Final Cut Pro Can Organize Your Clips For You with Smart Collections

Speed up your editing time by creating Smart Collections. They are a breeze to set up and will save you from manually organizing your clips.  Once you have imported your footage you’re ready to create a Smart Collection.
Select your event and click File>New>Smart Collection.

You can also press “Option + Command + n” to create a smart collection.  This will add a Smart Collection folder called “Untitled.”

Rename your Smart Collection appropriately.

Organization is always important to maintain an efficient workflow, so don’t be lazy! For the sake of this tutorial, let’s rename it “Audio.”

Double-Click on your Smart Collection icon.

Smart Collection BlankIt will open up a window that looks like this photo seen here.  It’s blank!    It is time to start adding filters to your Smart Collection.

(Note: You can click on this photo to the left if you’d like a better look at it.)

Click on the “Plus” symbol on the right part of the window to add a filter.

smart collection types It will bring up a set of options like in this photo.  As you can see there are many options that you can add to filter your smart collection.    You can do some really useful stuff with some of these setting and you may want to take some time to explore them, but for this tutorial we are going to select “Media Type” so we can make this our audio folder.

Click on “Media Type”Media Selection Type

That will bring up an option to customize the filter. By clicking around you can see that you can customize the options to filter to a clip that “is” or “is not” “Video with Audio,” “Video Only,” or “Audio Only.”

Click on “Video with Audio” and Change it to “Audio Only.”

Now you have a smart collection of your audio files.  This is especially useful if you import clips later.  They will automatically be placed into this Smart Collection.  If you have already imported footage, you will see the event browser become populated with the audio clips.

You can customize this as far as you would like.  You can even set two filter settings and really narrow down your smart collection.  To remove any filters, just click the “minus” or “-” symbol to the right of the filter.

QTK-lightbulb-color-square

Bright Idea!

If you are updating an event library over many months, add a Smart Collection called “Recently Imported.”  Add the “Date” filter and change the settings to be “Date Imported” “is in the last” “x” “days.”

Need help with anything?  Drop me a line! Stanley@QuickTipKing.com

You may also want to check out Adding Organization to Your Libraries in Final Cut Pro

This one simple technique in FCPX will save you so much time!

There is a great technique in FCPX that, if done on a regular basis, will save you tons of time as your projects get bigger and more complicated.
As you may know, I am a big fan of organization, and logging favorites is a big part of that. The great part of this is that it is incredibly easy to do.
While in the event browser window select your desired clip.
You can either favorite a whole clip or just a part of the clip. It works for video, stills, and audio.
Optional: Select the best parts of the clip by setting your in and out points.

To set an in point press “i” on your keyboard.  To set the out press “o”.

Press “f” on your keyboard.

This step sets your clip or portion of a clip as a favorite.

Repeat this process until you have selected all of your desired clips.

You may notice that it adds the word “Favorite” annotation to the clip.

Now go to the top of the event browser window and select “Favorites” 

Screen Shot 2014-01-07 at 8.33.20 PM

See where it says “All Clips” in this photo?  Click on that bad-boy in Final Cut Pro and switch it to “Favorites.”  You can also press “control + f” to switch to a favorites only view.  Pretty cool, huh?

Now only your favorites are visible.  And if you logged your clips with in and out points, only those parts made it into the favorites.  Don’t worry, this is a non-destructive “edit.”  The original file is unchanged and once you put the clip into the timeline you can expand it and the rest of the clip is still there.  This view is especially rockin’ if you’ve favorited two different parts of one clip.  It will show up in this view as two different clips.  So by following this simple step, you can get rid of all the clutter and see only the clips that are your best clips.  To log more clips and get back to the original view just repeat the same process or press “control + c” (or “control + h” to see all but your rejected clips).

Let me know if you have a topic that you would like to see a tutorial on.