Tutorial: Keyword Tagging in Apple Final Cut Pro X
In this first installment of our new tutorial series, Glen Elliott demystifies Final Cut Pro X, illustrates its core functions, and focuses on one of the most powerful new features for organizing, accelerating, and streamlining your edits: metadata keyword tagging.
Adding More Levels of Organization
You could even add another level of organization. Let's say we wanted to group all of the cars that we shot multiple shots of, and call them, "featured cars." So we can make a right-click on the event and choose "Make New Folder" (Figure 19, below), and name it "Featured Cars."
Figure 19. Making a new folder in the Event Library
Then, we can move the keyword collections of the cars that we have multiple shots of each into that folder (Figure 20, below). For each one, we can go into and get our shots.
Figure 20. The Featured Cars folder in the Event Library with keyword collections for each featured car in it
Finally, shots can exist in as many keyword collections as you'd like. For example, if we wanted to still delineate the difference between the outdoor and indoor shots, even though they're keyworded, we could highlight all the outdoor shots and add them to a separate keyword collection that we already made earlier for "outdoor b-roll." You'll see it pop up on the left in the Event Library. The Outdoor B-roll shots shown in Figure 21 (below) exist in more than one keyword collection.
Figure 21. Clips that are keyworded to appear in multiple collections
That's an overview of the keywording functionality of Final Cut Pro X. It's certainly not the most exciting topic in the world, but it is an extremely powerful feature, and it will give us a good foundation for the tutorials to come in this series, which will build on the concepts we covered here. You should take the time to learn and utilize it because really is the key to a lot of the power that Final Cut Pro X offers.
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