Plan a project

Create a project, drag in the assets that belong together, and use it to drive the whole pre-production pass.

A Project Tag is the planning layer of ReelChest. It isn't a timeline. It isn't an assembly. It's a labeled bundle that lives in the sidebar, holds the assets and tags that belong to a real-world deliverable, and lets you treat that bundle as one thing when you ship it to FCP.

If you're working on multiple deliverables out of the same source pile (a wedding plus a teaser plus a same-day-edit, three different sponsor cuts of one shoot, a documentary alongside its B-roll archive), this is the layer that keeps them straight.

Create a project

The sidebar has a section called "Project Tags." Click the + in its header. An inline name field appears. Type a name. Press Enter.

That's it. The project lands in the sidebar immediately, sorted with the newest at the top of the unstarred bucket.

You can give it a color from the seven-color palette (gray, green, purple, blue, yellow, red, orange) and star it to pin it above the unstarred ones. Both are optional. The project name, the color, and the star are visible in the sidebar so you can pick one out at a glance.

Two ways to populate

This is the part worth understanding. A project bundles assets through two channels at once:

1. Assets you add directly. Drag any asset (or a multi-select of assets) from the grid onto the project's row in the sidebar. They get attached to that project. The inspector also has an "Add to project tag" button that opens a searchable picker. Or, with an asset selected in the grid, hit p (no modifiers) for the same picker.
2. Tags the project subscribes to. Open the project's grid view (click the project in the sidebar) and add tags to it via the tag-management row at the top. Every asset that already carries any of those tags now shows up in the project view too.

When you view a project, the grid shows the union of both: every directly-added asset, plus every asset matching any of the subscribed tags. So if your project subscribes to "interview-Jane" and "broll-studio", and you also dragged in three SFX clips, you see all of them together.

This is the thing that makes Project Tags worth the effort. You can pre-tag your library generously (the way you'd tag any clip), then subscribe a project to a tag combination and watch the project populate itself. New footage that gets the right tags later just appears in the project automatically.

Multi-select moves

The inspector adapts when you have several clips selected:

• A "Projects on all selected" section shows pills only for projects that every selected asset belongs to. Click an X on a pill and it removes all the selected assets from that project at once.
• "Add to project tag" applies the chosen project to every selected asset.

So you can stamp a project assignment onto fifty clips at once, or undo it just as fast.

Rename, recolor, delete

Right-click a project in the sidebar to rename, change color, star/unstar, or delete. Settings → Projects gives you a full table view (sortable, searchable) with per-project asset counts and a "Delete empty projects…" batch button for cleanup at the end of a season.

When you delete a project, the project record goes away. The assets inside don't. The tags the project subscribed to don't. You're only removing the bundle, not the contents. The confirmation dialog says exactly that, so you don't have to second-guess.

What this is not

Project Tags are not Paper Edits and not Mosaics. There's no timeline, no playback, no assembly. A project is purely the answer to "which assets belong to this deliverable." For the actual cutting, you use Paper Edit or Mosaic, and a Paper Edit can absolutely live inside the same project (the project has the source assets; the Paper Edit references them).

The pattern that works: project first, then editing. Make the project, populate it with everything that might end up in the deliverable, do your tagging and color-labeling there, and only then start a Paper Edit or a Mosaic against that bundle.