How to mark selects in Final Cut Pro with favorites and keyword ranges.

Final Cut Pro marks selects as ranges on the source clip, not copies. Favorites, keyword ranges, Keyword Collections and the append edit that turns a collection into a stringout.

Why ranges and not subclips?

Most editing apps treat a select as a new object: a subclip, a copy in a bin. Final Cut Pro treats it as a mark on part of a clip. The clip stays whole in the browser; the range sits on it as a colored stripe under the filmstrip, green for a favorite, red for rejected, blue for a keyword. One clip can carry dozens of ranges, they can overlap, and none of them duplicates media.

That matters for interviews and dialogue because an answer rarely ends where you first thought. When a favorite needs the sentence before it, you drag the range edge outward instead of hunting for the master clip. The selects pass becomes a layer of decisions on the raw footage, and the footage itself is never touched.

Two kinds of range exist, and they do different jobs. A favorite is a rating: a range is favorite, rejected or unrated, nothing else. A keyword is a label: a range can have several, ranges on different clips can share one, and every keyword gets its own Keyword Collection under the event in the Libraries sidebar. Favorites answer "is this good?"; keywords answer "what is this about?"

How do you mark selects in Final Cut Pro?

1. Set the browser up for marking. Select the event in the Libraries sidebar. Switch the browser to filmstrip view (Cmd+Option+1) so ranges show as stripes, or list view (Cmd+Option+2) to read names and notes. Set the filter menu at the top of the browser to All Clips so a rejected range does not vanish while you are still deciding.
2. Mark a range. Skim a clip and drag across the filmstrip to draw a range, or press I at the start and O at the end while the clip plays. The range is only a selection until you rate or keyword it, so do the next step before clicking elsewhere.
3. Press F for a favorite, Delete to reject. Mark > Favorite puts a green stripe on the range; Mark > Reject puts a red one. U removes either. On a first pass, favorite anything you could imagine needing and reject the dead air, false starts and retakes. Set the filter menu to Hide Rejected and the rejects leave the view without a frame being deleted.
4. Press Cmd+K and type a keyword. The Keyword Editor opens over the browser. Type a word, press Return, and the range gets a blue stripe and the keyword. Use the subject of the answer ("childhood", "the fire", "advice"), the speaker's name on a panel, or the role of the moment ("opener", "ender", "b-roll cue").
5. Give your working keywords a shortcut. The Keyword Editor has nine slots in its disclosure area, Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9. Put the keywords you apply most in those slots and you tag a range without typing or looking away from the footage. Ctrl+0 strips every keyword from the selection if you tag the wrong thing.
6. Name the favorites you will need to find again. In list view, click the disclosure triangle beside a clip to see its ranges. A favorite is listed as "Favorite"; click the name and type over it, so it reads "why she left, second take". The Notes column takes a longer line, and the browser's search field matches both.
7. Work from the Keyword Collection. Click a keyword under the event in the sidebar and the browser shows only the ranges carrying it, across every clip in the event. Set the filter menu to Favorites inside the collection and you have the good lines on that one subject. To keep that filter, File > New > Smart Collection saves the keyword and rating combination as its own collection.
8. Append the ranges to a timeline. With the collection open, Cmd-click the ranges in the order you want them and press E (Edit > Append to Storyline). Final Cut Pro lays them end to end in the primary storyline of the open project, in the order you clicked. That timeline is a stringout of your selects, and the actual cutting starts there.

What do keywords carry when the project leaves Final Cut Pro?

Keywords, ratings and markers live in the library, and an event exported as FCPXML writes all of them into the file. A keyword range in the file is a start, a duration and the keyword text attached to a clip reference, which is why the ranges survive a library move or a trip through another tool that reads FCPXML. A project exported on its own carries only the clips in its timeline, so export the event when the selects are the point.

The reverse works too. A tool that writes FCPXML can put keyword ranges on your clips, and when Final Cut Pro imports the file they appear in the browser and the sidebar as if you had marked them by hand.

When you need more than keywords

Keywords describe what you decided; they do not describe what was said. The browser's search field matches clip names, notes, keywords and marker text, not the words in the audio. Finding a line you half remember from a three-hour interview still means scrubbing. Final Cut Pro 11's Transcribe to Captions produces a caption track the Timeline Index can search, once the footage is in a project; how to transcribe an interview in Final Cut Pro covers what that does and does not give you.

The other limit is scale. One interview with eight keywords is a pleasure to work in. Twenty interviews with eighty keywords is a sidebar you scroll, and you are the only index of who said the best version of a thought. Keyword ranges are the right place for selects to end up. They are a slow place to find them.

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