Empty keyword collections

Just spent a good ten minutes panicking and thought I'd share my findings in the hope of sparing someone else similar anguish.

I opened up FCP X to jump back in on a project I've been working on and soon found that all of my keyword collections, while still intact, were empty, as was the event itself. The screen read "No clips match the current filter setting." However, when I navigated to the disk image housing all of my media, everything was kosher - it all showed up. Each clip still had the blue stripe across the top and the clips in the event browser still held their keywords. Heck, even the event library still retained their settings. And yet, I the clips I'd selected for each keyword collection wouldn't populate where they were supposed to. And yet, no error dialogues appeared telling me that there was something wrong with my event. They were just...gone.

Turns out I'd somehow inadvertently selected the search box and hit the space bar a couple of times. As I don't have any clips with such a tag, FCP X couldn't find any of the clips I'd "searched" for.

I don't use the search function all that often so I didn't even think about the little x in a circle that allows you to void out a search in the search box when I saw it the first few times (if the search box isn't selected, there's no flashing cursor). But that wound up being the solution. I clicked on it and my event and keyword collections were all repopulated with the clips I thought were "missing".

My takeaway: be careful where you click and mind your search window.

I stress this all the time in my classes. I always have more than a couple of times in each class someone panics because all their media is gone. When you don't see what you think you should see:
1- Clear the search field, even if it looks clear.
2- Verify the Browser Filter menu (top left).

Very good lesson to learn! LOL

I still miss this on rare occasion.