Very difficult to click/drag corner handles to resize crop/ken burns

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Very difficult to click/drag corner handles to resize crop/ken burns

I'm using FCPX 10.1.4 on a Macbook Pro Retina 15 (mid-2012), Yosemite 10.10.2. However, I've seen this problem over the previous several releases of FCPX, and also in OSX 10.9.x

When using the Crop/Ken Burns editor, the corners of the area are bracketed with blue handles (or red/green for the ken burns edit).

Here's how it's supposed to work, as I understand it:

To move the crop region, you click within the bracketed area and drag to move the crop-window over the source material.

To resize the crop region, you click a corner bracket handle, and see the bracket change to a slightly larger bracket, then drag it in/out to make the area smaller/larger.

However, I find that most of the time, when I try to click/drag one of the corner handles to resize the area, it instead acts as a move operation.

Even worse with the ken burns editor, often the click toggles between the start and end crop regions, when I really wanted to just resize one of the regions.

In short, I find these brackets unbelievably fidgety to click/drag for resizing/cropping. It almost always doesn't work right, so I find myself wasting a lot of time with click/drag/undo, try again, click/drag/undo, try again, etc, until finally the click works as the intended resize.

I've tried everything I can think of- modifier keys while clicking, click and hold a moment, double-click, etc.

Is this a bug, or am missing something?

Thanks,

John

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Feb 27, 2015 9:19 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 27, 2015 9:36 AM in response to johnplanetz

I don't have problems with the Trim or the Crop tool, but with the Ken Burns tool it can be sometimes tricky to hit the right spot.

I went and experimented a bit, as I don't use Ken Burns very often.

I can offer two little tidbits from my experience:

1) Cursor size: I am in the habit of having a larger cursor (by using the Accessibility in System Preferences), because, especially when using two displays it is easier to spot where it is. I found that this makes it trickier to know where the active cursor spot is. Reducing the cursor back to normal makes hitting those green and red corners much easier

2) Changing from start to end in Ken Burns: if you want to hit, say, a green corner which happens to be *inside* the red frame, and you have red (end) selected, you have to click first to select green (start), and then click and drag. Otherwise your click will register as a drag of the red frame. No such problem if the aforementioned green corner is outside the red frame (then click and drag immediately works). This makes sense, but it was not obvious to me at first.

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Answer 2

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Feb 27, 2015 3:30 PM in response to johnplanetz

One thing that can be a big help in working with the bounding box handles is to choose a smaller display size for the frame in the Viewer. Typically, the display will be set to Fit, which can make working on the Viewer difficult. Reduce it to say, 25% and I think you'll find it easier. Of course, this doesn't really apply to your Ken Burns effect issue – just the bounding box adjustments.

Russ

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