This week on MacBreak Studio, Steve Martin from Ripple Training and I share a couple of tips for selecting clips in a Final Cut Pro X project.

There are times when it can be quite useful to be able to select a group of clips in your project. For example, you may want to put a bunch of similar audio clips into a compound clip in order to adjust all their levels at the same time, or to apply an audio filter. Or, you may want to move all clips to the right of a point in the timeline over to accommodate a new clip, but you don't want to use the magnetic timeline because you want certain clips to stay where they are.

In cases like these, the Timeline Index is your friend. This very powerful tool is hidden by default but can be opened at the left of the timeline to reveal a list of all clips currently in your project. These clips can be viewed as roles, or filtered by clip type, such as audio, video, and titles. You can also view all markers in your project. You can search on clips, and jump to any point in your project simply by selecting a clip or marker.

Now when you select a role, the clips highlight so you can see which clips have been assigned a particular role, but the clips aren't actually selected – meaning you can't perform any operations on them other than disabling them. But there is a way to actually select all clips that belong to a role – and that is the focus of this week's discussion. Along the way, we discover a couple other neats tricks up the sleeve of the timeline index.