[Updated July, 2016, May, 2018, Jan. and June 2019, Jan. 2024 with more icons.]
I don’t think there is anyone outside of Apple who knows what all the icons, symbols and alerts in Final Cut Pro X are, much less what they mean. Still, I had some extra time this weekend and decided to put together an illustrated list. Then, over the years, I’ve expanded this to include more icons as they are discovered.
So, here are more than 60 icons and indicators, grouped by the panel in which they appear, with a short description of what they mean.
NOTE: For the most part, I excluded icons which you click to do something; in other words, buttons.
GENERAL
Blue indicates something that is active (turned on), gray is something that is inactive.
LIBRARY LIST
A Library.
An Event
An Event with Missing Media
A folder in the Library containing Smart Collections or, in an Event, containing keyword or smart collections; used for organization.
A Smart Collection, whether associated with the Library or an Event.
Keyword Collection associated with an Event.
BROWSER
A yellow box means the clip, or a portion of the clip, is selected.
A green bar at the top means the clip, or a portion of the clip, is a Favorite.
A red bar at the top means the clip, or a portion of the clip, is Rejected.
An orange bar at the bottom of the clip means the clip, or a portion of the clip, is used in the Timeline.
A blue bar at the top indicates a clip, or portion of a clip, with keywords applied.
Earlier versions of Final Cut also displayed a purple bar, indicating the clip had been analyzed, generally during import.
The ghosted-back waveforms indicate Reference Waveforms, enabled in Preferences.
A file that was linked to the project is now missing. Generally caused when the file was renamed, moved or deleted.
Similar to this is the “Missing Camera” icon which indicates that a media file was captured from a camera or camera card, which is now missing.
Missing proxy file. This will appear if you switch to Proxy mode in the Viewer and proxies were not created for this file. Proxies can be created at anytime (File > Transcode Media).
A Compound Clip.
A Compound Clip that contains no media.
A Multicam Clip.
An Audition clip.
A Synchronized clip, which combines a separate audio and video clip to act as though they were one clip.
This icon indicates source footage that was shot at a high frame rate to enable high-quality slow motion; most commonly shot on an Apple iPhone. Modify > Retime > Automatic speed enables slow-motion playback.)
That little circle in the lower left of your clip indicates how much of a newly imported clip still needs to have thumbnails and waveforms created. This icon disappears when creating these auxiliary files is complete.
The small camera icon means the underlying media for the clip still resides on the camera. This happens if you stop the import using the Background Tasks window or remove the camera cord (or card) while importing. Restart the import by choosing File > Import > Reimport from Camera/Archive. Once the import is done, the icon goes away.
This means that you’ve applied an audio effect to an audio clip that has more than one Role assigned to the audio channels it contains.
Apple’s Help states: “It signifies that there is a clip-level audio effect. That is, the user placed an audio effect at the clip-level as opposed to the audio component level and so the clip is mixing down to a single role. This is done since an effect at the clip-level will mix all of the audio from all of the clip’s audio components. If the user places an effect on the individual role, then we can keep the audio separated by role when playing back and when exporting.”
(Thanks to Scott Brown for this icon.)
Apple’s Help states: This icon is for captions. In Final Cut Pro, you can import clips with embedded captions, then extract them to display those captions as separate, editable elements in the timeline. That icon indicates a source clip with embedded captions. Read more here: support.apple.com/kb/PH26866?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US
A Synchronized Clip that contains no media.
The yellow tips at the tops of the waveforms indicate audio that is close to peaking or distortion.
A Browser clip that is expanded and continues to the line below (torn right edge).
A Browser clip that is expanded and continues from the line above (torn left edge).
The end of a Browser clip (clean edge).
SEARCH
An empty Browser search box.
The Browser search box with an active text search.
The Browser search box with an active Keyword search (blue key icon).
The Browser search box with an active search (blue icon).
TIMELINE
Playhead with skimmer active.
Playhead with skimmer inactive.
From the left, Skimming is active, Audio Skimming is active, Solo is active, and Snapping is Active. When any of these icons are gray, it means they are inactive.
A selected clip, group of clips, or region of clips.
A disabled clip (top) is invisible/inaudible; the image of the clip is dimmed.
A soloed clip (top), all other clips are silenced and indicated in black-and-white.
The hashed area indicates that portion of an audio or video clip that is used elsewhere in the same project. (View > Show Duplicate Ranges)
A selected transition.
A portion of the Timeline that needs rendering (orange bar in earlier FCP Versions, white dots in current versions).
A Timeline marker.
An unaccomplished Timeline To-Do marker (To-Do).
An accomplished Timeline To-Do marker (Done).
A Timeline Chapter marker with poster frame indicator (the round thingy).
A gap clip.
A placeholder clip.
VIEWER
The first frame of a Project in the Timeline, the filmstrip on the left.
The In of a selected clip, square angle bracket in lower-left corner.
The Out of a selected clip, square angle bracket in lower-right corner.
The last frame of a Project in the Timeline, the filmstrip on the right.
Past the last frame of video in the Timeline, the dark band on the right.
Transform controls are active in the Viewer.
Trim controls are active in the Viewer.
Crop controls are active in the Viewer.
Ken Burns controls are active in the Viewer.
Distort controls are active in the Viewer.
SUMMARY
Here is a link to a summary of alert icons that Apple has available on-line.
I’m sure there are more that I haven’t found. Send me what you find and I’ll add it to the list. As always, I’m interested in your opinions.
62 Responses to An Illustrated List of Icons, Symbols and Alerts in Final Cut Pro X [u]
Newer Comments →-
Philip Snyder says:
May 25, 2015 at 5:25 am
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Alfred says:
May 25, 2015 at 7:30 am
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Gloria Messer says:
May 25, 2015 at 9:20 am
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Chuck says:
May 29, 2015 at 8:34 am
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Todd Gallant says:
June 9, 2015 at 5:53 pm
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Larry says:
June 9, 2015 at 7:41 pm
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Tony Gay says:
June 21, 2015 at 6:16 pm
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Larry says:
June 21, 2015 at 6:19 pm
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Tony Gay says:
June 21, 2015 at 10:05 pm
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Gloria Messer says:
April 20, 2016 at 7:38 am
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Larry says:
April 20, 2016 at 8:33 am
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Dick Walters says:
April 23, 2016 at 8:43 am
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Michael says:
June 28, 2016 at 8:02 pm
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Larry says:
June 28, 2016 at 8:06 pm
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Donald Van Wyk says:
October 21, 2016 at 11:33 am
Newer Comments →Great idea, Larry! This is a valuable asset! Thanks for taking the time to do this, especially on a holiday weekend.
Thanks Larry. This will be very helpful.
Larry,
Your list of icons and symbols are a fantastic resoursce
Would it be possible for you to prepare the same list
for Adobe Premiere Pro. Thank you so much for all
the wonderful work you do.
xxo glo
Here’s another:
If no clips are selected in the Timeline, a white dot appears on the playhead to indicate the clip whose attributes are shown in the Inspector
Hi Larry. Great resource. Thanks!
I have another for you. Some of my GoPro MP4 clips in the event browser have a little white square in the upper left corner with a ring of 12 black “dots” (they actually look more like elongated dots) that looks a little like a clock face.
I was initially puzzled by this but I think I figured it out. That symbol appears ONLY on clips that were shot at 120FPS on my GoPro. I’m guessing perhaps the symbol appears on clips that have a frame rate that’s higher than 60 FPS – the highest possible frame rate for a project.
Just a theory. Maybe someone else can confirm?
Is there a way I can upload an image to show you?
Todd:
Great theory. Send me a screen shot to larry at larryjordan.com so I can verify your theory and add it to the article.
Larry
Hi Larry
I have just come across an error that I have not seen before and noticed that you do not have it in your list either, the area where the waveform appears is red and the thumbnails area is black. this has randomly affected clips in the event from two cameras.
The following is a link to a screenshot showing the browser and also a Multicam timeline.
http://digital-image.com.au/videos/TG/
I have had this project open many times and it only today that this has appeared.
I have a number of libraries for this particular project, I have opened them all and one other is also displaying similar symptoms.
The media is all still in place, EX3 and 5D MKii
The vision from both cameras has been affected.
I have tried;
relinking, no missing footage
reimporting, nothing
deleting the render files, all
deleting preferences
If I find a resolution I shall get back to you.
Regards
Tony
Tony:
Hmmm… I don’t know. Let me try to find out.
Larry
Update;
I tried opening from my backup drive with the same results, I opened a backup from the autosave folder, a file from 12 months ago, and the symptoms were different but the net effect of the vision not being there was apparent.
I opened the FCPX library package (ctrl click> show package contents) and copied out the original media folder to run the Corrupt Clip finder, with this folder outside the Library I tried re-linking the clips, no joy, I then tried reimporting the clips, this seems to have worked, it reimported 74gb of files and transcoded them, again, and my browser no longer has the black and red clips!
The green clips I figure they are some type of duplication from the process of trying to fix the issue, I had to wait for the importing to complete and then as I was unable to select these files was able to right-click on them and select Move to trash.
In Summary
Symptoms
Audio waveform replaced by Red
Thumbnail replaced by Black
Vision & Audio missing
Solution
Close library
in finder go to the library, control-click the affected library file and select Show Package contents
move the “Original Media” folder out of the package and into another folder
open the library in FCPX
Using the menu Import the vision from this Original Media folder, this will copy the files back into the library and relink all the files, as this is a copy process make sure you have enough space on your drive for this.
In my case as my vision was from an EX3 (XDCAM), FCPX by default copies the media files into the original media folder and then transcodes them, having deleted all render and transcoded files earlier in the trouble shooting process, they needed to be transcoded again.
An issue that occurred during this process was that the clips used in multicam clips lost their audio, in the project inspector it was there though and the clips in the browser had audio. I resolved this by turning the audio on and off using the checkbox in the project inspector, for the clip in the project, not the clip in the browser.
I was able to duplicate these results with the other library that was exhibiting the same symptoms.
I hope this helps someone down the track.
Tony
also some more details on the apple forum
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7092742
Great article Larry.
Would love to see a list of icons & symbols for Premiere.
We are finding a lot of bugs in Premiere.
How do we report them to Adaobe??
thanx.
xxo glo
Glo:
Good question on where to report bugs, let me check with Adobe and report back.
And I’ll keep the list of icons et al for Premiere in mind for the future.
Larry
Thanks much, Larry. Very helpful for us folks who don’t use this program all the time.
Thanks for the list, Larry. Can you tell me what it means when I’m trying to search for a file and I get four white stars in a field of purple? It seems I cannot open these files. They don’ seem to be deleted files but they cannot be opened.
Any help you can offered would be appreciated.
Thank you!
Michael:
This is the icon for a Library. The file you are looking for will be inside it.
Larry
BIG thanks Larry, this is just what I needed. Really helpful