compound clip cropping when scaling/moving

Question

compound clip cropping when scaling/moving

Hi editors.

I have a very complex "scrapbook" movie where there are "pages" with clips of video or photo montages or whatever and the camera zooms in to each of these in turn as they play.

Each of the segments is a compound clip with various media in it, and its placed somewhere on the screen.

This works really well in 90% of the film. BUT there are a few places that when I scale up and move to frame one of the compound clips, IT STARTS TO CROP from one side or the other. These clips all play fine when the frame/page is full-size, but as soon as I try to add movement and scale in order to fill the screen, they go haywire. I have no idea why. A few of these problems just randomly went away after I did something, but I can't seem to replicate this consistently. Does anyone know what is happening? I've tried moving both anchor point and position but it seems to be the similar results with the wiping.

I'm attaching two frames below: the first shows the fullscreen with 3 compound clips, the second shows what starts to happen when I'm scaling up and moving. One of them wipes left, the other wipes right. As I mentioned, this does not happen in most of the film.

Help please!

Mac Studio, macOS 14.7

Posted on Sep 28, 2024 2:06 PM

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Answer 1

fox_m

Level 6

12,595 points

Oct 4, 2024 9:51 AM in response to Javier Bonafont

The only way I can see this happening is if you added transform effects (or transitions — keyframes or templates) to the clips **inside** the Compound Clips. (You obviously added borders to the Compound Clip layer as they don't move with respect to the background.)

There's a lot more information that's needed about what exactly you're doing here. What effects do you have applied to the clips inside your compounds? How, exactly are you zooming into the images from the storyline — with Transform controls/parameters? Or, Effects (if so, which effects)? Are these Compound Clips within Compound Clips? Is there anywhere in your treatment of the clips within the CCs where you changed their Z position?? (This cannot be done with the regular Transforms... but can be done with many different kinds of effects.)

If you Opened these two clips in their own timeline (Open Clip from the Event browser) and added some kind of effect or transform... forgot about it... and added the clips to their own compound clips, you can open the compound, select the clips and simply **turn off** (or delete) any transforming effects that might be applied to them. [This will not affect the settings you have in the Event Browser clip(s).] [Effects added via Open Clip are not visible in the Effects inspector when those clips are added to the storyline — they are "hidden".]

Other than what's stated above, there is really no way those clips should be moving inside the CCs like that.

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Answer 2

fox_m

Level 6

12,595 points

Oct 4, 2024 10:23 AM in response to fox_m

I left out a step — sorry — when inspecting a clip within a compound, you can double click the compound to open it in its own storyline, but you need to select the clip(s) inside and go to Clip (menu) > Open Clip to see if there are any effects you added from the Event Browser version.

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Answer 3

Oct 4, 2024 10:56 AM in response to fox_m

So, there aren't any effects used at all. The clips in the compound clip are having attributes changed like scale and position, but no added effects. Likewise in the main timeline, I'm not adding any kind of odd effect, just using the basic transform scale/position/anchor controls to move about the screen.

To be clear, the clips are not "moving" but rather are being cropped or wiped as one applies position/scale changes to the main timeline. They do NOT do this if I play the timeline without adding any scaling or transitions, so on their own the compound clips play fine in the timeline. But as in the example images, if I scale up, I get this weird wiping/cropping. If the problem was an effect inside the compound clip, wouldn't it happen regardless of what scale I was at in the master timeline? But it doesn't, the problem is directly tied to where I am moving the XY parameters and Scale on the timeline. If I leave it fairly 'wide angle' it's all good. This should not be how compound clips behave AFAIK.

I have several of these "pages" of images in the project built I think identically, and this problem only occurs with regard to a few of the compound clips, and I can't figure out what could be the difference.

My workaround was to basically export and reimport the compound clips as media files, but the question of why this was happening remains.

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Answer 4

Oct 5, 2024 7:38 AM in response to Javier Bonafont

Javier Bonafont wrote:

So, there aren't any effects used at all. The clips in the compound clip are having attributes changed like scale and position, but no added effects. Likewise in the main timeline, I'm not adding any kind of odd effect, just using the basic transform scale/position/anchor controls to move about the screen.

If I may interject, I think that the fact that the clips inside the compound are being scaled and positioned cannot

be ignored. In a sense, they are having the "effect" of scaling and positioning being applied. Even if it is not named an effect, it can potentially interact with what is done outside the compounds in which the clips are.

It would be interesting to see an xml of this. In this case, it would have to be not just of the project, but at least the event so we can look at what is applied to the clips.

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