The Secret Power of FCPX Roles And A Trackless Future

Final Cut Pro X launched with an ambitious goal: put video editing, sound editing and color grading in the same app. Apple has been refining FCPX in each of these areas. Last year Apple made big strides toward their goal and delivered an expansion of the “Roles” feature. Let’s dig in and see how Roles can help you focus on your work, and keep you organized. The Benefits of Roles We all want to streamline our work as much as possible. We want an efficient workspace so we can focus on telling our story. This is the benefit of Roles. They ultimately help streamline our entire post-production process and give us access to a cleaner, tighter editing environment. Introduction to Roles I think of Roles as “tracks without limitations.” Basically you are just telling Final Cut Pro X what role a particular clip plays in your film. Is it a title? A sound effect? The audio from a certain interviewee? There are both video Roles and audio Roles. Video Roles are helpful to visually organize your timeline; but audio Roles are where the feature truly shines. By default, Roles let you identify video clips as titles or normal video, and for audio, dialogue effects or music. These standard Roles get you started, but you can take the feature much further. Roles simply identify elements as what the are. The need to say, “dialog is on track 1-4 and sfx are on 5-8” disappears. A Visually Organized Timeline The first advantage of Roles is visually distinguishing between different types of video clips. Normal clips get the video Role (blue) and titles get the title Role (purple). Audio clips get different Roles as well. Your dialogue, sound effects and music clips all get distinct colors. This makes it really easy to see what you are working with at a glance. I find this more helpful than traditional video and audio tracks because the type of file is directly associated with the clip, instead of indirectly associated with it via a track. SubRoles SubRoles give you the opportun... Read more