Duplicating and trimming clips vs using Favorites

I am working on my first documentary and have a question regarding achieving the same benefits as using sub-clips. I saw on a tutorial site that FCPX clips can be duplicated, renamed, and trimmed with different in/out points. These "sub-clips" seem to have all the capabilities of regular clips since they're all just a meta-data view pointing to a physical clip. They can be opened in the timeline for detailed in/out work and can also contain exposure correction or any other baseline FX. It looks like they can overlap time-wise as well, which is something I can't do with Favorites.

I can add favorites and rejected areas within these "sub-clips". It looks like these duplicated clips are more flexible than the Favorites method thus far. Additionally, it appears that a text filter will not act on Favorite names that were changed, but it will search the notes field. I also have not been able to find a way to open a Favorite range in the timeline area for editing.

After all of the sub-clips are created and annotated, I'll create projects for the various trailers that will need to be created and insert the clips/sub-clips I need.

Are there any other distinctions between the two features that I should be aware of before I start isolating each interview question?

How would you folks approach this in FCPX for a documentary project?

Hi Alex,

Perfect timing on your reply. When my question didn't receive any replies, I wondered if there was something obvious I was missing. My wife has been fighting a nasty bout with bronchitis, so she hasn't asked me to show her how to proceed... until yesterday.

Thanks for letting me know about favorite renames being included in text searches in 10.0.3. My background is in programming and databases, so I tend to question appropriate levels of structure and abstraction. A clip in the event library is created during the ingest process. It is a pointer to a range of time on a physical clip that just so happens to cover the entire physical clip. At a functional level, if I create a duplicate of that pointer and change the in and out points, I have another pointer with all the same capabilities as the original.

To me, interview questions seem to be hard structural demarcations that deserve more than the slipperiness of favorites and keywords. Within the footage associated with a particular interview question, I would use favorites and rejects to point to the usable and unusable sections. I would use keywords to identify who is asking and answering the question, which parts are the question vs the answer, emotion (sadness, laughter, tears, anger), interior/exterior, location, subject matter, etc.. Notes could capture anything else that doesn't need to be consistent across clips.

I haven't amassed any experience yet to validate or contradict these criteria for organizing footage. I did not physically record separate clips during an interview session, since there can often be a flow of questions that I wouldn't want to interrupt.

I'll know shortly if this makes sense in practice. I'm all ears if you beat me to it.

John