scale multiple clips without pasing attributes??

Hi there,

I have a 20 minutes fcp project which consists of 7 tracks video which are layered on top of each other. The clips of each track have been scaled down so that I see seven mini screens next to each other. The seven mini screens (each of them represents one of my tracks) are of different size/scale. Now I would like to scale multiple (around 300) clips, so that they all end up beeing 30% bigger. The usual answer for this would be: use copy and paste attributes. This doesn't work in my case though, as all of my clips are of different scale and if I copy/paste attributes I end up with one and the same size for each clip which would be a desaster.
I would love to be able to just select all the clips I want to blow up and in the canvas' wire frame view drag the frame bigger. So that all clips get bigger simultaneously without losing their relation to each other. I know that it is possible to do this by sending the edit to Motion, the problem is that I worked with a lot of filters which all get lost on the way (Sending to Motion does not send filter information). I hope there is an easy work around and would be so grateful for every little suggestion.

Thanks in advance
Alex

Select all the clips you want to scale, nest them(opt - C), and then scale the nest.

That should work for you

>I would like to scale multiple (around 300) clips, so that they all end up beeing 30%
>bigger.

I would advise copy and paste attributes, actually... This is because the footage gets "rasterized" before you blow it up in the nest, so you realize that you end up with the footage looking a little pixelated.

Eg. scale clip down to 30%, nest, scale original clip back up to full frame, render and watch the pixelation...



www.strypesinpost.com

> I would advise copy and paste attributes, actually..

He can't because not all the stills were originally at the same size. So to paste one

You could also try adding a Basic 3D filter to all the clips. That filter has a Scale function and so you can apply it globally. However, I'm not sure what it would look like. I never use it for this purpose; I would go one by one through the stills and scale them up individually.


www.derekmok.com

Select the clips and Send to Motion. In Motion select all the clips and drag the scale parameter in the Inspector. It'll scale each clip proportional to each other.

Andy

You need to scale as a group in order to keep your spatial arrangement correct, nesting or sending to motion to get them all into a layer is the best way to go.

Motion/AE would probably be a better way to go about this... They were designed for compositing.

Adding a basic 3D filter will be good if you are scaling up, since the filters are rendered before the motion tab, which means, you'll be scaling up, then scaling down. That is better than scaling down then up (which you will definitely lose a lot of resolution). Hopefully this makes sense.

However, since they're different clips, I don't think they'll scale proportionately.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks so much everybody for your answers! A couple more questions came up in the meanwhile:

Re. Nesting:
I tried to nest my tracks before - the problem is only that as soon as one nests a track with scaled down footage in it and scale it up again it looses its resolution. The reason is because a nested sequence pixelates everything within, means there is no real connection (resolution-wise) anymore to the master clips. Is this right, or am I missing out on something?

Re. Motion:
Motion would theoretically be the ideal solution for my problem. The bummer is only that by sending a track or a sequence to motion you loose all applied filters and I used a lot. I find this quite restricting. I don't see a way to reapply all filter information automatically after getting the footage back from motion into Final Cut?
Or: it would work if one could get the media manager to export all used clips + the ones with filter information. Basically a way to "bake in" the filter info into the master clips. But I guess this is too specialized.

Re. basic 3D filter:
I can give this a try - it sounds like it could work. I am wondering though how much it will compromise the quality of my clips. I will make a couple of tests.


Thanks again to all of you!

Alex

>Re. Nesting:

Losing resolution is what I mentioned earlier. Due to the order of the filters, the footage is scaled down, so it loses pixels, then it is scaled up, so whatever pixels that are left after scaling down are enlarged. So you start seeing pixelation.

Adding the 3d filter should produce a different result, since you first enlarge the footage, then scale down (unless I'm remembering this wrongly). You lose less as a result.

Motion/AE, etc, these are more suited to jobs like this. FCP is an NLE. It can do some compositing, but it's not built as a compositing tool.



www.strypesinpost.com

I think you're making this more difficult than it needs to be. You have 7 mini screens representing 7 tracks of video according to your OP. Am I to understand that each clip in each track has a different scale (300 clips with different sizes)? Or is it that each TRACK contains clips, all the same size, but different in scale to the other tracks (7 different sizes)? If the first, see below. If the second, all you need to do is paste attributes 7 times, one for each track. That would certainly be faster than round-tripping to Motion or spending days to find a work around.

Quote
Alex
The bummer is only that by sending a track or a sequence to motion you loose all applied filters and I used a lot. I find this quite restricting. I don't see a way to reapply all filter information automatically after getting the footage back from motion into Final Cut?

This is what I call editing yourself into a corner. This speaks to a workflow issue that has existed since the NLEs began having compositing and FX capabilities.

In the film world a film isn't colored until the picture is locked. And special FX sections have placeholders. The point is that it seems as if you were trying to get a finished look before you finished building your effect. Unfortunately, this means that you'll have to do some work over.

Either you leave everything in FCP and resize each clip individually (a time consuming process), or you do the round-trip to Motion and resize quickly, but reapply the filters in Motion to match what you used in FCP.

I'm not sure that there's a quick and easy answer for your problem.

Andy

Andy,

just to clarify (didn't want to get too deep into detail): I am working on an edit which consists of 7 channels which had to be edited simulateously, as it is going to be a film which is running on 7 differents screens at the same time. Each actor has its own screen and they are all communicating with each other. In order to do this edit I scaled seven tracks down in FCP so that I see them all next to each other. When I spoke about filters I actually meant the flop filter, which I used a lot as I did a lot of mirroring in the edit.
As the actors all act in front of pitch-black backgrounds we decided we wanted them to change position a bit or scale them in or out slightly so that they looked nicer in relation to each other. This decision we made in the very end. It's a rather complex project and some decisions have been made on the way - that's how we ended up editing ourselves in the corner a bit as you said. Our very last step is blowing the individual channels up to their full size again without losing their slight repositioning and resizing. This all wouldn't be a problem at all if we hadn't used the "flop" filter so much. Motion would have done a great job for us. But now it looks more and more that we have to go the tough way of either resizing and repositioning clips individually or replacing the hundreds of flop filters by achieving the mirroring effect through motion tab and going the MOTION way afterwards.
You are totally right that FCP is not the right programm for more elaborate compositing, but After Effects or MOTION are not exactly the right programms for editing and we had to do it somewhere. Thanks for your help anyway! At least I know that there apparently is no obvious solution to my problem. Best, Alex

Sounds like there was little you could do to avoid it.

However, have you considered that it might be faster/easier to replace hundreds of flop filters in Motion, then to individually scale up hundreds of clips?

Motion has a flop filter, and you can select all the clips you want to flop all at once and either group them, or flop them individually, but at the same time.

Might take less time than rescaling all those clips manually in FCP.

Andy

That might be an option Andy - I will give this a try! Thank you very much,
A