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Hi there forum folks,

I'm just curious what the ideal workflow for adding clips is in the project view. My situation is that I am working with a voiceover, which I've put into the project. I just find the process clunky, so I wanted to describe how I'm doing this to see if there is a better way. I assume there is, because this is anything but smooth. Here's what's happening:

I continually add new clips after the current one in the project view, but I'm not sure how to set the duration of that clip other than by going into it then holding arrow key right for a while, until it hits around 200 frames or so, in order to hear a decent chunk of audio, then right click the timeline at this point to set the out point. Only then can I hear the audio to then decide how long I actually want my clip to be, go back, and then set the out point more precisely. Then only after I've decided the right duration for the clip, can I begin drawing the storyboard image for this scene. Doesn't this just feel full of redundancy?

I guess to me it would make much more sense if I could "Play" the clip right after creating it (which you can't because the mark in and mark out both begin at frame 0) and stopping it when I want to set the duration for the scene. Instead I have to arbitrarily set a far off "out point" and then curtail it back after I have more than enough frames. Surely I'm doing something wrong here, because this is such a clunky way to make new clips in a storyboard. Please tell me I'm doing something wrong here, or that there is an easier way to make a new clip, set the duration based on listening to the audio, then begin drawing right away.

Thanks for the help.

My way of storyboarding to a soundtrack is sort of similar, instead of setting an out-point i'll stretch out one layer across the timeline to the duration that the clip needs to be. the clip will always end at the last frame within the timeline so it's easy to adjust how long you want the clip and get straight to drawing on that layer.

Personally I don't use in and out points all that often, it's usually only once i start animating over the storyboard so it's easier to see where the end is, or if the end point needs to be adjusted at some point. just letting a clips length get determined by the last frame on the timeline has always been easy enough. I'd imagine that if you wanted to keep using the in/out method, instead of creating new clips, you could set one clip to have a specific out-point, and duplicate that clip instead of creating a new one every time to keep things simpler, so you could scrub through and just find the out-point that you want.

also I believe there's a few settings that you can adjust that sets what every new clip is set up with, i'm not sure if it includes a custom out point duration but it might be worth a look.

Thanks for your response ChristopherC! You this is another way but the issue is the same - you can't just play the audio as soon as you make a new clip and decide where to end it, you have to arbitrarily guess where it will end, and then adjust again. If this is the standard workflow, it just feels a bit unnecessary. Seems like it would be easier to be able to listen to the audio and THEN set that end of the layer or the time out point.

If there is a way to have each new clip start with a certain amount of time that it will play, that would be much preferred as then you can make each new clip really long so that you can listen to the audio right away, then set when you'd like it to end.

I imagine others may seen this as not that much work, but it depends how many clips you're working with in a project. In this current project, these extra redundant steps are just a bit annoying, that's all.

Thanks for sharing this alternate though.

Cheers,
Garth

I see the problem but don't know any better solution than to prepare 1 example scene and duplicate it.

(Off topic: you can't imagine what a PITA Final Cut is when you've prepared an animatic and now want to export all the exact separate sound clips for single scenes. No way to automate, not even a way to just do it with keyboard shortcuts.)