4

944 Part XI Project Management and Settings
Master-affiliate clip relationships help you to:
 Keep track of which clips in your project use the same media
 Perform media management operations on one, some, or all affiliated clips
 Trace your steps from an affiliate clip in a sequence back to the unmodified master clip
Note: If you need to, you can break the relationship between affiliate clips and master
clips, turning the affiliate clips into independent clips. You generally don’t want to do
this because then you lose the benefit of a single master clip controlling all the others.
There are a few cases where independent clips can be useful, but it’s best to avoid
them unless you have a special reason.
Shared and Unique Clip Properties
All clips have properties such as Name, In point, Out point, Duration, comments, and so
on. Master clips are the objects in your project that store clip properties; affiliate clips
then refer to the properties stored in their master clip. In other words, an affiliate clip
stores very little unique information about itself and instead refers to its master clip for
almost all properties.
For example, suppose you import a QuickTime movie file named Apple into
Final Cut Express. A master clip named Apple is created in your project. Each time you
edit the master clip into a sequence, an affiliate clip is placed in the sequence and its
name is also Apple.
The affiliate clip doesn’t actually store a name, but instead refers to the Name property
stored in the master clip. You can test this by changing the name of the master clip to
Orange. The names of all of the affiliate clips update simultaneously.
Master clip
Shared properties
Name and Scene
are examples of
properties stored
in the master clip
and shared with
affiliate clips.
Unique properties
Affiliate clips
In and Out points
are unique to each
master and
affiliate clip.
Name: Apple
Scene: 2
In: 01:00:04:00
Out: 01:00:08:00
Name: Apple
Scene: 2
In: 01:30:22:04
Out: 01:30:29:08
Name: Apple
Scene: 2
In: 01:31:24:00
Out: 01:31:30:00