Iain Anderson

The music video is probably the only kind of edit that's harder in FCP X than a traditional timeline, and that's because FCP X makes it easier to deal with "local sync" and a little harder to deal with "timeline sync". I wrote about that here: http://www.macprovideo.com/hub/final-cut/fcp-x-organising-an-unusual-timeline The solution for music videos is either to stay on the Position Tool so that nothing ripples, or to make the music your primary storyline and connect everything to that (more detail in the link above). There are a couple of other commands that might be handy for switching the order of things around. Command-Option-Up to lift a clip from the primary storyline up, replace it with a gap, and connect it instead, might be handy, and Command-Option-Down does the opposite. To swap two connected clips in height only, just drag the lower one up, and hold Shift so it doesn't move in time. Also worth noting, FCP X's H.264 export uses QuickSync if you use the Faster Encoding option, and can do 5x realtime speeds (20% of runtime) on a modern Mac.