Back again with more babbling. To recap… some people find… ah, screw it. I had envisioned this topic as a linear series of posts for folks dipping their toes into X, talking about my editing process… A-B-C-D etc. Turns out my brain doesn’t work that way. Maybe that’s why FCP X appeals to me. 😉 So I guess I’m just gonna write a little bit now and again –  in no particular order – about unique things I like when working with, rather than against the FCP X timeline. This little post will be about Storylines.

The Primary Storyline. Use it.

I, and others, have  said that the best way to get acclimated to the Magnetic Timeline is to fill the storyline with gap, and cut everything in as connected clips and disconnect the audio. I did it at first. It works kind of like you’re “used to” working. And it sucks.

Or, you could use connected clips but keep the audio components connected to maintain sync. You get the benefit of audio components/expansion too. But it’s a mess.

Or, don’t fight it. Use the Primary Storyline. 

All nice and neat. Use the Position Tool (P) to move clips without rippling. Hold the tilde key while adjusting clips (~) to temporarily disable connections.  Press and hold tilde (~) then press SHIFT and release both keys to lock connections off. Press tilde again to re-enable connections.  This cursor let’s you know connections are disabled.

Secondary Storylines Are FCP X “Tracks”

When working with Connected Clips, if you want to butt clips together and put transitions on them outside the Primary, X will put them in a Secondary Storyline for you.

Making secondaries is really just like making a new track in other NLE’s. But, you only do it if you need one, which you do if you want to put a transition effect between clips. So… why else would you need one?

Well, maybe you’d like to cut a music bed first, lock it, and edit to that… without having each clip of your music cut move because it’s “connected” to the primary clip above it. Maybe you have a bunch of little clips you want to keep together or easily move as a group. Whatever. Think of storylines as tracks you can move around if you want to. Add gap at the front end and pin it to the head of your timeline and it’ll behave exactly like a track.

What you can also do, that you can’t do in tracks, is expand the audio in storyline clips and do a nice manual crossfade. so it takes the place of 2 (or 4) tracks in other NLE’s. And you can select and manipulate clips in a storylne just like any connected clips in the timeline.

Storylines are also useful if you want to keep a group of clips together for visual organization. Again, just like tracks.

Make new Storylines by selecting a clip and hitting CMD-G. If you forward (SHIFT) delete the clip after this, it’ll leave an empty secondary if you need it.

Spare “tracks”

And while you’re at it, Never disconnect your sync audio. Unless you need to cheat some dialog or something, leave the sync audio components with your video clips. If you know there’s a stem you won’t ever need, disable the component for the master clip. In my case, I hardly ever need the Music from a split source, so I just turn it off in the master clip.

That way, every clip I cut in has the sync Dialog and Effects with it. I can turn either on or off in the timeline clip(s) as needed, but it’s always there, I never need to match back to a clip to “find” the audio I didn’t think I needed. This essentially takes the place of track patching, but you only need to do it when you want to, not every freaking time you cut in a clip. 

It’s also trivially easy to do an A/V, Video only, or Audio only edit. Hit Shift 1,2, or 3 before you cut in your clip.

Next up (in some random order) Fun with Audio Components, Managing Clip Connections, Compound Clips, The Timeline Index, and anything else I can think of. Happy cutting!

To recap… some people, coming from other NLE’s, find the FCP X Magnetic Timeline… disorienting. And that’s being kind. No tracks, crazy connection lines everywhere, clips jumping around by themselves, it’s  a mess! Madness! But… there’s a method to the madness. And when you work with, not against, FCP X Magnetism, it’s quite nice to work in, warts and all.

Now, if you’re happily using X you probably won’t find this too interesting. Like all my babbling, this post is primarily directed at experienced folks who are trying to give X a shot and are getting stuck. And, as usual, I’ll probably skip important things, and dwell on minutiae. Feel free to ask for clarification in the comments.

Also,there will be a Part 3, on this topic. And 4 etc. It seemed like it would be a simple post when I thought of it. Oh well…

Since I usually have fairly uh, busy sequences, I figured the best way to talk about the Magnetic Timeline would be to talk a little about my workflow on a typical project. I fought against magnetism for quite a while, and it kinda sucked. But over time, I’ve stopped fighting it, and grown to (mostly) really like it. Your mileage may vary… 🙂 This isn’t a tutorial, just my experience, so forgive me if I gloss over some things as I go. And I assume you have at least a passing familiarity with FCP X. So… the first, and arguably most important thing you need to do is:

Set Up Your Roles!

Roles take on the majority of the organizational functions of tracks in other NLE’s. If you don’t set your Roles properly, your Project will quickly become an unmanageable nightmare. This is especially true for audio, as there is generally much more of it in the timeline. In fact, pretty much everything in this post pertains to audio, though what I’ll talk about is generally true of video as well.

The “built in” Roles in any new Event are Video, Titles, Dialog, Music, and Effects. You can create and assign as many Roles and Sub-Roles as you need. There are a couple custom Roles in the example above. The more detailed your Roles, the more precise your ability to interact with the Timeline will be. 

When you import a clip to X, video automatically gets assigned a “video” Role, and any audio with the video gets assigned a “dialog” Role. Imported audio will often get assigned to “dialog”, no matter what it is. Always double check the Role of any clip after you bring it in to an event.

You can assign Roles to clips in the timeline via the Inspector, but it will only change the timeline clip(s). This is quite useful later in an edit for creating sub-roles etc, but do it first in the Browser and it’ll carry into every project in which you use that source.

Hey, this isn’t dialog! I better fix it.

Take a few seconds to do that as you bring in each clip. You can set Roles on multiple clips if you bring in a folder of music or effects or whatever. You’ll be glad you did.  Since I generally get video with multichannel split tracks embedded in it, I need to set Roles for the embedded stems in my master source. Select the master clip in the Browser, open it in a Timeline, and set the proper roles for each channel.

1-Open the clip(s)                 2-Select the channel(s)                            3-Set the Role(s)

In addition to allowing you to do a nice split audio output with the click of a menu or two, Roles allow you to Mute, Solo, Locate, Select and Manipulate clip(s) from the most overlooked (IMO) part of X, the Timeline Index. More on that in, I dunno… Part 3 or something…

I’ll skip over all the other stuff you normally do before starting a sequence… Selects, Favorites, Keywording etc. There are lots of actual tutorials on that. If done right though, it’s really really easy to find footage you’re looking for as you cut.

Starting The Cut

First thing I do is create a new Project, and set a usable view. No giant thumbnails, no connections, and the lowest basic clip height. The examples below are obviously an existing sequence.

I’ve also made custom shortcuts to switch between the “working” view, and a super minimized view that I use when I need to see everything in the timeline.

Anyway, back to the empty timeline… I cut a second or so of my main source video in as a connected clip to auto-set the resolution and frame rate. Just my preference, you can manually choose any Project Settings you want when you create your project. Then, I’ll drag out the Gap clip that gets created to some arbitrary length, generally longer than I expect the cut to be. I like to stash unused bits and pieces at the end of the timeline as I go, so this leaves some space to do so.

Next I’ll delete the random clip, cut in my handy slate generator (you can make useful things like this in Motion even if, like me, you have no idea what you’re doing) and start to build the cut.

Cutting in FCP X, surprisingly, is just the same as in any NLE. 😉  Just Don’t Fight The Timeline. Observe, see how it works, and go with it. It’s fun! lol I generally assemble things as connected clips, and “commit” them to the Primary when they’re done-ish. Forget about carefully getting the clips to line up horizontally. Let it go. Just stack and drag and trim ’til they’re good and then dump ’em into the primary for fine-tuning.

You can drag and drop clips if you want, but there are plenty of Keyboard Shortcuts. Many are the same as in FCP “Classic”. In FCP X, the biggies for me when cutting are Q (connect), W (insert), D (overwrite) and E (append). Use these in conjunction with SHIFT-1 (Audio and Video), SHIFT-2 (Video only), and SHIFT-3 (Audio only). Those’ll get what you want into the cut. In the Timeline, the main ones I use are V (disable/enable the clip), OPTION-S (Solo) , CMD OPTION-S (add to Solo group), CNTRL-S (expand audio/video), CMD-4 (open/close Inspector), CMD-5 (open/close FX Browser). There are a zillion more, and you can of course make your own. Spend some time with the command editor, there’s some great stuff in there!

Also, leave your sync audio connected to video. There are reasons to disconnect it, cheating dialog, using a sync effect in multiple places etc. But in general, don’t. I’ll talk about this more in a future post. 🙂

And with that tease, I guess I’ll stop Part 2 here. In later installments I’ll talk about The Timeline Index, Managing Connections in a complex timeline, Secondary Storylines (tracks!), Compound Clips, fun with Audio Components, and whatever other random, disorganized thoughts pop into my head.

Thanks for stopping by!