Spacial Conform with Sync Clips

Hope you can help me out here guys.

Cutting a short film shot on RED at 5K 2:1 (5120x2560)
And we will be mastering to 4K 1:90:1 (4096x2160)

The issue I'm having is that as these aspect ratios are not the same if I edit footage into the project I get black bars top and bottom. Now normally I would just set the Spacial Conform setting on all clips to "Fill" however in this case all the clips are synchronised with audio so in reality are compound clips.

Setting the spacial setting on a compound clip has no effect on it's contents so I have to open it up and set the spacial conform inside each shot one by one.

Is there something I'm missing here? Can anyone think of any other way I can get around this problem?

Hi Seanus,

I hate to disappoint you but there is a known bug in the way FCPX deals with synchronized/compound clips and Spatial Conform.

Rule of thumb when working in any workflow using synchronized clips with video that needs to be reframed on the timeline is either to set the correct Spatial Conform to the video before you synchronize it to the audio, or to synchronize as a multicam clip. Spatial Conform does work with multicam clips on the timeline, not with synchronized/compound clips.

Many of us have already reported this issue to Apple, please do the same so they get this solved in a next update.

If you don't have many synchronized clips it's not a big deal opening each one of them in their own timeline and do the conforming clip by clip. You can do the first one manually, then copy/paste the reframing to the others.

If you do have a whole bunch of them you might consider if it wouldn't be better to re-synchronize your media as multicam clips.

Of course you always can use the Transform tool to reframe any synchronized clip on the timeline without having to open it, but I'm not sure how much this adaptive scaling will affect the video quality. As you are going from 5K to 4K I don't think this will be noticeable.

Thanks mate.

Wasn't aware it was a bug. Sadly there are hundreds of clips and they've all been synchronized.
I was handed the project after all that grunt work had been done so looks like I'm stuck with it.

I might try the transform option, I guess I can always remove it if it doesn't work properly on the proxy media.

Cheers!

Oh, by the way: if you are bringing your edit to Resolve for final grading you don't have to worry about Spatial Conform in FCPX at all, as this does not translate to the original media in Resolve (9) anyway. In that case the Transform tool does a much better job.

If you are finishing in FCPX any reframing will be carried over from the Proxies to the original media.

Great info thanks very much.