Efficient audio and color correction using Compound Clips in Final Cut Pro

I am relatively new to Final Cut and coming from an Adobe Premiere Pro background. I ran across a way to use Compound Clips to address cleaning up audio over several clips and was wondering if it is considered a best practice, or if I am abusing the use of them. I was working on a project where I shot about 10 core original footage clips containing interviews with various questions and retakes. I went through the original 10 core footage clips and applied tags and marked favorites, etc. After I had my clips together on the timeline I needed to do my final steps of cleaning up the audio and color corrections. While I had just 10 original media clips, by breaking them into favorites/tags that footage is now spread across multiple Compound clips so now if I want to correct audio or apply a LUT I now have to apply all those changes to all the indivdual clips…a LOT of work and if I want to tweak an audio setting, again I have to apply it to all the clips.  I figured there has to be a better way so I asked ChatGPT if I could just process the audio and major color corrections (i.e. if I want to apply a LUT or color cast) on the original media and have it automatically apply those changes to all the referenced clips that are spread across several areas. ChatGPT responded and said, yes of course I could do that but I would have had to place the original media into a Compound clip to begin with and if I would have set my favorites and tags and inserted the media from that Compound object instead of the raw footage clip, than any changes I make to the master audio track or LUT’s in that master compound clip would cascade into whatever projects or compound clips I use those in….saving a LOT of time with very little extra work up front…I just would have had to create a composite clip for my raw footage clips and place it in there. I tested this process and it works exceptionally well. My question is, is there a downside to doing it this way as I haven’t found any restrictions using this method, but a lot of benefits. Now I can export my audio for the entire original clips, clean it up and have it leveled across all areas where it is used, and it avoids me having to copy/paste attributes all over the place for consistency, whether it be for audio or video changes (i.e. like a LUT change). So...that is a lot of words, so let me summarize:

Old way:

  1. Import footage.
  2. Create favorites/Tags of best footage
  3. Build timeline made of the favorited/tagged clips
  4. Apply color correction/audio adjustments to every individual clip...can use copy paste but if you are exporting audio to external sound editor creates a LOT of file to have to export and import.


New way:

  1. Import footage.
  2. Create a compound clip for the main raw footage clips (1 compound clip per media file since sound cleanup and color corrections would be consistent with that take)
  3. Create favorites/tags from the the compound clip instead of the raw/original clip
  4. Export my audio from the compound clip that houses the original clips, process and cleanup the sound, and reimport. Now, anywhere I used any portions of that clip, all the sound is already corrected...once...I don't have to go to each individual clip where it is used to correct just that clip.

Same with color correction, if I want to use a different LUT, I can jsut change it in the Compound Clip and it cascades to any and all clips that inherited.


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Pro (M4)

Posted on Feb 4, 2025 9:24 AM

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Feb 4, 2025 8:58 PM in response to BZoneFC

That should work although there may be an easier way using the Multicam functionally in FCP. If you shot the interviews with multiple cameras and either In camera or stand alone audio recorder you can drop each of the 10 interview sessions into a Multicam clip. In the clip editor you can apply the LUT and audio changes to each of the views and the changes show up wherever that view is used.

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Efficient audio and color correction using Compound Clips in Final Cut Pro

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