FCP Tip #001: Overwrite with sequence content

With a global recession causing budgets to tighten up, faster turnaround times required for new methods of distribution, etc. an editor needs to pick up the slack by acquiring speed and knowledge. For speed, there is no substitute or shortcut for seat time to provide repetition and build muscle memory. But for knowledge, you can certainly speed things up by learning from people, as opposed to trial and error and/or hunting and pecking your way through a program. In this post, I will share some knowledge that many of you may find useful and is intended to save you some time and help you avoid some of those pesky Final Cut render file problems that come from nesting sequences.

First, let's be clear that nesting sequences is not necessarily a bad thing. There is just a time to nest and a time where you definitely don't want to, or need to, nest. Here's an example of a time where people may find themselves nesting unnecessarily. If you're like me, at some point you've made the realization that logging clips, giving them distinct names and descriptions, while helpful, can be a huge time waster in an edit and sometimes just plain overkill for a particular job that won't be around long enough to go back through all the carefully named clips in a bin. Because all of this data entry may not be worth the return on investment for many quick projects, I've taken to making “selects” sequences instead of logging clips into bins. I basically go through my raw footage and pear it down to just the stuff I like by editing clips from the raw footage into a sequence that I usually name “Selects” or something similar.

Then when I'm all done this style of “logging”, I'll load this selects sequence into my viewer window and use it like a clip marking ins and outs and overwriting to a new edit sequence. Here is where the trouble comes in. Most people will edit away using F10 to overwrite or drag those clips from the “selects” sequence (loaded into their viewer) into the edit sequence and what they end up with is a bunch of clips that are really nested chunks of the selects sequence rather than individual clips from the raw footage clips. Some people don't use this workflow because of this result and those who do tend to run into a multitude of potential problems such as; Match framing back to your raw footage from your timeline will not work, batch digitizing can be tricky and will likely require you to capture more than you really need if you ever delete your footage and need to recapture and the potential for the problem in Final Cut that I've taken to calling “sticky render files” where even though you make changes inside of a sequence, sometimes the sequence that contains a nest of the sequence you changed does not update properly because it did not force itself to re-render after the changes were made. So the old edit lingers until you disable and enable the updated section to force a new render.

How can I edit selected parts of a sequence into another sequence without getting a string of nested sequence clips? All that is required is a simple remap of your F9 and F10 keys. (There is a video tutorial of this process at www.davestiles.com if you prefer to watch over reading) Out of the box they are mapped to “insert” and “overwrite” respectively. In order to insert or overwrite the original clips from a sequence in your viewer rather than chunks of the sequence itself, we need to remap those keys with the operations named “insert sequence content” and “overwrite sequence content”. You can type “insert” or “overwrite” in the search window at the top right of the keyboard layout dialogue box to narrow down the choices to help find them. Drag the “insert sequence content” to the F9 key on the map and drag “overwrite sequence content” to the F10 key on the map. Save and close your keyboard layout. Now when you load a sequence into your viewer and F9 or F10 into the timeline you will get the original clips in your timeline, not chunks of sequence. You like that George?  Nice.