Get Fast FAST

I’m migrating from wordpress to my hosted server, so you can find everything here at www.luminoir.com from now on. All further updates will be reflected there.

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Get Fast fast

Let’s get one thing straight.

Being fast does not make you a good editor.
There are certain situations in which speed is the premium, either due to deadlines, workload or budget,
but in the long run, being fast isn’t quite enough.

Bearing that in mind, speed is still an important part of your arsenal.

What gets you on your way is mastering your tools
so that you have the quickest translation of what you see in your mind
to what you execute to the cut.

This tutorial won’t cover the more obvious basics of getting faster in FCP,
I think there’s plenty out there that covers that.

Hopefully, there are enough tricks here that even the old dogs haven’t used before.

How to approach binding keyboard shortcuts (and useful non default bound keys)

There are many opposing views on keyboard shortcuts.
Everyone has a preferred configuration so there’s no point quibbling about which is right.

Some people try to get their config as similar to avid as possible.
A person that takes over the station immediately after finds this out quickly
when they try to mark clip with x and finds their in to out ripple deleted.

My preference and approach when I started on FCP was to use the default config for a while before adding my own custom keys.
There’s no pointing spending half an hour setting keyboard shortcuts for an application I hadn’t used.

I used FCP for a few weeks before starting to add commands that I used with some regularity.

Here are some commands that are not bound by FCP by default that I recommend you bind. my bound keys follow, just as a suggestion

Command	Action
navigate tabs	cmd shift [ cmd shift ] (don’t click tabs any more, what a time waster!)
Export Export to Quicktime Export to Compressor	cmd e cmd shift e cmd opt e
Audio Normalization Gain	ctrl shift g
fav video effect	ctrl shift numpad (use all 9 keys of the numpad to bind your 9 most used effects)
fav motion path	ctrl opt numpad (use all 9 keys of the numpad to bind your 9 most used motion paths)
fav audio effect	cmd ctrl numpad (use all 9 keys of the numpad to bind your 9 most used effects)
reveal in finder	ctrl r
send to motion	ctrl shift m
deselect	cmd d (cmd shift a by default but I use it often enough that I don’t want to hold 2 modifier keys to use it

Find the find tool

The FCP find tool is one of the biggest timesavers of the software.
It’s perfect for finding the media/effect/part of timeline you need.

There’s a reason I bind my deselect key to cmd d.

The find tool searches from the selected file on the browser/effects palette/timeline.
Deselecting forces it to search from the top.

Basically it’s a rapid fire movement of holding cmd then hitting
3df for files in the timeline (See my previous article for useful applications of this)
4df for files in the browser
5df for effects in the effects palette
6df for effects in the favorites palette

This helps most if you know exactly what you are looking for.

So for gaussian blur, instead of opening the effects palette, expanding the blur folder and double clicking gaussian blur it’s
cmd 5df (open effects palette, deselect, open find dialog)
gaus (use a unique part of the full name of effect you need)
enter
the effect you want is then highlighted.

If you want the Chroma Keyer, you might put “chroma” as your search term
but this will bring up chroma key transitions first and you’ll have to scroll down.

It’s more effective to use “keyer”

Here are some phrases for commonly used effects to skip similar situations
gaus gaussian blur
keye chroma keyer
3- 3-way color corrector
flicke flicker filter
spill spill suppressor
interl interlace flicker

This, of course, varies depending on the 3rd party effects you have installed.

To get around this, you can favourite all the effects you absolutely always use
and search your favourites instead with
cmd 6df %phrase enter

Changing durations of files but retaining keyframes across new duration

We’ve all been there before.
We’ve painstaking used the motion tab to make a file move/crop/rotate on a motion path to perfection and now it needs to be 16 frames longer/shorter.

Instead of opening the motion tab and dragging keyframes around, copy the current file, extend/shorten it,
then paste motion/distort/crop attributes with the scale attribute times checkbox checked.

Changing motion effect to fit to fill without affecting sync

Whenever I had to speed effect a clip to fit to a duration, I used to create a new video layer,
move the file up, lock all others, change speed effect, unlock, move file back down, delete video layer.
Now, I’ve realized how slow that was after I starting doing it this way.

1. Set playhead to start of clip
2. set in point (i)
3. set out point at desired NEW end of clip (after speed effect)
4. go to canvas window (cmd 2)
5. select in/out duration (tab)
6. copy (cmd c)
7. select clip
8. cut (cmd x)
9. go to end of sequence (end)
10. paste (cmd v)
11. speed effect (cmd j)
12. paste (cmd v)
13. enter
14. cut (cmd x)
15. go to in point (shift i)
16. paste (cmd v)

Make Favourites your favourite tool

As mentioned earlier, I have my most used audio filters, motion paths (for resizing anamorphically stretched footage and correcting it with respect to a graphic crawler)
transitions and effects saved in my favorites. You can search them as suggested above, but what if you have a very specific set that you use all the time?

As you can see from my favorites folder I number them sequentially and bind my keyboard keys to be a modifier combination and the numpad.

This is because the # of the effect is based on creation order and I name the plugins based on that so I remember which number corresponds to which shortcut.
I create it based on frequency of use and over time it becomes second nature.
This makes all my favourite filters, motion paths a keypress away.

So I know instinctively that my motion path to fit anamorphically stretched footage into a gfx donut is ctrl opt 2 for example.
The modifiers for the filters used ctrl are for video, ctrl opt for motion path and ctrl shift for audio filters.

Autosave Duration

Hopefully, there’s been something in the article above that you’ve never used before and it has been useful to you in some way.

If you’re working faster, that means if FCP crashes 29 minutes after your last autosave and you left the autosave duration at its default value of 30 mins,
you’ve lost a lot more work that you need to do again, and that’s terribly demoralizing.

It’s slightly irritating to be interrupted every 5 minutes by an autosave
but less irritating than redoing that complicated key, secondary color correction, multicam cut from 29 minutes ago.

Be Replaceable, Have A Life

I’m migrating from wordpress to my hosted server, so you can find everything here at www.luminoir.com from now on. All further updates will be reflected there.

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Being replaceable as an editor isn’t necessarily something everyone is comfortable with.

This is especially the case if the industry is very competitive where you are
and there are far more editors than jobs available.

However, after many years of being on 24/7 troubleshooting duty and being unable to take leave or even fall sick,
it becomes very important to be able to handover your duties for your own sanity and personal life.

Sometimes, you realize that the world doesn’t fall apart because you’re not there and that’s a good thing.

Prepare a handover brief

This is a sample brief I prepared before I took 2 weeks off to get married.
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dhjkwk8t_16qv4xzg8
Google Docs is a pretty good tool for this, but you can use Zoho, Powerpoint or Keynote.

Creating Episodic Templates easily

If you can spare the time, read my article on the beauty of standardized filenaming before you proceed with this section.
Having these standardized filenames becomes very useful when you deal with an episodic series.

As each episode progresses, some creative decisions may be taken that will be maintained throughout the remainder of the series.
It is best to have these sequences saved so they are easily repeatable throughout the duration of the series.
These creative decisions thus have to be updated into a template project so all future episodes follow this standard.

But it’s a pain to have to make changes to your current episode while updating a template project to reflect these changes in the future.

If your project has all its filenames in this format, it’s simple to just hit cmd-f in the timeline, type “mytvshow-S03E04″, click find all.
All media specific to that episode will be highlighted. The other media which is generic (will remain the same week to week) remains unselected.

You can then “make offline” (shift-d) the clips and have a new template to start the next episode.

The reason I make the clips offline instead of deleting them is so that they retain motion, distort, crop, filters, etc
so you do not have to repetitively adjust the new files you are inserting to match a graphic doughnut, 16:9 box, etc.

It is much simpler to use “paste content” to replace the offline file with the current episode’s file.

Tune in to my next article to find out more about the power of the “find” function in FCP’s Browser,Effects Palette and Timeline.

Music

Make loops of your music and mark the points that cut together with markers.
This way, you can have a hard ‘in’ on the music, loop it as long as required, and cut out with a hard ‘out’ when the segment ends.

Sure beats fading it out.

There are some music libraries that give you short loopable files of their longer tracks. I never use them.
It’s generally better to take their long track and make that loopable in some way
so there is a progression and change in the music particularly if it will be on for long.

This depends a little on your sense of music timing and knowing how to count beats, but it sounds infinitely better.

Full Frame Graphic Transitions

When you have graphics transitions, use markers to indicate the points at which they are full frame so you can align your cut points to them.

Track Consistency

Be consistent with what you put on your video and audio tracks.

My full frame graphic transitions are always on the topmost track V8 or V9
unless they are meant to be within graphic doughnuts in which case they are on V5.

My main footage/B Roll is always on V1 unless it is cropped/keyed and has a background in which case it’ll be on V4.

With this track consistency, it makes it easier to do tasks throughout a sequence like

• running general ‘one light’ color corrections
• adding flicker filter to graphic files with fine lines
• adding broadcast safe only to shot footage which has not been legalized

In general, it makes it easier for the editor taking over to understand where things should go,
and he’ll put things in the right place so it won’t confuse you
when you have to take over the job when you get back.

Speed up project opening and saving

Make a seperate project for generic elements so your episode project only contains media from that episode and is thus smaller, easier to manage, and less likely to be affected by corrupt media.

Anticipate Problems

If your machine has been unstable or if the power trips in your office often,
let whoever takes over know so he/she can take measures to safeguard against any loss of data/work.

Example
I had problems with FCP v6.0.2 saving corrupted project files that gave the “this file is too new for this version of Final Cut Pro” error.

This error occurred in the same machine it was created in and even the autosave vault files gave the same error.
The project file could not be opened in 4 other machines.
I had to roll back through a day and a half of auto saves before I found one that was valid and could be opened.
My autosaves are 5 minutes apart and there weren’t big changes or large amounts of media imported in between.

Thus, I surmised that it was version 6.0.2 error as this had not occured in the previous few weeks I had worked on the project
and had only begun after a company mandated application upgrade. This problem has since been fixed in V6.0.3.

Fortunately, I had the v6.0.1 version of FCP in my portable hard disk.
I will talk more about the contents of this hard disk in a future article “FCP Toolkit“

I have these versions of FCP v5, 5.1, 5.1.2, 5.1.4, 6.0.1, 6.0.2 on my harddisk,
so that I can ‘downgrade’ the version of FCP I use anywhere if ever necessary, as it was in this circumstance.

I left a copy of the v6.0.1 application for the editor taking over me to use
by dragging the project file into the app file to open the project
using v6.0.2 instead and avoiding the corrupt project error.