Open Stills, Video Clips and Audio Clips in an External Editor

If you have a clip selected on the Timeline or in the Browser and you’d like to open it up in an external editor such as Quicktime (for video clips), Soundtrack Pro (for audio files) or say, Photoshop (for stills), you can simply hit OPT Return:

In order to determine which external editor is chosen, you’ll need to hit SHIFT Q (you can read more about the “SHIFT Q Lifestyle” here) to get to the System Settings panel first. Go to the External Editors tab and then choose your external editors. Note that if no editor is specified, the default editor is based on the asset’s “Creator Type” (so Motion files open in Motion, for example) or they will open in the same app that they will open up in if you double-clicked them in the Finder. This means that video clips would open in Quicktime which is probably desireable, but stills will open in Preview in most cases.

I highly recommend that you specify Photoshop as the editor for your stills and you may also want to make sure Soundtrack Pro is the editor for audio clips. It should be noted however that, since you can “send” audio clips to Soundtrack Pro via another process, you may wish to designate a third party audio editing app here such as Peak Pro and then you have two quick ways to send audio clips out for work.

The Photoshop designation is particularly handy for me because I prep all my stills in Photoshop and to go out to the finder, surf to the still’s location and drag it down to the Photoshop icon in the dock (because if I simply double-click a still file in the Finder, it opens in Preview) is a lot of steps. Opening a still directly and quickly in Photoshop from the timeline is a huge convenience for me.

If you’ve saved any changes via your chosen editing app, the updated file is automatically detected and updated in FCP. This of course, suggests that you should have a backup of the original media stashed somewhere–if you don’t and you “save as” from Photoshop, you will need to re-import the new “saved-as” file into your project. That might mean some additional work if you’ve opened the still directly from the Timeline, but if you are working through and prepping stills in the Browser before laying them on the Timeline (which is the ideal workflow), it’s no biggie to reimport the revisions (and possibly remove the originals) in the Browser–still saves you a lot of off-campus folder surfing.