Transitions in compound clips

Hello FCPX Experts,

I'm having a little trouble with the following scenario:

I have a compound clip with a few transitions (fade to color mostly), that I want to use as a picture in picture, so the compound clip is scaled down and layered on top of another clip.

It works fine until I come to the transition, which not only affects the compound clip, but also the underlying clip. See attached screenshot (with a simple blur transition), I've also tried to have the compund clip in the main storyline.

I've experienced this a few times with transitions in compound clips - is it a known behaviour, and is there a way to avoid it (short of moving all the contents of the compund clip to the main storyline)?

Best regards,
Jörn

Many transitions effect multiple layers. It's the way they are designed in Motion. Fade to color is to a color solid so it will not have transparency.

What specific transition are you using? Because I'm trying to replicate the issue with several transitions, and they all work fine for me.

In your screenshot, the map is not effected, from what I see.

BenB,

in the screenshot I'm using a the "Simple" transition from the "Blurs" folder. The compund clip is in the top left corner of the image and you can see it bleeding horizontally and vertically over the underlying map clip. It looks as if the border pixels of the compund clip are continuously replicated in all 4 directions.

I have recreated the situation in a new project:
choose two clips and make a compund clip
open the compound clip
add a simple blur transition to the two clips
close compund clip
drag another clip to the timeline
drag the compund clip on top of the clip in the timeline
scrub to the location of the transition
wonder what's going on

All clips are 1920x1080, 25 fps, and from the same camera.

More screeshots showing the effect (before and during the transition) are here:
www.dropbox.com/sh/yrge62dwvlxksm8/ralJtl6z1c

Best regards,
Jörn

Forgot one step in the recreation instructions:

...
drag the compund clip on top of the clip in the timeline

+++ resize the compound clip to 50%

scrub to the location of the transition
...

OK, I now see it is unique to the Simple Blur. Zoom & Pan blur has a similar issue, stretching the CC across the full frame. The other blurs seem to be fine. I've tried many other FCP X and 3rd part transitions, and everything else I'm trying seems to work just fine. I also notice they're the only 2 blur transitions you can't open in to Motion, so they must be coded. Bad code, bad!

Report this to the FCPX dev team via the feedback page.


A workaround would be to mute the Primary Storyline clip, select the two clips transitioning as a range, export. Oh, resize them to 100% first, also. Then with the transition "baked-in" you can import and use it. Not elegant, but if you need that specific transition, it is a workaround.

BAD Simple Blur, bad transition! Go stand in the corner!

BenB,

thanks for checking. Might have tried other transitions myself (bad, bad me! ), but since Fade to color also shows the fault, I didn't really think of checking other transitions as well.

Thanks a lot for your effort! I wrote a bugreport to apple, replaced the transition with simple crossfade, now it works.

Best regards, Joern

Hey, I just tested something, and this is very interesting.

Don't use a Compound Clip, make a Secondary Storyline with your Connected Clips. Then apply the Simple blur transition. Try it out, let me know what you think.

Basically it stops effecting the Primary Storyline clip. BUT it also bleeds outside of the Secondary Storyline's frame, when the individual clips are shrunk for a PNP effect. Different, not exactly right, but interesting...