Using Slug Generator in FCP To Simplify Tasks

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One thing in FCP I've often found particularly useful for a number of different scenarios in the Slug generator in Final Cut Pro. This is simply just a filler clip of black frames, but it can be used for a number of different reasons.

Here's just a couple cool uses.

Mark Clip

Here's the scenario- you have a gap on your video track that you want to mark with an In and Out point to fill with a new clip.

You proceed to park the playhead over this gap and press the keyboard shortcut for Mark Clip- X. Unfortunately, instead of marking an In and Out point for the gap, other things may happen. In the following screen shot, FCP marked an In and Out point for the audio clip instead of the video gap.

In order for Mark Clip to work in a situation like this, FCP (usually) needs to see a video clip to actually mark. Since there was no clip in this case, FCP marked the only clip it saw at the playhead position- the audio clip (this is all based on the black buttons in the Timeline called Auto Select- but we'll leave that for another discussion).

So that FCP will mark the spot on V1 instead, you can fill the gap with Slug first.

1. Right-click in the gap between two video clips to bring up a contextual menu.

2. Choose Fill with Slug. A new filler clip is added.

3. Place the playhead back over the Slug and press X. This time a correct In and Out point are added.

Deleting a gap

In the following screen shot a gap exists on V1.

Often times a gap can be deleted by clicking into the gap to select it and then pressing Delete. But in this case, if you wanted to delete this gap, unfortunately FCP will prevent you and instead will bring up the following warning.

This is because the gap does not exist across all tracks. If it did, then it can easily be deleted.

On the other hand, one quick solution in this scenario is to lock the audio tracks. Then the gap could be deleted. But this locks these tracks to the end of the sequence, potentially throwing other sections of your sequence out of sync. Instead of locking tracks, another option is Slug. As we just saw, gaps can't be deleted in this case, but clips can. If we turn the gap into a clip first, then it can be deleted, and since no tracks are locked, clips downstream in the Timeline are free to ripple left in the sequence, maintaining sync between different tracks.

1. Right-click into the gap and choose Fill with Slug.

2. Then single-click on the Slug clip in the Timeline and press Forward Delete or Shift/Delete.

This time the following sequence clips do shift left, and the gap is gone.

For more handy uses of  Slug, check out this article I wrote at kenstone.net called The Versatile Slug in FCP- Practical Tips Using the Slug Generator.