Roles, part 1 — labeling clips with Roles

In a large-scale production, you may be editing a complex project with a primary storyline, b-roll, titles, subtitles, narration, sound effects, music, room tone, and more. Each of these acts as a role in your movie. And with larger productions, sometimes you're not ultimately in charge of all of these roles.

For example, you may have created a project with manually created subtitles and you need to be able to export a clean version, without subtitles, of your video so that someone else in another country can take the movie file and add their own subtitles. With the Roles feature in FCPX, we can easily pick and choose which elements or roles we want to export.

What's even better is that FCPX does most of the work for us. We don't have to go and tag every single clip with a role. FCPX puts generic roles on every clip automatically (that is video, titles, dialogue, music, and so on). But it's up to us if we need to further break these roles down into...