As I mentioned on THIS POST a week ago, I am faced with an interesting online. A mixed format timeline with ProRes (and I just found out, ProRes HQ), HDV and DV…and then stock footage that I need to capture from BetaSP and digibeta and upconvert to HD. The biggest issue was going to be finding what footage is what on the timeline, so that I can separate it out and recapture the DV and HDV as ProRes. The stock footage is very easy to spot, as it has visibe timecode on the clips. DV might be easy as it will look pretty low res in comparison to the rest, but the HDV clips won’t be that easy to spot.

So how am I going to find all that footage and separate out what I need to recapture?

Well, Martin Baker of Digital Heaven e-mailed me saying that he had a tip that would help me tremendously. It was on page 56 of his new book, FINAL CUT PRO KILLER SECRETS, which I am allowed to share with you:

Finding Timeline Clips with Matching Attributes

This tip is useful for locating clips in a sequence that match certain
attributes such as being offline or a particular codec.
For example, when preparing a sequence for export to Color, clips that
aren’t running at 100% forwards speed will need to be exported and
replaced. Here’s how to identify those clips.

1 -Create a temporary bin in the current project.

2 – With the Timeline active, press Command-A to select all the clips in
the sequence and drag them to the temporary bin.

3 – If it’s not already visible, right-click on a column header and choose
the Speed column.

4 – Click on the Speed column header to sort the clips in the bin
by their speed.

5 – For each clip that isn’t 100% speed, open it into the Viewer then press
F to reverse match frame into the current sequence. The playhead will
move to show where the clip is used.

While this tip is for finding speed changes…also something that I need to do as I prep for Color, you can also use this to sort the footage by compression type or frame rate…any column heading. Sure enough that trick did the…uh…trick, and I am good to go.

Looking at the rest of this PDF (just glancing through) I am already learning a LOT of stuff I didn’t know. I’ll wager those timeline scrolling lock and Autosave Restore are in there too. If you are interested you can download a copy for only $19.00. This already has saved me that much in time.

Man that was a fairly simple trick…and the simple ones are always the best. Makes you go “why the heck didn’t I think of that?”

I have added the FINALCUTTERS blog into my blogroll. Full of FCP news and tips from other blogs, including this one.

(thanks for the tip Martin.)