Keywords In Final Cut Pro 10

Final cut Pro X iconWhen you are working with a large number of video clips that you are going to be using within various projects you need as many ways as possible to help you organise these video clips.

When you import your media, the media will be added to your event library. This is the first level of organisation for your source media files. So the event in the Event Library is going to be a project or part of a project. When you’re looking at this event browser you can sort your clips in a number of ways such as the creation date, but you might also want to browse by the date imported, the real, the scene, shot duration or file type.

Sort out your Source media

It is worth getting to know all of the tools that are available to you for cataloguing and sorting your source media within Final Cut Pro X so that you can find what you need quickly when you need to put media into the timeline.

 

One of the ways to further sort your source media is to use keywords. Using keywords is a form of tagging and the best way to think of it is a way to add an extra layer of grouping certain video clips together. I would recommend that the tags that you use, don’t need to contain words that you’ve already used in the name of the file. You can already do a search to find those specific words. Where it becomes particularly useful is where you have, for example, different types of file, so audio, video and still images that you want to group together for a unique purpose.

Group video clips using Keywords in FCPX

You might have a keyword of green screen and this grouping of source media could include subject matter of all sorts, but if you had that keyword then you will make it very easy in all to find any clips that are shot with a green screen.

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You can set a keyword that it will apply to the whole of the video and he also set a keyword so that it applies to only part of a video clip. So if you have a video clip that includes within the length of it some close-ups, some medium shots or shots of a particular person, you can then keyword those particular parts of the video. This could save a whole lot of time later, when finding sections within a video, you will not have to watch the video or scrub through the video in order to find what you need.

Keywords added automatically by FCPX Analysis on import.

Keywords can also be added automatically when you are importing video. If you are adding a folder with various sorts of media within it, you could have the folder name applied as a keyword to all of those bits of media imported.

If you are having the video analysed as it is being brought in there are some keywords that can be added automatically such as excessive shake. To get this to happen you just need to select the “Create Smart Collections at the Analysis” checkbox. This will let you find those clips with the excessive shake keyword.

It is even possible to use Final Cut Pro to find people and add keywords for you. The keywords that will get added to the video or still image will be one person, two persons, a group, close-up shot, medium shot and white shot. So it can be extremely useful to have Final Cut Pro create smart collections after analysis and depending upon the type of video editing that you are doing, it may well be that these functions will speed you up enormously.