all your organizing and key wording inside FCPX. That way, clips CAN exist in multiple keywords (or visual bins in a way) and you can do all of this much quicker.