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Setting Up a Project: Keywords and Smart Collections

Lesson 13 from: Final Cut Pro X Bootcamp

Abba Shapiro

Setting Up a Project: Keywords and Smart Collections

Lesson 13 from: Final Cut Pro X Bootcamp

Abba Shapiro

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Lesson Info

13. Setting Up a Project: Keywords and Smart Collections

Next Lesson: Working with Audio

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

12:34
2

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Navigating the Interface

32:32
3

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Project Timeline

18:23
4

Exploring Final Cut Pro X: Basic Editing

16:07
5

Refining Your Edit Introduction

15:15
6

Refining Your Edit: Trimming

37:06
7

Refining Your Edit: J and L Cuts

09:00
8

Refining Your Edit: Roll and Overwrite Edits

06:25

Lesson Info

Setting Up a Project: Keywords and Smart Collections

So this is your doing a warmup, which I thought was really kind of fun with this little ah little animal zip up outfit, this dancers. So I want to assign a keyword to this. And to do that, I'm gonna open something called the key Word. Hud, is this little, um, area up here? The keyword hot. It's a little picture of a key right here. If I click on that, I'll get a little dialogue box here somewhere. Come piece like a state is there it is. Gets little dialog box down here. I'm gonna bring it up so we can see it a little better. And it's already had one keyword assigned to it because this came off of the show gun. This huge file, which is probably why it's taking forever to render. But I'm gonna add the word warm up, make it all a single single phrase, and then I'm gonna go ahead and hit the return key and you'll notice that I now have a blue tile that says warm up. And over here I knew I have a new keyword created that I concert by is like when I click on warm up I'll find any shot that's...

labeled warm up, and this is really where the magic comes into play. I can take a bunch of clips and assign keywords and start organizing things, and the beautiful thing about keywords is they can live in different locations. So, in other words, this clip is both in the show gun keyword area, and it's also in the warm up area. So I said, I won't warm up stuff. I don't care what camera came from or I would say, Oh, I want the that the show gun because I want all my Big four K footage. So that's what you're gonna do is you're gonna go through. I'm going to start assigning keywords two clips. So let's go to the lesson. We're starting to see things getting built, and we learned earlier that I can look at thes as Long clip zoomed in for more detail. Or I can just look at them as individual, like the first frame defined things so zooming in and zooming out once again command. Plus, we'll zoom into more detail. I see more frames of the clip. If especially, this is great for longer clips. Zoom out his command minus command plus minus, and it works throughout. You know you're on your timeline. And if I hit Shift Z, that's a fit command. It turns each of these into a single frame, so I can quickly look and say, Oh, there's the clip I want. There's the clip I want. So this is still redrawing. So it's kind of hard to see the clips that I want, but let's see if I can push this a little bit. We go. It's refreshing much quicker now, because now is just creating that one frame, and I'll do the other frames later. So that's another another opportunity where I intentionally made a slight error of bringing in so many clips of being so zoomed in. It was taking forever, and now the problem is solved. Shift see does the 1st 1 Now I can really see what's going on, so I have all of these images and once again I can rearrange my layout. We have the two sides here. We have our big image, and then we have this over here and I can say, you know what? I want to see more of these images, and I wanna see them a little bigger so we can go up here and in the upper right hand corner. You see, there's a little filmstrip that allows me to change the appearance of my clips. Okay. I mean, we might keyword out of the way. So I have a slider where I could make them bigger or smaller. So if I want to see them, this clock here, that's that thing where I did with command. Plus and minus, I can look at them in more detail, moving it to the right. I'm looking them at in two minute chunks. Okay, five second chunks and you see, we're back to the same problem we had before. Okay, so this is the same thing as command plus command minus and shift Z bring that back down to single frame. And in this same area, in addition to making things bigger and smaller, I could also start grouping these differently in the how I view them. Because right now it's not grouped anyway. But what if I wanted to group them by the date that I brought them in? I want to see my newest stuff on top because I don't know where I 500 clips, Or maybe I want to do it by what type of file it is. So let's go ahead. We click file type. And now if we look here, there's my way form audiophiles. There's my quick time movies. I'm gonna go ahead and close that little thing. There's my MPEG four movies, different flavors, different cameras. There's just generic quick time movie. There's my photos, my J Peg images. So it's very easy to structure your organization. And also, if you don't want to see them and you want just work with your photos, I can close everything out, okay? And that goes back to this selection here of how don't want a group it, and you can change this back and forth, depending on what you're doing. Maybe I just need to find everything that I've labeled a certain scene because when I brought it in, or maybe I just really want to do it by when the image was originally shot versus when I brought it in. Okay, so you have those choices, then you can choose whether it's ascending or descending top to bottom. So this all helps you control how you organize your media and so we're gonna go ahead and uncheck, not let that go. You can also click on way forms. And in this case, if there's audio and it's drawn, you can then see the way form when you see the clip. Most of the time, I don't do this, but maybe I want to look a wave forms. You know, in one instance, I say, Oh, yeah, I need to see where the one take that. I had good audio, and I can see big wave forms, But go ahead. You'll play with this, and, uh, we're gonna just bring this down to, you know, all and make these little bigger and come back out. We're gonna start doing some key wording. So it's very easy now for me to see what's happening in each of these images. So I'm gonna go to my quick time movies, and I can start selecting a bunch of things. For instance, piano shots and I could go ahead and click all these in right piano. No, I'm gonna go ahead and expand this. This is that keyword where I typed in the word earlier of warm up. This is problem footage because remember, I had a folder called problem footage. It assigned that key work. OK, it's already there. But now I may want to do something else with a clip if I click on this piano, you know, here, this clip did not have I brought it in from the camera card. I didn't have a keyword because I can assign anything. So maybe I want to sign piano to it. It's all type in piano. And I want to open this little disclosure triangle because I want you to see what's blowing. And I usually keep this open These air little registers Where now I have a keyboard shortcut in the first spot of any time I do warm up. I could just had control one. So, piano, I'm gonna hit. Return now assigns piano to control, too. And we'll just automatically fill this up if I know I'm never going to warm up again. Aiken selected and hit the lead. It's okay to delete things from here because it doesn't delete it from here. These are just quick shortcuts that Oh, this is piano Aiken selected, and I can hit piano. And now that has the piano key word on it. I can also just select a bunch of these. And instead of, uh, clicking on, you know, control, too. I could hit control to That's that little like triangle to me. It's like a hat. If you have the hat, you're in charge. I don't know if something from when I was kid, so control, too. And now these all have that key word, and you'll notice that I'm starting to see some bars above my clips. Okay, So what do these mean? Well, this has a key word on it. Okay, so I've assigned a key word that means I've done some sort of trance coding optimized media. Okay. So I can see you'll also see them as we go across if you've used the media and we're also gonna go, you know, before we wrap this session, is when we make favorites of something, So there's lots of little indicators and you could turn all these off if it's distracting, But it's usually very useful to see what I've worked on. So what I would normally do is I might go ahead, get these all small, select a bunch of clips holding the command key. And I could if I wanted Teoh. These already have the key word, or I know they had the key work. Um oh, I haven't Internet. We there. So I have a bunch of these. I could hit command too, but I could also just as easily grab all the ones I selected and dropped them onto the keyword area that says piano. And now that keyword will be applied to that. So I will be able to find on my piano shots. And this is that organizational structure that you do at the beginning and as you bring clips in So when you have 400 cliffs and you like, need to find Oh, I need to find the shot of the master bath. Well, look at the thing that says math and I can see all the bathrooms or I'm doing Ah ah, wildlife. And I was like, Oh, I need to find all the squirrels. Okay, look at that. So the nice thing is, they can live in multiple locations. It's easy to assign them. I had pre assigned them for you all, but this gives you a good idea of how you can assign these things. I could also just create keywords in the register and apply them whenever I want. Okay, So if I know that I'm doing something where it's going to be studio work, I could do when the says studio. So I haven't applied it to anything. And what I think is really cool a lot of people don't realize is that you also can have multiple keywords in a register. So for now, I know. Okay, maybe I did a lot of different dancers, so this is should have both studio and Anna the name of the dancer. Okay, so there we have studio and Anna and I'm gonna go here and look at all of my clips, and I'm going to reorganize these. I'm looking at thes by type. I'm gonna go back here, and instead of sorting them by file type, I'll just do it by when I created the content. Because my cameras should have pretty much had the time and date on them. Always set your cameras dating Time makes things easier when doing multi Cameron whatnot. And now I can see. Okay, there's all this studio stuff. Havana and I can select a whole range select the 1st 1 We'll go down here at the shift key. They're all selected. And if I press this button or hit control one, it creates two keyword areas. So I confined any shot that was done in the studio by clicking on that. And I also have shots of Ana, which is all here, and I can start moving stuff around like OK, I like the ANA stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and go back and anything that has an A in it select those. Bring those there and now they're applied. Now I have all the stuff, so I can very easily find stuff so you can apply keywords. What if you want to remove a key word, you did something by accident again. It's very easy to do. If you select any clip, you'll notice that in the keyword Hud, these are all the keywords assigned to it, and it's like, Oh, you know what that should have been. Ah, studio selected and hit the league, and now it will no longer be found in the studio keyword collection. You could remove all of them if you wanted to, so it's very easy to change those another way you can view your clips. We saw this early when we brought them in is I could see them as a list. So we go over here and right next to the how we view things. There's our toggle between ah, the display between filmstrip. You'd be able to read that between film strip, strip and list. Click on that. And now we see this as a giant list of footage. We saw that when we're bringing things in, I could click through and I could see each of my clips. Now, in addition to seeing them and be able to skim through them, they are little triangles. And if I open up any of those triangles, I can see what keywords might have been assigned to it. I know that. I brought some clips in that it did analysis onto the medium shot. You'll notice that is also something that is identified here. And it has a different icon. Okay, this is like a little person's head. So this is a smart collection. Okay, so there's my medium shots wide shot. Okay? Not only does this clip have one person in a wide shot, it's also has the keyword I put on it Anna and piano. And if I wanted to remove piano, OK, I can do the same way I can select it. And then under the keyword Hud, I remove piano and now I control what's there. So once you kind of know how it works, it makes a lot of sense. But if nobody's ever explain this to you, is like I don't know, I have all these keywords. I can't find what I want. It tells me what something is and you're like, but now becomes logical, right? You know, and it's a very smart way of doing things. And the nice thing is, it does do a lot of the work for you, another area of smart collections. If I go up here, it automatically has thes by default. So oh, I just want to look at my video clips announcing any clips. That's is a video clip. I want to look at just my audio clips. These are my music clips. I wanna look at favorites. We'll talk about those in a moment. I want to see what projects I have. We haven't made any projects. I want to look at just my still images and we'll go back and we'll look at this as icons, so I can quickly, and it does this analysis behind the scenes. But I can also create my own smart collections. And an example might be is, you know, I've added all this metadata. Wouldn't be great if I could have a smart collection that whenever I put it in any image of ana playing the piano as opposed to Bob playing the piano, I could find them all. So if I look at this clip here and I'm gonna go back to all video and I'm going through have all these things I did label piano. Um, I don't think I've labeled Anna and piano, so it will be interesting to see I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to search. We've used these two buttons. I'm gonna go ahead and search for some keywords, so I just open up the search box. Let me do that again. I did a little quickly. There's a search comes here If I hit this little area over here. Well, let me go back over here. If I type in piano, it will search and find anything that is labelled with piano. This is an and piano. So I can start by the name of have named things I can search and find things But if I hit this little button here this is where the magic happens I can create a smart collection with any keywords are type that I want So I can say, you know what? I want any media That's video with audio And I wanted to have one of these other things. Maybe it's something I I want video, but I wanted from a specific camera. So maybe it's MP four and I wanted to have a key word there. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm going to say, uh, people and I want this to be just a medium shots. If I get myself into trouble here, I like working without a net so you can make definition. The nice thing is, if I bring in another clip and I assign the keyword of Ana to it and it's video and audio, it will appear here. But it will also appear in this smart collection. So Aiken do choices. You know, it could be exteriors. Rainy day. It could be exterior sunny day, and they just get defined. And it's very easy to find things, and you can search things going to wrap with, ah, one last thing again. You can apply keywords. You could also make something ah, favorite if you want, or you can reject it if you know that you're not going to use it, so you'll notice up here you have a choice of what you see inside of the folder, so the default is hide rejected. But if you look, you can look at all cliffs rejected something if it doesn't have any ratings or keywords. If I click on that, it would show me any clips. And I look at my entire library that I didn't have a rating on them. Okay? And as soon as I put a rating on the maybe a go ahead or key word and this is the key word for piano, which is Ah, maybe it's his shift Wander shift to control one OK, soon's I assign it a keyword. It disappeared because it's no longer empty, so you can quickly find things but favorites rejected and unused. So I'm gonna go through here and let's just show all of my clips again. And maybe I go through here and I say, You know what? Um, this looks like a good I like this one. So I'm gonna click on that. I'm gonna hit the f key for favorite. You see, a green bar, something That's a clip I want to use. I like it, And then I'm gonna go down here, and this one says, battery exhausted. I'm gonna reject that. Okay. Favorite F rejected our I'm sorry. Rejected his delete. You see a red line above it. Okay. And if it's uninsulated, there's nothing. So if I accidentally rejected like this when I hit our I'm sorry, rejected. Delete, delete, delete. Um, and I go Oh, that was a mistake. I could hit the u key, and it takes that back. So it's very useful. Um, and I could make a key word that says, Show me all my favorites. A smart collection. So making things favorite is great. Now what? If only I want part of a clip, have a keyword are part of a clip to be a favorite, are rejected. That's where it comes into play as magic. I can go down here and I'm gonna go to the interview clips. So let me actually find interview. And if I'm lazy and don't want to look at my list, I can just type in search. I'm going to sort this by duration. So has the longer clips on top, and you'll notice here I have clips that to 10 seconds. Clips that are those air stills. Those don't count. I have 10 to 30 seconds. I have a clip. That's 10 minutes. Because that's that One of the piano clips. So let's go somewhere in here 1 to minutes. This is a nice long clip. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to select that clip, and I want to actually look at this as a list. So there's that and I have all this area. I'm gonna go ahead and pick a range in this clip where I really like what she does and let me close this window here so you can see So I'm scrubbing through our skimming through. I like this move here Gonna market in point. Gonna go there to that market out point. I'm gonna hit the f key. I just favorited that one area. Okay, I am going through here, and I'm in the shot. I don't want that shot, so I have to reject that. The cameras there. I'll grab that area at all. Hit, Delete. You see a red line there? I could also grab area. And maybe I want to sign a keyword to that area on Lee. It's apparel wet. I can't spell para wet, so I'm gonna call it a spin. Okay, Now it has that keyword. And let's take a look at the left side here. So I should have something here called Spin. I click on that. It's just that one part of the image. So now not only do I keep hearing a whole clip, I can keyword different parts of a clip and find those sections very quickly. Oh, you know what I really would like? I'd love to see just all of my favorites. So instead of looking all clips, I'm going to say favorites. And now I just see the clips and the parts of the clips that are my favorites, and it's very easy to go through. So you see the control you have, and that's the beauty of working with this metadata and why it's so important to spend a good amount of time understanding, import strategies, labeling key wording and what not.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Keyboard Shortcuts
Project Files - Dancer Media - Part 1 of 2 (Large Download 2.13 GB)
Project Files - Dancer Media - Part 2 of 2 (Large Download 1.88 GB)
Project Files - Green Screen

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Wonderful. This is the first time I've seen any of Abba's classes, and he's a great teacher. I've been watching the live sessions for the past few days and have picked up a ton of great tips that will indeed speed up my workflow in FCPX. He's a great teacher, and does a wonderful job of setting people at ease, ie. where he says things like, 'there's no trick questions', and times where he will click on something wrong, then he'll go back and show his mistake (pointing out his minor mistakes are actually a beneficial lesson). In all, wonderful wonderful wonderful. Thank you!

Lara
 

Fantastic teacher. I enjoyed every video, super worth it. I've been reluctant to jump into FCP X since it got upgraded from FCP. Now I feel confident to work with it again. Seems pretty self explanatory, but I am glad I watched the course. Abba covers pretty much everything you need to know. I also loved his personality, made me want to learn more each day.

Alan Pole
 

Absolutely brilliant. Abba gets to the point, is clear, organized and articulate, and lays it all out in a manner that quickly brings your confidence level from zero to hero. Highly recommend this to any photographer who wants to blog, build ads, or include video in their offering. I feel like an amazing new world has been provided to me. Thank you!

Student Work

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