Changing speed without pushing the timeline ?

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

You need to adjust the speed of your clips BEFORE they are edited to the timeline.
But you can solve this problem afterwards by adjusting the matching “original” clip(s), then editing these newly adjusted clips to replace the one(s) on your timeline.

On the timeline: Put the cursor on the FIRST FRAME of the clip you want to Slo-Mo or Fast-Mo.
But do NOT double-click IT into the viewer, but hit the F key so a “match-frame” of the original clip appears in the Viewer.

Then, adjust the speed of the clip in the Viewer (Cmd-J) to any percent you want.

Next, on the timeline, use REPLACE to change-out the regular-speed clip with the newly speed-adjusted version.

Your other clips will all stay in place.

[Bret Williams]

All good. Except it doesn’t matter what frame of the clip you’re on. It’ll bring up the clip with the ins and outs marked.

The reason you can’t adjust it in the timeline is because you’re making the clip longer or shorter. FCP doesn’t know what frames it can delete or add to keep the clip the same length but change the speed.

IMHO though, it should simply default to just clipping off extra frames or lengthening the clip and let the user deal with it after that. Rippling the timeline is pretty extreme and no application should ever do that unless the user specifies. That can really screw up a project.

[Andy Mees]

as Thax said, except don’t use match frame to the “original” (using F) … the problem is that this doesn’t match frame to the original (source file) but rather it match frames to the ‘master’ clip — any speed changes you make are applied to this master clip, and will therefore affect all subsequent instances of that clip (or at least until you change the speed again)

the method can work, but instead, use CMD-OPT-F (Match Frame to Source File) … this loads a ‘temporary’ copy of the real “original” (which was Thax’s intention, i think)

to better understand whats going on, take a look at the title in the Viewer window:
double-click a clip in the timeline … the viewer window tells us we are looking at clipname from sequence name
this is an affliate (or instance) of the master clip
match-frame a clip from the timeline (F) … the viewer window tells us we are looking at clipname from project name
this one is the master clip
match-frame a clip from the timeline (using CMD-OPT-F) … the viewer window tells us we are looking at clipname
this is the original source clip

it’s considered temporary as it belongs to neither the project or sequence and exists within the project only until another clip is loaded into the viewer. any changes you make are not applied to the source media, but only to the instance of the source that you use.

cheers
Andy

[Debe]

I find this frustrating, too.

I have taken to picking up the clip from it’s place in the timeline, dropping it at the end of the timeline, changing the speed, exporting it out as a self-contained movie, importing it back in and re-editing it back into the sequence where it all started.

It’s a pain in the tushie…but it solves two problems. It takes care of the rippling issue, and when I run Media Manager, I end up with an independent clip of my speed-adjusted video to archive, since Media Manager seems to have issues with managing media that had speed changes.

debe