Final Cut Project Organization
Everyone knows the feeling of trying to find a single clip in a library of over 1000. When you are out trying to complete a finished and final video, you can’t waste every other five minutes trying to find the correct clip for the section you are working on. This short tutorial will show you how to beat this by helping you organize your projects using bins and sequences.
Sequences essentially are timelines within a project. When you start a new project you will generally be greated by ‘Sequence 1’. There are easier ways to organize your self than just working in a single sequence. A great way to do this is to create a new sequence for each scene that you are going to be working on in one project and then, when you finish, put all of those sequences together in one new sequence and export.
Bins are just folders, that's it. No different than having your folder in Windows or Mac OS X. Personally, I'll have a bin that corresponds with each sequence (part) in the video. Within that bin will contain all the files that i'll be using. But there is no restriction, you can have your files imported anywhere in the project, this is just for organizational purposes.
- First you see your project window, with one sequence already in it. Looking down you will notice the timeline has a tab that says ‘Sequence 1’. This is your only sequence so far. click
- Now click File and go to 'New > Sequence'. Now you're going to have to define how many tracks of audio and video you want, also give it a name for who's part it's going to be like 'Jim' or 'Mike'. For all intents and purposes I used ‘Rider 1'. Now I went ahead and made a second sequence for 'Rider 2'. click
- Now this will be a good time to create the bins for all the files that correspond to 'Rider 1' and 'Rider 2'. Just right-click in the project window and go to 'New Bin' click. I renamed them 'Rider 1' and 'Rider 2' click. Now when you import footage, just highlight the destination bin and then file => import as normal and the footage will end up there. You can also define the destination folder in the capture window. Now we have 2 bins and 2 sequences, you'll notice there are tabs on the timeline for both sequences. click
- Clicking on 'Rider 2’s’ sequence tab in the timeline window, you can drag his footage in the timeline. This is where you edit their part as normal, as you can see I have 2 tricks which corresponds nicely to real-life situations. I also went and did the same for 'Rider 1'. click
- So now in theory you have all these separate timelines of all these different parts and you need to incorporate them together into the final project. This is where we're going to have to make another sequence for the final video. click
- Now you just go to the project window and drag your individual 'Rider 1' and 'Rider 2' sequences down to the final video sequence. They are going to appear as one huge block, but actually within that block is all the edited clips and properties of their respective parts. This makes it nice because lets say you want 'Rider 2' to have the first part, instead of dragging a ton of clips all you have to do is move one in front of the other, and that's it! also you can apply properties to a seqence and apply for all within it, like fades, audio fades, etc. Anything you apply to the sequence clip in that final video timeline applies to all clips within that sequence. click
Pretty simple huh? Now you can really start cranking through those full length videos with ease.
