Create clips quickly from one track in real time?

Hey all,

So as I am trying to do some sports videography, one of the needs is to be able to separate individual players "moments" in a game. So in my case, soccer.. there are 11 players on the field. What I need is a way to play the video and quickly be able to mark in/out points for small clips of individual players. Each game is a bit over an hour. Currently, what I have to do is scrub the video, when I find a bit that has a player I want to create a clip of, I have to stop the scrub, mark the in, then scrub to the out, mark the out, then drag/drop that to another track for that specific player. Eventually, the goal is to break down all 11 players into 11 tracks (1 for each). This process, for 1 player is a time sink. For 11, it is just way too long.

So, what would be great is if there was a way to map a key on the keyboard like a toggle, to start the in point and then stop.. and have that in/out automatically moved to another track. The track should contain all the in/out clips that the one key is mapped to.. so I could set up a key for a specific player, and thus get all their bits on to one track.

Is there any way to do this? OR if not.. is there a plugin that may make this work?

If not, any suggestions on how to speed this process up?

What would help your situation, and a lot of others, would be to have a menu command (and keyboard shortcut) to move the selected clip up or down one track.

Yes..that is one thing. The other though, would be able to configure multiple custom keys, and set each one to a function like in, out, etc. BUT.. each of the functions would allow some custom configuration. For example.. the IN and OUT toggle for the same key, would then have an option to say move to new track when OUT is triggered.. and a sub option that says each/every clip using this key move to same track, not new track each time.

With that setup.. I could then quickly scrub through a video, and use say hotkey 1, 2 and 3 to start in points (because maybe 3 players were all in the same play together). Then possibly at same/different times, I select 2, 1, 3.. and each of those would move the clip (in the same location on the timeline) to new/existing tracks. A few seconds later, I press 1 again, then press it again a second later.. that would then move that to the SAME track that the previous clip with the 1 hotkey was moved to. By the end, I should have 12 tracks. The original full track, plus 11 tracks for each of the in/out clips I set for the 11 players I am clipping out.

That would be a massive feature for sports video editing capabilities. Frankly, I suspect it could be useful for other purposes as well.

Is there any NLE on earth which automates functions this way? I never seen one....

You might be able to accomplish some of it with a third party program like Autohotkey, with a lot of work.

Without keystroke macros this is quite difficult.

My approach would be (and it's still quite manual) to use the keyboard mapping to setup a custom map for this job.

I would create the extra video tracks and map the keyboard to set the editing destination tracks to number keys.
Then I would match frame the timeline position required, mark the in, then out point in the source viewer, select the destination track using the keyboard shortcut, use the overwrite keyboard shortcut to add to the selected track. This would allow a fairly smooth and easy workflow with only 5 keystrokes for each clip, and no switching between timeline & viewers or dragging required. I tried a test and did not need the mouse at all!

You may want to visit the new Resolve 14 way of creating subclips from named duration markers.
You can do it (optional) without stopping video and using keyboard shortcuts (apple +M, and use tab key to switch marker text input fields). (video auto continues when you finished typing your market notes/title)
So you would go through all your video and create these markers and name all the ones for player 1 , player 1 , etc.
When finished , (check you are in list and not thumbnail mode) , you see all video clips you tagged have turned insto sort of subdirectories with underneath all auto created subclips. Now drag all player 1 sublcips to the target track for 1 etc etc.
Super fast.

edit: this way you also need to create dummy markers for the out point as default it treats consecutive markers as outpoint for the previous. Play with it , you see what i mean.

Hey,

Quickly said, I don't know haow to automatically move clips to another TL, but what you wanna make first is the recent functions added to markers, that's to say putting markers while watching the game, and turning them into duration markers (so subclips) afterwards...
Look at duration markers in the manual

Edit: ah, Glenn roasted me...

Hey all,

That new Marker flow with duration markers is nice... only problem is, the video I found on youtube shows that when you go into Media, List mode, they have a > next to the clip that has marker (sub clips). In my Lite version, I dont see this. Is this only a Studio version option to twirl down the marked clips and then drag/drop them to another track or timeline? I plan to buy it soon anyway as it is well worth the price. I just cant seem to get this working in the Lite version.

Works also in free. CHeck my earlier post description. Maybe you make timeline markers and not clip markers.
So load you clip in the clip viewer and make markers there. The moment you make your first marker you should see the clips list view ">" appear and you new subclip.

Yup.. well all be darn.. so I basically have to dbl-click the clip from media pool to open it up, then use that there. It is a shame you cant use the timeline in the same manner. E.g. it seems since you can add multiple markers there too, it could be beneficial to get a list of clips from the Timeline and use those as well. Especially if those markers span across more than one clip you may have in timeline. Could be useful to quickly set up a marker across a few short clips, and export a bit longer clip that covers those. It also seems like it wouldnt be difficult to make this work in Resolve (e.g. for the developers) since they already do it with individual clips and allow for multiple markers on timeline.

Thats for the future versions
At least now you should be able to get going with this very handy new feature.

Well, you could cut those clips up on the timeline (ctrl+\) and drag the newly created subclips into appropriate bins in the media pool. It's no more difficult than adding markers, and the clips remain intact on the timeline. It might even be easier than working with markers.

That is a valid point John. I think it will be a little bit slower doing it that way... but not by much. Ideally for the fastest workflow for what I am looking to do providing customized keys that toggle in/out points and on the out add some canned tag and move it to a bin or track, would be great. In my case, with soccer video, you have 15 to 22 players (give or take a few) that may be in the game at any point. Setting up toggle keys with a player name/number, and then having the key (on OUT press) copy the in/out clip to a bin or track would be super fast. Right now, with either timeline cutting/drag/drop to bin OR using the multiple markers, there are a few extra steps each time I set the in/out point that easily adds a lot more time to the process.

Ofcourse I do realize that an NLE is not a specialized sports video clip tool.

Yep, John's suggestion is the (now) old (prior to 14) way to do it and it stills works. Same way to turn text into a clip

Another idea is to use Multicam Editing. I found a process that will work in 12, there may be an easier way in 14 but I have yet to install it. Here's what I figured out:
- Add clip to media pool
- Create timeline and and copy clip to 12 different video tracks, 11 players +1 extra (in sync)
- Convert each clip on each track to a compound clip (This will make each compound clip 1-12 appear in the media pool)
- Select all 12 compound clips in media pool, and create a multicam clip from them.
- Create new timeline from multicam clip.
- Right click the multicam clip and select open in timeline, this will show you all the compound clips on their separate Angle tracks.
- Right click each tracks compound clip and progressively assign a Clip Color (8 choices), for the remaining 4 assign a Flag Color.
- Rename each "Angle 1" etc. track name to a player name, and "Angle 12" to OUT
- Exit out to the multicam timeline again, now make sure the viewer is in multicam mode, you will see a grid with identical video, but labeled with your player names. Start playback and click the box corresponding to the correct player IN point, when ready for out point, click the "OUT" grid box. Repeat as playback continues, if you accidentally click wrong player, hold alt/option and click correct one, no cut will be made but the "angle" or player of the current section will switch.
- After your edit pass is complete, select all clips on that multicam clip track, right click, and select flatten multicam clip. You will now have a track with the various compound clips, all coded by clip color or with a color flag.
- In the main menu "Timeline" select "Select Clips with Clip Color" and choose your first color. This will effectively select all clips for a single player.
- Move those selected clips straight up to a new track.
- Repeat selecting each clip color, and then flag color, and moving to a new track until all players and "OUT" have their own track.
- Select all the clips on the "OUT" track, if you want to leave the blank space to preserve timing, hit backspace to delete clips. Or if you want to ripple so there will be no gaps hit the Delete key instead.
- You now have all your players clips on separate tracks, with a real time shot selection workflow. It would be nice if there was a simple "expand multicam clip to separate tracks" option (Vegas), but the clip color and colored flags allow this process to work in a convoluted work around. Hope this helps!

JD | Seamless Media

So..I am hoping I have the answer for my particular use case. I am not the coach, therefore I dont need to actually break down the video into individual player clips. I am however the videographer, and am going to be making highlight reels with individual player clips for said player.

The amount of time to make one reel (5 or so minutes in length) when having to find all the clips too.. would be dozens of hours over the course of 30+ 90 minute games. I just dont have a fraction of that time, let alone for most of the players on 2 different teams. That is a full time job to do something like that.

Instead, I am pitching to my teams to have the kids (and their parents if need be) go through the videos I post on youtube to find the clips and jot down the start/end times. I am baking in the timecode overlay using the burn-in data feature. All they have to do is find clips they want in their reel, jot down start/end times, and send me that info. I have the original 4K high quality source. I will then write a simple program that will make use of ffmpeg and the start/end times to extract the clips for each player, putting them in appropriate folders to keep them together for the player. That vastly reduces the time needed to make the reel. I just have to string together the clips, add some FX to each clip (e.g. an arrow or something to point to the specific kid), and render it out for them. It will still take a few hours to assemble correctly, add in the FX, intro, etc and render it.

So the only thing I would love to figure out is if there is some way I can build a sort of series of FX into a template, so that I can add it to a clip, adjust the "power window" around a player (and track it), so that I can quickly add a nice set of FX per clip. Namely, I hate the use of an ugly arrow pointing at a player to be over-layed on the screen. It does the job, but detracts from the quality of the video. I prefer to slow the video down, pause it for two seconds, blur out the background, then return to normal speed. I would like to find some way to do all that in a quick repetitive manner.

Justin, wake up! You’re having a nightmare! Only in a nightmare would such absurdity appear to be a reasonable expectation when you find yourself in Hell with all eternity to do this task.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk