Final Cut: Duplicate frames – not just for Film users

So there I was working on someone else’s rig when I noticed all the pretty colours on the timeline. They reminded me of old Final Cut render errors, when it didn’t update the timeline window properly.

I guessed it was to do with using the same footage multiple times in a timeline and wondered why my friend had that option on. I thought you’d only want to use it on film projects. It turned out that he found it useful when making conference videos. If you need to shoot, edit and encode a video in a single day, it is very handy.

You can use it to see if you’ve used the same shot twice by mistake. You can also see if you’ve included all the shots requested for a montage. All good if there’s no time to label every clip clearly.

To see which bits of footage are used more than once in your timeline, choose ‘Show Duplicate Frames’ from the Timeline Layout Popup:

This shows that two bits of footage are used twice in the sequence:

Up to seven colours are used to show dupe frames, if seven clips were used twice you’ll see the eight repeated clip will be marked in red.

You can also right- or control- click a clip to jump to the point in the timeline the duplicate frames are used:

Choose the Dupe Frames submenu and choose an instance of where the frames are used and you’ll jump to that point in the timeline.

This means you can jump to each instance of a clip you’ve used in a sequence. Quicker than using the Find command in the timeline. Adding some frames of all the clips you want to find to a sequence will quickly show you if any clips you are looking for aren’t in the sequence. In this example, the first and fourth clips don’t have any frames duplicated in the clips pasted on the end of the sequence: