Editing Down a Long(ish) Video

Hi guys and girls,

I'm a PC refugee and completely new to FCPX. I'm used to Premiere Elements 4 and you know how old that is. Anyway...

I shoot video for a website at trade shows like NAMM and in PE4 I can take the video shot that day, say an hour's worth of 1-2 minute features about different products and edit it down into chunks, top and tail each 1-2 min vid with branding, save it as .flv or something similar and when I have 10 or 20 of these mini vids I upload them to YouTube when I get plugged back into a network connection.

I'm trying to do the same thing in FCPX but I seem to be misunderstanding something about the way it works.

I can get the day's video in there just fine. I can edit it into the chunks I need. What I have at this point is say a 20 min video divided up using the blade into say 10 small videos each about a different product. If you play the timeline it will all play one after another etc...

What I would normally have done next in PE4 is take one of the chunks and cut & paste it into a new timeline so I can add the branding at the start and the end, add an overlay with the website name and copyright. Then I'd save that out as it's own named file in case I need to go back and add or edit it again. Then I render and export it as a file for later uploading.

The problem I'm having in FCPX is that I can't copy the chunk I want onto a new timeline and I also can't save it out as its own little file.
In fact I can't see any save options anywhere.

Usually I'd be doing this over and over until the original cut up video is down to nothing and I have say 10 separate videos each with their branding etc... I'd then close the main video down but not save changes. This would leave me in the position of still having the day's video in one file still chopped up into bits and also having each bit saved out as its own video.

I'm clearly missing something fundamental in FCPX but I'll be buggered if I can figure out how to do this.
I should also say that I don't have to do it this way. I can easily do things a different way as long as I get the separate videos out I'm not worried how it's done.

If there's a good way to edit down a long video into small chunks that can be individually edited and then saved for later uploading I'll happily do it that way even if it means doing things completely differently to the way I have done in the past.

Can anyone help out an FCP muppet with this please ?

First, I'd work in the Browser. Find the chuck there, click and drag to highlight just that section, Cmd+K to keyword it with it's title. Don't be afraid to add a bit of extra to the head and tail of each. Using the Filmstrip view of the Browser, and setting the duration of the flimstrips to be long may help.

Now you have each section isolated in the Event by it's own keyword. Now, with a keyword collocation highlighted, you'll only see that "range" you keyworded. Right-click that, Open In Timeline, edit up, and use the Share > YouTube option. Although just exporting (Cmd+E) and manually uploading it yourself seems to be faster sometimes.


Another method would be to select the range of the Master clip you want to use as a Range in the Browser, use "E" to drop it into a new Project (make a new Project first). And edit it inside it's own project.

In the Project Library, you'll have a bunch of Projects this way, but you can make a single folder to put them all in for organizing.


Finally, yes, you CAN in fact highlight a clip in a Timeline, copy it, then go to another Timeline and paste it. Normally this is done between Compound Clip Timelines and Project Timelines.

Is it possible to Export (or share) a selection of a project, not the whole project?

No. Put you can copy and paste a section into a new project and export that.

Thanks guys, I'll be giving it a shot this evening.
And I'll report back with the results.