Efficiently Removing a Filter Effect

Say you have several filter effects stacked up in various clips in a timeline and you want to globally remove one. An example:

You have applied filters throughout clips to adjust the levels, color correct and make broadcast safe. You decide you have gone too far with a particular color correction and you want to globally remove the filter and give it another stab rather than stacking up another layer of color correction...

The solution I see is to select the timeline and remove attributes, then reapply but this seems rather crude. I have tried to use the find function but cannot get it to play nice with this kind of search and replace.

What is the best way to strip out a particular filter in the timeline?

My way of doing this is to click open the filters in the browser, then toggle 'open' on the canvas.

Then delete the filter you want, go to the next edit with a keystroke, delete the filter etc etc.

Long winded, but it keeps the settings of the other filters and avoids having to open each one up as well.

Peter

[www.peterwiggins.com]

If it was only a few edits this approach would be practical. The timeline I am talking about has over 400 edits in it with 2 camera angles.

I can do a *find* on the camera angle and then apply a filter but how does one remove a filter amongst several applied throughout the timeline and do it within a minute? There must be a way.

> The solution I see is to select the timeline and remove attributes, then reapply but this seems
> rather crude.

Unfortunately you've painted yourself into a corner there. You can easily apply the same filters by using Copy and Paste Attributes, but if some of your clips have additional filters, you have no choice but to do it by hand -- Remove Attributes would kill those as well. Seems like you guys may have jumped the gun in applying colour correction filters to every shot?


www.derekmok.com

OK, so I got it down to 800 key presses

Actually, it shouldn't take that long - have one finger on each command.

Peter

[www.peterwiggins.com]

I would do it this way

1. Make a new timeline. Copy and paste in to it one example of each camera angle. I think you said it was only two, so that's a big bonus.

2. Adjust these examples to be exactly as you want them to be. So - remove unwanted filters, tweak remaining filters.

3. Go to the main timeline. Select all the clips to be changed. Remove attributes > Filters.

4. Go to your fresh, correct clips on the second timeline. Select the camera angle 1 clip and copy.

5. Go to your old timeline and search-select all the camera angle 1 clips. Paste attributes > Filters.

6. Repeat for cam angle 2 clips, copying in the filter pack from your good example on the second timeline.

Good piece of lateral thinking Jude. I could simply lay over another layer of color correction but I wanted to know if there was a way to deal with this issue in my case and on a broader scale.

Programatically it would be easy for Apple developers to add layer of boolean search and replace in the timeline to deal with filters or even allow a global reordering of the filtration layers. I am surprised considering how *mature* FCP is that this kind of functionality is not in the application.

Thanks Jude.

What's about XML?

Andreas

Yes Andreas, the thought did strike me. I was going to dive into the XML out of interest to see if it is relatively easy to parse out the lines but I think I will do it on some files that are not "production" ones.

EDIT:

Andreas I see you have developed some tools to deal with XML in FCP!