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My Final Cut Pro X frustrations: Number two

Because I was using a lot of double system on my recent shoot, I kept running into this problem.

I would apply appropriate Keywords to the audio and video that would make up a synchronized Clip, making it easy to find them when I was ready to synchronize them up.

Select the appropriate clips, fire the command, and nothing seems to happen. What in fact does happen is that the Synchronized Clip is created in the parent Event. But if you’re looking at a Keyword Collection you won’t see that.

The fix doesn’t seem that easy either. The easy response is that “they” should apply the Keyword(s) to the Synchronized Clip: but are all Keywords applied? If not what subset and how would that be determined. Apply all Keywords from both audio and video component is likely to be undesirable because I may have Audio and Video as Keyword collections. (I didn’t but I could have.)

My own best pass at how Keyword Collections should be applied:  Either only the Keyword that the parent audio and video components reside in is applied; or those Keywords that are common to both audio and video components should be applied. I have a slight preference for the latter.

It’s not a big deal, once you’re aware of what’s really happening, but it did lead me to a confusing couple of minutes.


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3 responses to “My Final Cut Pro X frustrations: Number two”

  1. I always thought at least the automatic creation of a new Keyword Collection called “Synced Clips”. But yeah, that’s a tricky one to figure out the proper handling of. Since everyone I’ve worked with has their own unique, personal desires for how it should work.

  2. Dawar

    Another big issue for me with synchronized clips is that they don’t keep original timecode, unlike compound clips created in event:
    if you create a compound clip from two clips in an event, resulting TC will be the one from first clip in your compound.
    Unfortunately synchronized clips TC start from 00:00:00:00.
    So if a director made his selects at home with original shots unsynchronized, you’ll have to manually change starting TC for all synchronized clips !

  3. Bill Streeter

    I ran into this exact same issue. I think an easy fix would bd for apple to add a checkbox to the sync clip dialogue that would add keywords from the source clips to the synced clip if it’s checked.