Batching in FCPX

Hello everyone, I'm Mark a fashion photographer and I'm a complete newbie to FCPX.

I've joined to pick you brains regarding batching of films. I'll try to keep this as simple as possible.

I recently came back from a location shoot where (for the first time ever) I was asked to shoot a 10 second video of the model wearing the garments. As you can imagine I had a lot of products to shoot and I have ended up with rough 350-400 videos (which I shot portrait).

These video will be loaded to a website and used to show customers what the garments are like worn on. I was thinking that the videos will look nicer if they are slowed down to roughly 50%.

Is there a way that I can add all of the videos to FCPX, rotate them, crop the frame to the film (as in have no black borders on either side of the image), slow down the film (50%?? and maintain the quality), fit the film to frame (I think dropping it down to 56% seems to fit them all) in one go? Like batching images on photoshop?

Thank you in advance.

Hi Camo,

pasting attributes should work for you. Put all your clips in your project timeline. Choose the first clip, adjust to taste and then copy its attributes using CMD-C. Choose all the other clips and hit SHIFT-CMD-V to open the paste attributes dialogue. Select the attributes you'd like to paste and hit OK.

Hope this works for you.

Sebastian

Hello Sebastian and thanks for the rapid reply.

After pasting the attributes will I be able to out put all of the videos files out as separate files - in one fell swoop?

Also, when I flip my video to portrait I end up having to fit my video to fit (roughly 56%) which makes two large black areas. Does FCPX allow custom window sizes or can crop or output without the black areas?

Thanks.

Do the Paste Attributes thing with all your clips in one Timeline as previously explained.

Then hit R for the Range tool. Select the first clip a a Range, export. Select the second clips a a Range, export. Repeat as necessary.

When a Range is selected in the Timeline, only that segment of the Timeline is exported.

We only have standard video frame sizes for now.

Ah I see, I was hoping that the export would separate the clips as they are and convert my timeline of separate scenes into individual files.

Thanks.

The way I'd sort this out would be to use Final Cut Pro 7, which is much better for this task. I imagine you don't have that old app, so...

Final Cut Pro X will not export all the clips used in a project as individual files. But you can export in parallel: keep starting new exports going. Click each clip in the timeline and press the 'X' key. That will select the clip using the range tool. When you then go to the Share menu, the movie you export will be only made up of the currently selected clip. The movie will start exporting in the background, so you can go on to select the next clip, press 'X' and export that one clip next.

To deal with the rotating and black edges, I suggest you don't do that in Final Cut Pro X. Once you have exported your slowed down movies, use the free

MPEG Streamclip

application to rotate them all.

You can set up a preset using these settings:



...this one rotates the source footage 90º - strips off the sound and saves the movie in Apple ProRes 422 LT. Click the Presets… button to make a new 'rotating' preset.

Once you set up the preset, start a new batch, add your movies to it, choose a destination and choose the 'rotating' preset.

What format does the website want these videos? Can they take full HD vertical or will they convert to a web format. If they are going to convert all the videos, bear in mind their workflow. They might not even be able to handle vertical video, or might be able to take your non-rotated videos and convert them to the size and angle they want.


@Alex4D

Blimey, thats a great help and a lot to digest today. I've got other jobs on so I'll come back to this later but i just wanted to post a reply thanking you for your input!