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FCPX Tip: Copy and Paste Attributes

Danny Greer
Published: Last Updated:

Discover a Final Cut Pro X feature that flies under the radar for many new editors: copy the attributes of any clip in your timeline and instantly paste them across multiple clips.

Say you’ve tweaked the color or cropping of a clip in your timeline. Now you want to apply those same effects to multiple clips. What’s the fastest way? I once saw an editor manually add these effects to other clips, one by one — this is time consuming and completely unnecessary! Instead, use the FCPX Copy/Paste Attributes feature to selectively choose what effects/attributes you want to copy from one clip to another (or group of clips).

What was a mainstay feature of Final Cut 7, Copy/Paste Attributes didn’t make an appearance in FCPX until about a year after its initial release. Here’s the scoop…

  • Select a clip in the timeline that you’ve applied some tweaks to. Use the shortcut Command-C to copy it.
  • Now select a clip (or group of clips) that you’d like to apply those attributes to. To paste the attributes use the shortcut Shift-Command-V.
  • You can selectively choose what attributes are applied, or simply check Video Attributes or Audio Attributes to paste them all.

FCPX: Paste Attributes

✓  Pro Tip:  There’s actually a shortcut that will instantly paste ALL attributes automatically. Copy the original clip, select the clip(s) you’d like to apply the attributes to and use the shortcut Option-Command-V.

It’s worth noting that you can achieve a similar technique by applying effects and settings to a group of clips via FCPX’s Compound Clip feature. This may be a preferred method when applying effects to an entire scene.

Alternatively, you can save a clip’s attributes as a preset, so you can quickly apply it to clips across different Final Cut Pro X projects. Check out this post over at FCPEffects for more information.

Was this FCPX tip helpful? Got any tricks up your sleeve to share with your fellow video editors? Let us know in the comments below.

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