Export Keyword Selections?

[Ben Fullerton]

Hello all!

So I'm trying to figure out something, and it would baffle me if this isn't possible, but at the moment, I've got nothing.

Here's what I'm trying to do: I've got an event, it was an adventure race. I brought the media into Finder off the cards, as usual, then into FCPX. Now I have all the footage broken out into all sorts of applicable keywords, one of them being by team. So I want to send a client all my footage of a certain team. Should be easy, right? It's already all sorted out, click that keyword, select all, and then...?

That's where I'm stuck. I assumed there would be some easy way to do this. The clips of them are from all over 5 day race, and therefore are all over the place in finder. I would have thought I could at least select all and show in finder, then copy to a new folder, but the show in finder option in dark as soon as you select multiple clips. I also though, maybe you can export a group of clips, but the whole export drop-down is dark too. I can't seem to find any way to take all the clips within a keyword, and send get to the source files, so I can copy them and send them to somebody.

Anyone got help on this one?

[Ben Fullerton]

Anybody...?

[William Hohauser]

You probably can't do this from within FCPX, sorry. What I have done is take a keyword selection, select all in the Events browser and send them to a new project. Then I export the project timeline to a file. Makes a big ProRes file for the client but they get the footage.

[Ben Fullerton]

Thanks. That's what I was thinking, but I was hoping it wouldn't come to that.

Seems like a pretty big omission to me on their part. I would imagine it's a pretty common scenario for someone to get a request from another project saying, "Hey, send me all the footage you of so and so from blah blah blah." Oh, sorry can't. Here's a giant timeline.

If they're really trying to sell us on the fact that keyword based organization is the bomb, than I feel like they dropped the ball huge on this. Keywords are very crippled if all they can do is help you out, on your own machine, on your own project, in your own timelines. The potential for keyword based storage is limitless, but without the ability to take certain keywords, and send just those files to people, you're not even getting half the power out of it.

[William Hohauser]

Actually what you want to do is not commonly done although it is used in large productions such as features and TV series. And they are likely using AVIDs not Final Cut. There are programs that specialize in categorizing footage and sorting it for production such as this: Pro Media Tools - Offload camera memory cards, edit markers, modify QuickTime metadata, check clips are broadcast safe and more but I have no experience with any of them.

For FCPX I recommend that you sort your footage into folders before importing it into the program. FCPX will use the folder names as a keyword for the clips in the folder. You should also look into programs that batch rename files.