Post-edit color correction adjustments workflow

Imagine that you have clips A, B, and C, which are recorded in different environments and therefore needs different type of color corrections to match up. You want to cut these clips up and mix them in the timeline, so that for example you get something like this: A1, B1, A2, C1, B2, A3, C2, et cetera.

What would be the best way to be able to make color correction adjustments after you've started to edit your project and have them show up everywhere instantaneously? The only way I could think of would be to import A, B, and C into the timeline, make compound clips of each of them, and then edit using these compound clips. If you later wanted to do a color correction adjustment, you could just open up the relevant compound clip, change the settings for the clip within it, and then have that change appear everywhere the parent compound clip was being used.

This method seems a bit cumbersome but I really can't think of any other way to do it. Do you guys have any suggestions?

You could

Select A1, Ctrl-Click>Open in Timeline, make your colour correction to the clip (i.e. the whole of clip A), go back and do the same for B1, then C1.

You've then colour corrected all three clips, and all the edits in your timeline will reflect that.

Unless I'm missing something...

ffg wrote: You could

Select A1, Ctrl-Click>Open in Timeline, make your colour correction to the clip (i.e. the whole of clip A), go back and do the same for B1, then C1.

You've then colour corrected all three clips, and all the edits in your timeline will reflect that.

Unless I'm missing something...

Well, doing this to for example A1 only affects A1, not A2, A3, A4 and so on.

Today I test what you mention FFG but you first have to color correct the clips and then make the edit, if you make the edit first and then go to the clips and color correct them it wont reflect the change in the timeline.

The only way I find out in how to do this is convert the whole clip in to a container and then edit and then every change I made to the container (Color correction or any FX) it will reflect in the timeline.

Ricky Dominguez
Luna Films
Puerto Rico

You have to do the open in timeline and color correction in the browser before you edit the clips into the timeline.

rickytin wrote: The only way I find out in how to do this is convert the whole clip in to a container and then edit and then every change I made to the container (Color correction or any FX) it will reflect in the timeline.

You're referring to creating a compound clip?

Tom Wolsky wrote: You have to do the open in timeline and color correction in the browser before you edit the clips into the timeline.

But this doesn't solve my original problem, right? I won't be able to change the color correction settings for all the clips after I've edited my piece if I change my mind or want to make some minor adjustments, or?

The simplest way is to correct one clip. Copy it. Use the search function in the timeline index to find just those clips. Select them in the timeline index and use paste attributes.

Yes Speldosa compound clip, sorry.

Ricky Dominguez
Luna Films
Puerto Rico

If you didn't initially open in timeline all the clips to color correct them before you cut them in, you can pretty easily copy and paste color corrections at the end. If you named your clips properly, they should be easy to pick out and sort in the timeline index. From there, just select all the As and paste a color correction, then select all the Bs, and paste another correction, etc. You could also assign roles to your video and copy/paste by role. Neither of these methods are "instant," but they're pretty easy to do.

Tom Wolsky wrote: The simplest way is to correct one clip. Copy it. Use the search function in the timeline index to find just those clips. Select them in the timeline index and use paste attributes.

Great! That's actually quite useful, and using this technique in combination with the tag feature could probably be quite powerful.

The workflow I suggested earlier in the thread was wrong, I'm sorry. I've been working a lot recently in Multicam mode and that works differently - in MC mode, if I edit a MC clip, select one clip from it and then open it in the timeline, I can make colour corrections to the various angles within the MC clip, and when I return to the main timeline, these changes are reflected in all the edited clips (those which relate to the MC clip I just corrected, of course)

I assumed that the same workflow could be applied to single clips in the timeline, but it appears that it can't. If I select one of the edited clips in the timeline and 'open in timeline' (so I am now looking at the whole of the parent clip, without edits) and then colour correct it, when I return to the main timeline the changes are only present in the clip I selected, not in any of the others edited from the same parent clip.

This seems illogical to me - why not allow the same behaviour as for multicam clips? What advantage is there in opening a clip in its own timeline if the changes you make to it aren't applied to each instance in the main edit?

ffg wrote: The workflow I suggested earlier in the thread was wrong, I'm sorry. I've been working a lot recently in Multicam mode and that works differently - in MC mode, if I edit a MC clip, select one clip from it and then open it in the timeline, I can make colour corrections to the various angles within the MC clip, and when I return to the main timeline, these changes are reflected in all the edited clips (those which relate to the MC clip I just corrected, of course)

I assumed that the same workflow could be applied to single clips in the timeline, but it appears that it can't. If I select one of the edited clips in the timeline and 'open in timeline' (so I am now looking at the whole of the parent clip, without edits) and then colour correct it, when I return to the main timeline the changes are only present in the clip I selected, not in any of the others edited from the same parent clip.

This seems illogical to me - why not allow the same behaviour as for multicam clips? What advantage is there in opening a clip in its own timeline if the changes you make to it aren't applied to each instance in the main edit?

Well, when working within a multicam clip, you'd have the same result if you just applied an effect to one of the angles without open it in the timeline (unless you've made cuts for that angle within the multicam clip itself that is).

I think that the "Open in Timeline" feature is meant to be used from the browser so that one can apply effects and make adjustments to selected clips without having to place them within a project. Also, Final Cut Pro X seems to handle a range selection of a certain clip as an individual clip, meaning that if you define multiple in and out points for a clip in the browser, you now have several "clips" instead of just one (for example, you have to apply tags to each individual selection, rather than just tagging the whole source clip and having the tags spread to all the individual selections). That's probably why changes made through the "Open in Timeline" feature of clips in your project doesn't affect other clips that are taken from the same source material.

But yeah, it seems like the "Open in Timeline" feature should be disabled for clips that already have been placed in a project (when one tries to access this feature through the clip in the project). The only thing it seems to be doing is to obfuscate changes made to the clip. For example, if you place a clip in your project and then change the scale of it within the "Open in Timeline" feature, the clip will have a different scale when viewed in the project, but the scale parameter will remain unchanged when looking at its properties through the inspector.

It's quite confusing I must say.

Thanks for this. I'm learning FCPX after years working with audio workstations and I suppose it's inevitable that while some functions and concepts in FCPX bear a close similarity, some are very different and therefore seem very odd to me!

Onwards and upwards...

This reminds me of this thread:

www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...rrect-clips-in-event

starting at post number 3.

Jonathan

Quite.

I suppose in some situations it's probably helpful to treat each edited clip as if it is separate from its parent clip, but it would be handy to have an option to have changes made to a whole clip be reflected in any parts of it already edited in the timeline.

It's also quite confusing that changes to a parent clip (e.g. colour corrections) are not shown in the inspector for a an edited segment clip. It makes it harder to trace what I've already done to the (parent) clip.

I guess if you ask 10 editors how they would like to see FCPX changed you would get 10 different answers.

There is no parent/child relationship between clips in FCP. Each is a separate representation of the original media file.

Yes, for me, for every time I decided to make CC changes to an entire original clip, there would be many more times that I just wanted to uniquely tweak the color of the specific section used in a timeline instance. What would be useful is if when you did color adjustments to a timeline clip, there would be an option to "apply these changes to every instance from the source media in this Project" or something.

I just get the first clip from the media as close as I can, then Copy Attributes. Then I make further tweaks to each clip in the Project as needed.