Over the six years our film project has been in post-production a number of hard drives have gone to “bit heaven.” Clips had been logged and organized and once lost they weren’t replaced; instead, portions of a fully rendered QuickTime movie were used as placeholders.

Eventually the lost media was recaptured from source tape. One especially tedious task was re-logging ADR from a long recording session. It wasn’t feasible to mark edit points in Final Cut Pro’s Batch Capture because of slow tape transport so I captured the whole session and used the Viewer instead.

Using a mouse in the Viewer to quickly scan audio waveforms and playback was immensely faster but marking edit points for each take was, again, tedious. Looking for a better way, I discovered how to use markers to divide a master clip into subclips - no repetitive in/out points required. The steps:

• Create a bin to hold your final subclips.
• Open the master clip in the Viewer. Scrub through the Viewer timeline and in between takes drop a marker using M. Tap M again and enter what will be used as the subclip name.
• In the Browser expand the master clip to reveal the markers inside. Select all of the markers within the master clip.
• Drag the selected markers into your new bin.

You’ll find a subclip for each marker you created and they will be named accordingly. Because each subclip is created using an imaginary in/out point based on the marker, it’s important to place the markers based on slate (and “cut!”) or leaving sufficient handles in takes without slates.

You may want to copy the master clip before dragging the markers into a bin because the markers are deleted once you perform the drag operation.

Related posts:

• Syncing dailies in Final Cut Pro
• Shot detection in Final Cut Pro
• From encrypted DVD to Final Cut Pro
• Create your own ILM for (almost) nothing
• Idiosyncracies with anamorphic TIFF image export in Final Cut Pro 6

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