Exporting a section of the timeline with FCPx

WOW! Can't believe that's missing! I'm sure they're going to keep updating to include all our basic features, but in case you don't find how to do this in FCP, try setting your in and out points in Compressor's preview window. I sent out a test project, and shortened down to a few seconds and it worked for me.

Lawrence

Duplicate the project and delete the sections you don't want to export.

wow. no offense but the fact that you need to come up with a workaround for one of the most basic, simple and commonly used operations in a NLE just proves that the people behind this new revolution in editing know nothing about editing. what a sad joke.

Glad I could actually help someone else! Usually, it's you guys helping me.

Glad you asked that. Exactly what I came here to find out. Leave it to Tom Wolsky to come up with an answer.

(Hey Tom, it's been a day. Where's the book? Lol.)

And kudos to SC for providing the required (and IMHO, well deserved) snarkiness. Most of the observations I have seen about "iMovie Pro" seem more about the human animal's resistance to change, but I have to say the absence of this basic ability really is an iMovie Pro kind of retro stumble.

I agree that the programmers behind FCPX do not have a clue about editing. They probably used iMovie all their life! Ths is a seriously thick workaround. Here's a better workaround, 1. Export the entire sequence. It will keep the same settings. 2. Open the sequence using QuickTime Pro. 3. Mark in and out around the clip you want and save it. You can then work on it in Motion, after effects or any other application, the import it back to FCPX. Having a load of projects inside FCPX just for exporting will mess up the projects bin. Such a simple task requiring a work around! Not very good at all. Motion can export a selection off it's timeline. Why would you want to do this? This feature is in the wrong place. Maybe we should just use motion to do the entire edit?

I agree that the programmers behind FCPX do not have a clue about editing. They probably used iMovie all their life!

Crap. The same design architect who built the first versions of Premiere and built every vesion of FCP before built this one.

As far as I am aware, Apple laid off the old FCP team and hired a new team, under the lead of the iMovie designer. The same team that changed iMovie and made it "better".

Please read this article from Apple Insider from 2010.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/18/apple_scaling_final_cut_studio_app s_to_fit_prosumers/

I love Final Cut Pro, but leaving out simple things is not good at all. Even in QuickTime I can export a selection of a clip in a few simple steps? There needs to be tighter integration of FCP with Motion. Now that Shake is dead.

It's still crap. The article was uninformed then, and it's still uninformed. Randy Ubillos, as the article says, designed FCP1, as he had done Premiere before that. He worked on every subsequent version of FCP with the pro apps team as the chief video architect, which is Apple speak for he designs applications. He also designed iMovie 8-11. He also designed iMovie for the iOS. The layoffs were people in tech support and QA not programmers, which makes sense if a whole new app is being designed and their tech support expertise would not be applicable. A bunch of new people were hired as well. A lot of code went into FCPX. The same team was still there, Randy, Brian Meaney, Richard Townhill, Steve Bayes, and others, the same management team, many of the same programmers.

iMovie Pro it is then! An Good name for software that lacks basic pro functionality. What a crap workflow! Create a project, select what you want, save it, export it, reload it, correct it again, export it, make changes, import it, then export it again! What a mess!

_ragle wrote:

What a crap workflow! Create a project, select what you want, save it, export it, reload it, correct it again, export it, make changes, import it, then export it again! What a mess!

There's absolutely no need to do all this stuff.

Simply assign a Role to the clips you want to export, then export just that Role as QT - and carry on editing the original.

What's so difficult about that?

Andy

I think you misunderstand, its not the ability to export the track of your chice, horizontally, its to be able to set an in/out point in a project timeline and export all those layers. Vertically.

Its as _ragle/lawrence says, a basic feature.

I often export short clips in that fashion for passing around to test. Thats all tracks, could be anthing up to ten layers of video and four of audio.

Yeah. I was in the middle of a project when I read Andy's response with interest and was all ready to apply roles to portions of the completed project when I finally looked up how to apply roles. I was very disappointed to see roles only apply to events. For my purposes, that's like -- big deal.

I can see it would be useful if one wished to assign roles to a group of event clips to use in another project, but has no application when trying to export portions of an edited/completed project.

So I will continue to edit the chapters and drop the short results into FCE to place chapter markers for output (via QTP for 853x480 needed by iDVD) my dvd.