How to create Macro's? (Not Custom Command Editor)

So i have a few things i do in almost a repetitive move a lot in some of my edits.

One is while editing weddings. I place all the footage on the timeline because I need to have one video that is the whole days worth of footage, but i do edit out any parts of my camera messing up or me getting a bad shot or two.

So while i'm going through the whole days footage in the timeline, if i see a shot i really like and i want to save it for later when i'm doing the highlight music video edit later, i do the following...

set IN and OUT using the "I" and "O" on the keyboard. Then I press SHIFT+F to reveal just that portion of the clip in my event viewer, then I press "F" to favorite that selection of the clip, and then I press COMMAND+2 to go back down from the event viewer to the timeline, so i can then press SPACE BAR and continue watching and skimming through the video.

I'd love to create some kind of macro keyboard shortcut that i just press one set of keys and it will do the following...

SHIFT+F
F
COMMAND+2

... that way I just have to hit my In and Out, press one key or combination of keys, and it'll automatically jump to the event viewer, favorite my selection, and then jump back down to the timeline for me.

Is there anyway of doing this using anything already built into FCPX? I'm assuming it's nothing I can do in FCPX itself. I'd like to not have to use 3rd party programs but I'm willing to try.

bradywurtz wrote: …Is there anyway of doing this using anything already built into FCPX? I'm assuming it's nothing I can do in FCPX itself. I'd like to not have to use 3rd party programs but I'm willing to try.

… you could give Automator (in Apps/Utilities) a try or 3rd party, $$ tools as BetterTouchTool.....

But…
I have to admit, your workflow is, by my understanding of FCPX, a bit upside down
Or, ignoring the intended workflow…

I would…
skim JKML thru the clips in the Event Browser (double/triple key strokes to be faster)
set I/O and hit F
=> now all 'goodies' are marked, and when you set the Browser to 'Show Favorites only', you can cmd-A+E 'drag' all clips into a 'Them All!' Project.-

… and, while favorizing, you range and tag the 'highlights', best, shortcut, slowmo whatever… (add shortcuts for the tags…)

With that technique I usually 'cleaned' (just the good scenes, and tagging, e.g 'Year in Review') a 90min football match in under 20min…

Funny coincidence: the teacher, I'm helping at school with his projects, has the same, sorry: weird habit to drag everything into timeline and select there… After 5 years, I'm still not understanding the advantage to select there (??) .-

in that context…
Some brain-foodder about Additive and Subtractive Editing:
blog.frame.io/2016/10/18/make-fcp-x-log-better-1/

I put it all in the timeline because I’m making two videos. One video is just of the highlights (where I’m just making my favorites), and the second video is literally a 3+ hour video of all my raw footage. It’s a long video of everything I shot with no editing. It play out like a home video. I don’t do transitions or edits other than removing clips where maybe I hit record but didn’t get anything good. Or maybe I hit record and had to fiddle with the camera to focus and move to where I needed to be. So it’s literaly the whole 3+ hours of footage I shot, minus maybe about 1 minute of footage.

So if I go through all the footage in the event browser and mark my favorites, great, I have all my favorite clips so I can start working on making my music video. But now I have to go through all 3+ hours of footage a second time to make sure I’m cutting out the small little mistakes from the 3+ hour raw footage timeline edit.

I would suggest importing the 3 hour long clip, then duplicating the clip, rename the duplicated clip, then range and F key the good parts, on the duplicated clip, then select favorites under the show menu, that way all you have is a browser showing only clips you think you might need.

You see FCPX is not meant to do the editing on the timeline, it is meant to work best using the pre-editing method as explained above..If you want, you could also create a multi-cam clip, maybe if you were smart and shot in 4K, then you could zoom in on one of the clips, the duplicate clip, create a multi-cam play through cutting from wide to tight, then once finished make any changes, zen burns or whatever...

This would not take very long, and trust me, it would make that 3 hour video worth something...You can add effects to clips in the multi-cam if you want to, titles, you have choices...

Karsten's advice is excellent (as always) and no, this does not mean you have to go through the whole video twice.

In the event browser, mark your best footage as Favorites (F key) for the highlights video, and while you do this you can also mark any unwanted footage as Rejected (Backspace/Delete key).

- When you want to edit the cleaned up raw footage onto the timeline, chose "Hide Rejected" from the Filter pop-up menu at the top of the browser, press CMD+A, and press D. You now have an instant edit of your cleaned up raw footage.

- When you want to edit the highlight clips onto the timeline, chose "Show Favorites" from the Filter pop-up menu at the top of the browser, press CMD+A, and press D. You now have an instant edit of your highlights, which you can further fine tune on the timeline.

Using Favorites and Rejects in the Event Browser is the fastest and the easiest way to achieve what you want to do.

- Ronny

Yea I think that'll work best. I forgot that i can just 'Reject' selections of a clip, and not the whole clip. I'll do that from now on.

But yea, the only reason i put all the raw footage on the timeline and edit from there usually is that i don't DO any edits to it. it is literally the raw footage. I don't color correct, i don't try and build a story, it's just start to finish, the whole day, unedited. That's what they're paying for, the raw footage. And out of the 360+ clips I have, almost all of them fit onto the timeline 'as is'. There is only a small handfull of clips that might have 2-4 seconds shaved off the front or back of the clip, containing bad camera movements or mistakes. That or I might remove a part where a groomsmen says something inappropriate. So out of the 360+ clips, with over 3 hours of footage, I might cut out about a minute or less worth of footage. and i need all the clips to just stay in sequential order. That's why i drop them into the timeline first. It would take more effort for me to do clip by clip in the event browser, and have to hit 'E' to append all 360+ clips into the timeline one by one. i'd rather just JKL my way through the whole thing real fast.

Still, even after doing that, it would still be nice to really know how to create macro's on macOS to do some other things too. I'll have to look up some tutorials on Automator

I'd like to know as well. I have been trying to figure out to what extent FCP X is controllable using AppleScript. I was given a timeline full of compound clips that I want to replace with their synced clips. I have the synced clip equivalent in the browser thanks to Intelligent Assistance which converted the browser clips for me, but replacing those in the timeline is another issue. I am doing it manually right now. It would be great if I could use a macro or script to help automate the process. Is this possible?

My manual process is:

Select the next compound clip on the timeline (which puts me at the first frame)

Go the first frame of that clip

Get the source timecode of that clip

Find the same name of the that compound clip in the browser, but as a synced clip

Go to same timecode in the clip as above

Set the in point

Replace from start (option + R)

I don’t know what’s scriptable in FCP X. I could use your insight. A lot of times I do this in clip groups meaning – if there’s a scene/take 8F.1, I work on every instance of that clip first in the timeline so that I stay with that clip in the browser. This way I am not searching constantly in the browser for the next synced clip named the same as the compound clip in the timeline which (being an edit) could happen non-sequentially; like 8F.2,3T.6, 1.4…etc.