Quad Screen Effect and Flipped Image

Hello again everyone!

I have 2 EFX I'm trying to achieve:

1) I need to divide my screen into 4 equal sections and put the same image into each section. (Client request, not my idea).

2) Because I'm placing the same 4 images into the 1/4'd screens, I'd like to try and reverse (flip them left to right or vice versa) 2 of the pieces of footage so it's not so damn boring.

I was hoping there was some kind of EFX in FCPX that you could drag a split screen effect into your main window and then just drag the footage you need into each square/rectangle. Am I dreaming or, can it be that easy?

As usual, thanks for all your input and advice in advance!

P

Set the first copy of the clip to size & position it needs o be in. Option-drag to place a copy above itself, reposition. Repeat. Select all 4 together and Compound them.

Hey Ben,

Thanks for your input here. I get the "option-drag" thing. No prob there. Actually getting my clip to be exactly 1/4 a size of the screen is another issue though. Is there a "snap to grid" type of option whereby I can set all 4 clips to automatically snap to a 1/4 grid (or whatever portion of the screen is desired)? I see the yellow grid marker appear when I start to drag my clip around the screen but only when I'm in "crop" mode. It doesn't appear when I'm in "transform" mode which is pretty inconvenient.

An about "flipping" the image horizontal or vertically; how do you do that?

Thanks very much Ben. Greatly appreciated!

The yellow guides (borrowed from Motion) only show the mid point of the frame. There is no "magically arrange like I want" tool. But it is easy enough to do.

I'd use "V" to mute all but one clip. Size and position it. Copy it, then Paste Attributes, paste only Scale to the other three. Then we know they're all the exact same size.

Positioning manually isn't a big deal at all. One thing to remember is that you're not working with perfect squares, so they won't fill the frame perfectly.

Now, go to Preferences > Playback, look at the bottom there for "Player Background" (shouldn't it read Viewer Background?) and set it to checkerboard. This can help line things up like this quite easily. Also, make the Viewer as large as you can while moving stuff around.

When you have the first clip positioned, sometimes, depending on what's where, you can look at the X & Y numbers of the first one, use the negative of that number to position the next one to the other side (side to side or top to bottom).

Also, check preferences to set to read Pixels in the Inspector, not percentages, as you'll get more precise measurements.

As for flipping and flopping, search the Effects for "Flipped". This one effect will both flip and flop. HUGE improvement over the legacy flip and flop filters.

Then again, you could always just build a Motion template if this is something you do a lot of.