Music Video Workflows

I teach dance-filmmaking classes at a university and we're switching from FCP7 to FCPX this year. The projects the students do are often like music videos —a music track is laid down and then clips are edited to that, often with dance movements aligned to musical events. My concern in switching to a non-track-based editing paradigm is that it's too easy for students to knock their clips out of sync with the music since by default edits ripple. In legacy FC, you drop a clip in a track and it stays put, always synced to the music until you move that particular clip. But in FCPX, it would be very easy for a student to adjust a clip and not realize that he's knocking every subsequent clip out of sync with the music.

So I was wondering what workflows people have found effective in FCPX for music videos. One thought I had was to lay down a gap clip for the entire length of the music and then do overwrite edits so that everything stays in place until it's assembled. And then just make sure to only do rolling edits once clips are in place.

Thanks for any thoughts you might have about this.

Mitchell Rose
[www.mitchellrose.com]

There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to connect the audio track to a gap at the head so it doesn't move. Another is to put the music track on the primary storyline and then connect the video wherever you want to the music. The connected video clips don't move in relation to where they're connected to the music.

All the best,

Tom