multiple clips in split screen

This is my first time playing around with FCP X, and although I have a few creative ideas, I am finding it hard to manifest in reality.

For starters, would someone be kind enough to point me in the direction of a tutorial/brief instructions on how to have multiple clips being shown in a splitscreen format?

How many clips are you wanting to play on the split scree ?

I would either like to split the screen into quarters and have four different clips simultaneously, or have one main clip in the background with three other clips flying across the screen over the main one.

Too ambitious?

If you want to do it manually, I would use the mask effect (or just crop) in conjunction with the position/size of the video clip, and stack the clips on top of one another. However, if you have to do a lot of it, or want easier controls with animating the screens, you should use a plugin. Here are two:

www.crumplepop.com/fcp-split-screen/

tokyo-uk.com/fcpxeffects/splitanimator.html

Thank you very much!

So the blank spaces in cropped clips will essentially remain transparent and display whatever video is in the underlying clip?

I need to read up on plugins...not sure about the concept. Are they essentialy effects shortcuts?

Yes that's right. You can try it yourself easily by stacking two clips, one on top of the other. On the top clip, you can crop it, and you'll see that the clip underneath will show through. You can also crop with the mask effect, which will give you four points and let you feather it also.

Plugins are usually third-party effects or templates. They will give you pre-built options and a bunch of controls that you can tweak. For split screens, it can be a real time-saver. Pretty much all effects are essentially "shortcuts" because is saves you from creating the look from scratch.

Thanks for the tip....didn't realse quite how easy it was to use the crop function and stack clips!

What exactly does the mask effect do? and do I apply it to the topmost clip?

Or, if you want to retain all of the clip's contents, adjust the size parameter for each down to 25%, move around inside the frame as you with (Position parameters), tweak to taste.

help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.1/#verfc8a4713

I'm getting good results with what you folk have recommended so far.

Any suggestions as to how to get the clips to fly across the frame? Or is it just a matter of timing the transition effects?

Keyframe position parameters.