Tutorial: Using Compound Clips in Apple Final Cut Pro X
Working with compound clips in FCP X is similar to nesting sequences in Final Cut Pro 7. Once you understand how it works, and how changes to compound clips can ripple across projects, it's a powerful feature that you'll find yourself using more and more.
Making Changes to Compound Clips
Now in dealing with compound clips there's one massive caveat to keep in mind. Changes to a compound clip, whether in the timeline or up in the event browser, will ripple backwards, or ripple everywhere globally.
So, if you change, say, the color saturation of one clip in the compound clip in the timeline of your current project, you may think you just made the changes to this one instance of it. However, it rippled to every other instance you used in any project, including the parent clip in the Event Library, in real time.
Now there are several ways around that. One is to make changes to the compound clip rather than the footage inside of it. For example, we're outside of the compound clip, we highlight the compound clip. And say we want to make a global change, like we want the whole thing to be black and white. We can go to saturation, and drag it down, making the compound clip in this current project all black and white. But if you go up here to its parent, it did not inherit those changes.
Another way is to actually change the reference for the clip to a new parent clip so it doesn’t change the other clips associated with that parent clip. Unfortunately, there's no shortcut for this.
So what you have to do is, highlight the compound clip, go up to the clip menu up here, and choose Reference New Parent Clip (Figure 11, below). This created a new referenced parent clip called Narrative Opening Copy. This is almost like a retroactive way of copying the clip--making a new parent and linking this current compound clip to the parent. You can change the name to your heart's desire.
Figure 11. Referencing a new parent clip.
Now you go back to the original parent clip and it's safe, because now it's affecting only the new parent clip. See, it's the blue and the green.
The third way is to simply make a copy of your parent compound clip. So you can go ahead and highlight it, go up to the File menu, go down to Duplicate Clip or keyboard shortcut Command-D, and make a copy of it (Figure 12, below). So now you can drop this copy of the compound clip into your timeline, and make changes to it which will ripple back to the copy, but leave the original intact.
Figure 12. Duplicating the clip.
The fourth method of making changes to a compound clip and avoiding it rippling to every instance and every project is to simply break apart the compound clip, make the changes while it's not a compound clip, and then just make a new compound clip. To break up the compound clip and put it back on the timeline the way it was before you made it a compound clip, hold down Shift-Command-G on your keyboard to break apart clip items. Now you can make changes to the clips as needed. Once you’ve made your changes, you can make it a compound clip again.
In the example used in this tutorial, where I changed the clip in the primary storyline to black and white, FCP X is going to make a new parent called New Narrative Opening (Figure 13, below), and all of the primary storyline of the speech is going to be in black and white.
Figure 13. Duplicating the clip.
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