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FCP 5 and Transitions with Boris
I posted this on the Boris Cow as well.
My last system was a Media 100 system. With M100 I could drop a Boris transition in the timeline, just like a crossfade and it rendered perfectly (no timing issues and did not have to deal with wells). Now with FCP5 I can drop the transition wherever I want but when I go into boris there are now numbers where the video should be. So, with very little effort, I learned to drop the video into the video tracks on the control tab before entering the boris application. Then when I go into boris I now have video instead of the numbers representing tracks. The problem is timing. The transition is now out of sync with the flow of the video. Is there a quick way to apply the boris transition and have the flow of the video transition properly as if I had just applied a crossfade. I am sure this is a very simple question. In M100 it was a drag and drop. What is the shortcut in FCP5?
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8 Replies
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I think I know what you’re asking. I learned to use FCP and Boris at the same time, which resulted in much confusion. For a while I just could not get the Boris Transitions to work. The I finally got a grasp of it. If you’re asking how to do a Boris Red Transition in FCP, here’s one way to do it without placing a copy of your video in the numbered video wells; Boris uses your actual clips:
The clips where the transition is taking place have to be on the same track on your time line, butted up end to end at the points where the transition is to begin and the transition is to end. There also needs to be enough extra unseen overlapping footage to create the transition for the duration you seek.
Click on the seam between the clips. This will highlight the place where the transition will go. Select Effects > Video Transitions > Boris > Boris Red Transition. A gray Boris Red Transition symbol appears where the clips meet.
Make sure your playhead is over the transition. Double clip on that Boris Red Transition symbol to open the Boris Red Transiton in the Viewer. In the upper left, enter the duration of your transition in seconds and frames.
Then double clip on the red Boris Red customize bar, where it says “click for options.” This takes you into Boris Red without leaving FCP.
Choose your transition from the Library and be sure you click on “Apply” at the bottom of the Boris Timeline window when you’re ready to return to FCP. This will apply the transition to the clips on your FCP timeline. This method results in the video used in the transition being in sync with the clips the transition is going between.
Hope this helps.
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First question I have to ask is… What version of BorisFX do you have? If you are running version 7, that’s your problem. Version 8 is compatible with FCP 5, version 7 has many, many problems.
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Wayne Carey
wcarey@strikeking.com -
Randy, thanks for the tip!
Mike
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Oops! Sorry!
I gave you some information in error when I said your clips needed to be “butted up end to end at the points where the transition is to begin and the transition is to end.” What I should have expalined is that you need “overlap”–frames from your clips not shown on the timeline, beyond the the out point of the outgoing clip and before the in point of the incoming clip, necessary for the transition. Half of the transition for each clip is taken up by the overlap and half is from what is shown on the timeline, depending on the transition’s duration.
It took me a while to figure this out from the manuals. I kept fighting the thing, trying to make transitions longer in duration without success, until a co-worker suggested leaving ample off-timeline overlaping frames. In some cases ut mean recapturing clips with more frames before and after.
Again, hope this helps.
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Mike, Randy is explaining what are called trim handles. one of the biggest timeline differences between media 100 and fcp is that in media 100, you can usually ‘see’ the trim handles in the timeline. For instance in media 100, clip A in track A dissolves to clip b in track B. In the media 100 timeline you see clip A then an arrow then the transition in the f/x track then another arrow at the end of the transition then clip b in track b. at the end of clip A there’s a little part of the clip left that’s hanging over the transition, that would kind of be the equivalent of a trim handle in FCP. In FCP the transitions happen on the same track. I bet you are trying to put one clip on top of or underneath one another which works fine for some things but once it comes to a third party app, you are wondering how in the hell to dissolve/wipe/boris from one to the other. As long as your clips have enough trim handles in FCP, you create the dissolve in the same track. SO if your transition is 30 frames long each clip would have to have at least 15 frames of trim handles, which you will not ‘see’ in the timeline as easy as you can in media 100. If you try and put a one second transition between two clips and the transition only ends up being 1 frame long, that means one of your clips has no trim handles. This is hard to explain in words, but would be really easy to draw. Once you figure out this in FCP, it’ll help you along the way to realizing FCPs strengths in pure editing over M100, let alone compositing. I switched a few years ago and while it took some learning, it’s been really good for me and also my editing. Learn as many keyboard commands as you can stand and once you get a few down, you’ll realize you can move the entire timeline in one step, which would have taken you at least three steps, a mouse move, and three key keyboard stroke in M100. You’ll be flying in no time.
If you are unsure if your clip has trim handles, you can either double click it and look in the viewer and see if there’s any media beyond the in and out points, or, you can hit s (the slip tool) and click and hold the clip in your timeline. You will now see how long (or short) the clip really is. This might be too much information, but hopefully you can learn something from this.
Jeremy
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“Trim Handles”–I knew there was a proper name for those thingies.
Thanks.
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One more thing:
A trick I sometimes use when I don’t have enough footage to capture for proper “trim handles” is to make a freeze frame clip in FCP (it’s a choice under “Modify”) and render the clip and frozen frame as a quicktime movie with a length sufficient for the needed trim handles. Depending on the type of transition, the frozen frame part of the QTM might not be seen or be obvious in the transition.
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That’s interesting. I’ve found the opposite to be true. I use Boris 7 with FCP5 every day with no problems. I tried version 8 when it first came out and had many problems. I’m curious as to what problems Boris 8 fixed for you.
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