How to prevent cut clips from falling into lower timelines on Final Cut Pro?

Thanks, creating blank titles is a clever idea, and will achieve the object of keeping the videos clips in the tracks they were originally in, so we will certainly give it a try.

As somebody else mentioned, we can link the audio file with the clips that need to be synchronized with it, to keep them in sync when other clips are being edited.

Thanks Terry, my husband will have a look at it tomorrow! For now we managed to solve our problem by using the title bar, as suggested here, so the cut bits don't fall down through the gaps anymore! There should maybe be a feature to stop them from getting away from their timeline... or else it all becomes so very confusing.....

That is a helpful answer, however we would still prefer to be able to keep clips in a track-like structure. The suggestion of using connected storylines sounds dangerous in our case, as many of our FCP projects are for music videos, where some of the video clips have to be very carefully synchronised with a WAV file of the song, so if connected storylines can move clips horizontally, that could be disastrous in our case!

Thanks for your reply but all the clips have audio (for the general footage that is just background noise), and the pieces still fall down? Maybe I am doing something wrong, as I have no experience at all, but it seems crazy to me to have all kinds of bits and pieces all mixed up? Even when you make a puzzle you would separate the pieces according to the place where they are going to be? And my videos, as a rule are no longer than 4 minutes, which is the length of my songs, just image someone much more professional trying to make a feature film, with everything mixed up? My husband told me today that he tries to work like that and make sense of what doesn't make sense, for me it is a reason to look for another software, just he can now help me with this one. And others I tried, like Adobe Premiere Elements, were quite bad anyway! I am at a loss of what to do now. This is a bit showstopper for me.

I will try to see how to do that Command-Option works, thanks!

Thanks for your reply, Tom, but how do you work if all bits and pieces all are mixed up all over the place? I have only edited one music video so far, which I did with Adobe Premiere Elements, and there I had the three full versions of my song all on the top of one another, and then on the top of them I had all the general footage, which didn't need to be synchronized! That worked well, nothing dropped down but the constant rendering was making me crazy!

Actually I want everything horizontal, if that makes sense.......... the three full versions plus one line with the general footage. Isn't it how it usually is supposed to work? How else can one find what one needs, if it is all mixed up? Am I doing something wrong? Sorry, but as you have noticed already, you are speaking to a complete novice! This is my second video, even though I have my husband's help but he has always struggled with this problem!

Hi Tom, I can ask my husband to make a screen shot to show you. So basically I make music videos. Usually we film maybe 3, this time 4, full versions of a song, where I sing in playback. That aside, we also film general footage, nice landscapes, vegetation, me walking around, whatever seems interesting to then mix with the singing. We also make a full recording in the studio, which becomes the sound for the video. That recording we put as the first track, I suppose what you call storyline, on the top of it the first full version and synchronize it, on the top of it the second full version and so on and sync them. On the top of it all all the general footage. Then I make cuts, everything that doesn't seem interesting is discarded. When that is done I start to assemble the video, but if by then all the little bits have got mixed up it becomes **** to make sense of it. In other video makers everything that is on one track stays there and doesn't fall down to the first available space, which it seems to do here. I suppose that because each full version is synchronized with the recording they would be connected to the audio? But it does not seem to be that way. As long as I make a cut that is smaller than the space bellow, that bit falls down.

Hi Guys,

The multi cam option does help to a certain extent, however we have found that the earlier suggestion of using 'blank titles' at each level extended to the full length of the video. We might well try the multi cam option on the next video, as we typically have 3 or 4 full video takes of the song with Francisca singing, which in the past we have had to sync each take manually to the separately recorded audio, thanks for the very helpful ssuggestions!