STYLE SHEETS

STYLE SHEETS

The ability of the 3-Way Color Correction filter to apply itself to 1 or 2 clips ahead is great, but what happens when you want to make a change globally throughout a long project. It?s common to correct your movie and then after playing it back change your mind about a look that you gave to clips. I'm sick of viewing a project the day after I've applied color correction filters to 50 clips, only to decide that I wish it was a little warmer. It would be easy to make global changes if there were ?Style Sheets.? You create a style for the Jack close-up and a style for the Jill close-up. When you decide that you wish Jack was warmer, you change the Jack style and THEY ALL CHANGE. Of course, this wouldn?t be limited to Color Correction?it could be used for all filters and attributes?pretty much anything.

Your client comes in a says he hates the orange text--he wants yellow. So you have to go through 47 text generators correcting the color of each. Not if it's a Style--change one!

Style Sheets would have the simplicity that they have with iWorks Pages. You'd apply filters/attributes to a clip, go to a Style Drawer, create a Style Based on Clip. Then you select 100 more clips and choose Apply Style. It would take, literally, seconds to do all this... and more importantly, to be able to change all of this. Style buttons could also be placed on the Timeline Button Bar, and there could be keyboard shortcuts.

Doesn't this seem like a no-brainer for something that would be used in virtually every project?

Mitchell Rose
[www.mitchellrose.com]

> When you decide that you wish Jack was warmer, you change the Jack style and THEY ALL
> CHANGE.

There's loads of ways to do this. Copy/Paste Attributes, dragging a set of filters from one Viewer clip to a selected group in the timeline, Filter Packs, to name just three.

The "automated" aspect that you're talking about may be too intensive. Final Cut Pro is not a colour-grading software and it's not an effects application. It's for editing. I'm guessing they want the power of the software to be going to editing functions. Would be nice if such functions existed, but really, probably a job another software does better.


www.derekmok.com

Thats a nice idea Mitchell, i'd second that.

I love the idea of Apple leveraging the whole "smart" technology ... and what you're proposing could be boiled down to an "Smart Filters" implementation. Smart Filters, Smart Bins, all that smart stuff. Bring it on.

Andy

Yeah I like the Style Sheets idea too. This is how page-layout programs like InDesign and Quark work too, and it's very powerful. If I decide down the road that say, all the sub-heads in an article need to be 1-point larger in type size or a new font then I just change the style sheet and it updates all the text boxes in the document that have that style applied. It's not a big deal if it's a 1-page document, but if you have dozens of pages you really appreciate that level of control. Sure FCP is a different animal, but would it really be too intensive to add this functionality? All it involves is tagging certain elements (like a text layer) and then being able to edit the tags later on. The filter settings might be difficult though -- does the FXPlug architecture allow for global control over filter settings, or styles?

JK

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SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Isn't this the whole point of the Motion Template functionality inside FCP? Also, Digital Heaven's AutoMotion?