With Lumberjack System we don’t focus enough on Story Mode. Of late Transcript mode and Magic Keywords have taken the main focus, and of course the primary real-time logging and pre-editing tools are well known by now.
But Story Mode is ultimately move valuable if the project continues more than a one or two day shoot. Story mode lets us send Lumberjack logged Final Cut Pro X Events or Libraries back to the Lumberyard app to create string-outs from all the footage.
This recently became very valuable for a recent project: extracting the conversations on Final Cut Pro X from nearly 20 episodes of Lunch with Philip and Greg for an upcoming documentary.
Naturally we log every lunch, even though the logging isn’t used in the immediate edit, which is largely a cut-down of lunch, avoiding showing too much eating on camera! But, because it is so little effort to log the topic during lunch, I do it for long term access to the footage, which is exactly what happened here.
I consolidated all my logged multicam clips into an Event in a new Library.
From there I dragged the Event to the Lumberyard Dock icon (FCP X 10.3 enhancement). Lumberyard automatically recognized that the clips were already logged, and switched to Story Mode.
I then simply told Lumberyard to make stringouts for all “Other” (content) keywords. It takes no time and then I had a Final Cut Pro X Event with my string-outs for each topic covered during lunch that was mentioned three or more times. It’s easy to create, and discard, the string-outs I did not need.
From their I moved that Project into a new Library, and consolidated media to that Library. Because it was on the same drive, this was instant. I then copied that self contained library to an external drive to give to the documentarian. Copying to the drive took way longer than any of the Story Mode work I did, which was about half an hour including opening all Lunch Libraries and consolidating the logged multicam clips to my new master Library.
After the copy was complete, I consolidated the media back to the master media location.
While that’s a very specific use of Story Mode, it’s indicative of the way we can build topic-based string-outs across days, or months, of shooting, to get a head start on the edit.