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How to share Smart Collections between Events in Final Cut Pro X

I was working in Final Cut Pro X today and discovered a little trick with Smart Collections.

Smart Collections can be dragged from Event to Event.  You probably already knew that, but it was new to me.

This is really useful. If I’m working on an ongoing project and create, say, an Event for each day’s dailies.  In the course of preparing that footage, I apply Keywords and Range-based Keywords, and have a set of Smart Collections that organize the material appropriately.

When I get the next day’s footage and bring that into its own Event (or each Episode’s footage into an Event) I can drag the Smart Collections across to the new Event and they’ll instantly update to the content in the new Event.

This also applies to Keyword Collections, but since they’re created automatically when you apply the keyword, I don’t see that being so valuable other than to save a few moments setting them up if you prefer the workflow that creates a Keyword Collection first then drags Clips or ranges to the Keyword Collection (thus applying the Keyword to that Clip or Range).


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2 responses to “How to share Smart Collections between Events in Final Cut Pro X”

  1. Did you notice if this procedure duplicates the original media in the folder of the new event in the Final Cut Event folder?

    1. There is no duplication of media as we’re only moving a metadata-based search from one Event to another. To duplicate an Event you need to use the Duplicate Event command. The technique above allows you to copy Smart Collections (a software filter) to other Events where it then filters the clips in those Events.