Tutorial: Using Compound Clips in Apple Final Cut Pro X
Working with compound clips in FCP X is similar to nesting sequences in Final Cut Pro 7. Once you understand how it works, and how changes to compound clips can ripple across projects, it's a powerful feature that you'll find yourself using more and more.
Making an Empty Compound Clip (and Why You’d Want to)
Finally, there is one alternate way of making a new compound clip. Thus far we’ve worked only with projects and existing media, so we’ve been highlighting clips in the timeline and making them a compound clip, which makes a parent clip up in the Event Library.
You can also make an empty compound clip. If you’re inside the Event Browser and do the same shortcut Option-G, it’s going to make a compound clip but it’s going to make an empty compound clip. So once you hit Enter, you’ll see a new compound clip you just created (Figure 14, below). It's empty because we created it in the Event Browser, and you notice that there's no footage to skim.
Figure 14. Creating the empty compound clip.
If you double-click it, it opens up, and it looks like an empty timeline. So this is actually a pretty cool feature. I've heard some people online actually prefer this way of working rather than using projects. I wouldn't suggest that, but it is a viable method. It's almost akin to the way Final Cut Pro 7 works. It's almost like having a sequence you can open up and just add clips to it.
Once you’ve created your empty compound clip, you can go in and simply drop footage into this compound clip. When you go back to the Event Library and look at that compound clip, it's not empty any longer. It has the footage you just dropped into it.
Benefits of Using Compound Clips in FCP X
So that’s an overview of compound clips. It’s an extremely powerful feature, but you really have to have a good understanding of how it works and how it ripples changes globally across your project(s), because that can get you into a lot of trouble.
But once you understand it, I think you'll find yourself using it more and more.
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