Today’s Daily Tip Podcast sponsored by the maker of Sugar FX created themes and effects for Final Cut Pro. Check them out at ilearnfast.com.

Welcome to the TDMD Daily Tip Podcast. My name is Marcelo Lewin, the digital media dude. Today’s tip is for Final Cut Pro on how to rename your physical files on your hard drive to match your clip names in your project. So let us get started.

So here we are with Final Cut Pro and I have got a project opened. This is of the portable in New Media Expo 2007. And as you can see I have a lot of videos that I actually captured. What I usually do because I shoot with HTV, when I capture I just let it do a start-stop detection so that it actually breaks into a whole bunch of clips and I just name the first clip and that it depends on the number right next to it. That is all fine and dandy however the problem is when I am reviewing video.

Now, of course you can start adding notes. You can add a column here for notes and start with adding notes but there are where that works great but what I like to do is for example I can double click a video here. I will go ahead and double click one video. And this is a video of let us see Spodtronic. So I can go ahead and do, I can go ahead and rename the clip here to say b-roll-spodtronic. And that is all great, so it disappear because it has actually been sorted out by the name so it came at the bottom here. So you see here b-roll-spodtronic and that is great but now if I do a right mouse on it and the go down to Reveal and Finder, that is going to bring it up in my finder. We will bring that over here and you can see that it still has PME2007-58. Now what I like to do is I like to go through all of my clips, I will click on back in the browser the Final Cut. I like to go through all of my clips and rename them to something more meaningful for me.

The problem is that if I then go to the Finder, right here, you will see the old names. Now, there is a couple of ways you can actually rename the files. You can obviously rename them here but what is going to happen is if you do rename in here, it is actually going to become disconnected media here because it does not have the connection to get to the file. One thing you can do for example we’ll rename this one is right mouse on it and then if you scroll all the way to the bottom which is rename and you say clip to match file or file to match clip. In this case, what I want to do is I want to rename the file in the finder to whatever the clip name is here in the browser. So, I want to go ahead and go again right mouse, go down to rename, file to match clip. Then, it is going to actually Warning: Are you sure you want to do to the source file? Say yes. And then if I do right mouse reveal and finder, now you see right here that the file has been actually renamed.

And you can do that to multiple things. So for example let us say, I will go ahead and do this PME-AAA and we will do—we will rename this one to PME-BBB. You can actually select multiple files by clicking on the first one and then shift clicking the last one or you can do command and click on all the ones that you want. Then you go a right mouse click on it, go down again to rename file to match clip. You say okay to the prompt that ask you if you are sure you want to modify the source file, click on okay. So now if I go right mouse Reveal and Finder, you will see that I have three of them renamed—AAA, BBB and spodtronnic.

That’s very simple to bring it back to that way it was. I can Command Z, Command Z and Command Z to my other files which is what I did before and then if you want, you can just right click or select all the files, right click, rename, file to match clip, click okay, now if I go to any of them and say reveal and finder, you’ll see that their all back to the way their were. And that’s a great a way to manage your clip names, name them the way you want to and then rename them for your actual source file so they’ll match the clip.

Now, the other thing you can do also is you can rename your clip to match the file. So for example, let’s say I went ahead and on this one I put in b-role of something and then I go this one, I renamed this one to b-role of something else. Okay, that’s all great. But then I changed my mind because it becomes, that’s easy to find on a hard drive and I don’t want to rename the hard drive files because they’re being used in another project. So what you can do is, you can right mouse, I going to select both of them by select clicking on the first one, Shift clicking in the last one. I’m going to right mouse, say rename clip to match file. And what happen is, they got resorted again, but what happens is, they got renamed, there you go, to whatever the file name is.

Well that’s it for now, I hope you enjoy this podcast. I’d love to hear from you. If you have a moment, please email me at marcelo@thedigitalmediadude.com, so until the next podcast, this is Marcelo Lewin, the digital media dude. Cheers!