My favourite way of logging with keywords is to have ‘No Ratings or Keywords’ selected as the criteria for display in the Event Browser. Then, add a keyword and the clip vanishes. So you always know which clips have yet to be sorted. Ah, but what if you want to add more than one keyword? The clip disappears as soon as you add the first, no? Well…

If the keyword editor is open, the act of committing a keyword (or keywords) to a clip leaves the clip itself in that kind of half-selected limbo where its highlight is grey and not blue. Like it’s selected, but in an inactive window (which, I suppose, is what it is).

[pic of situation]

Here, type all the keywords you want to apply to the next clip (even if there’s a shortcut), select them all and cut them, leaving the field blank. Then click on the next clip and paste the keywords in.

The clip will vanish, but it’ll have all the keywords you wanted associated with it.

By Kenny Park

Kenny Park, pro video editor in Avid and Final Cut for over a decade.