Video triptych in Final Cut Pro

[David Roth weiss]

Put your three layers so they run simultaneously on V1, V2, and V3. Then select each layer one at a time (double click) to load into the viewer, and adjust the parameters such as scale and position in the Motion Tab.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Nick Meyers]

for doing motion effects, i find working in the canvas to be much more intuitive.
make sure you turn on the “Image & Wireframe” mode in the canvas.
you find that under the third small pulldown menu at the top of the canvas. (And viewer)

motion tab is great for fine-tuning the parameters.

for the sort of thing you are doing, though i’d also highly recommend Digital Heaven’s “BOX” filter.
this will let you crete your triptych frames, and then be able to control the framing of the shots within those frames.

cheers,
nick

[Steve Eisen]

CrumplePop SplitScreen!

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group

[Nick Meyers]

the crumple-pop plugin has some problems for me,

one is it’s based on pre-set shapes,

the other is a much bigger problem for me.
all the clips live inside one holder clip.

i imagine this would make it pretty hard to EDIT the clips.

when you’re lining up a split screen, you really want to be able to control how the clips interact.

nick

[Andy Mees]

A one size fits all (and free) option to check is Piero Fiorani’s Quarter PIP plugin : https://web.mac.com/piero.fiorani/PieroF_FCE_Effect/Quarter_PIP.html

But this isn’t a hard thing to do yourself just as David described above … I would probably set up my 3 sequences separately and then nest those sequences into the master sequence on the 3 separate tracks, cropping and reframing each as required tho, rather than doing it for each clip.

[Arnie Schlissel]

Triptych, diptych, polytych are a painting words. The film/video word is “splitscreen”.

Like a triptych painting, each window in your splitscreen is separate. You can do what David says & simply build it on 3 different tracks. Use the Motion tab & the wireframe in the canvas to size & position your 1st 3 clips into the 3 windows of the splitscreen, they you can “Paste Attributes” to all of the other clips on each track. If you want to crop & size some of the clips differently, then the common settings are still a good starting point.

One word of caution- if you’re working with interlaced video, then you must make sure that the vertical or Y coordinate of each clip in you triptych is an even numbered integer. If they sit on the wrong line of video, they will reverse fields and look jaggie (aliased).

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Nick Meyers]

no reason we cant use “painting” words
triptych is much more expressive of the effect than “split screen”
i’d consider “Split screen” to be a bit under-parr to describe the effect in the video above.

if the effect is not much more than a simple repo that can be applied to every shot,
then yeah, copy & paste attributes is fine.

if you need to repo the shots within the frame, then that gets a little harder,
but basic principle of three tracks of video is the same.

you may have to lock the other tracks when you go to speed mod a clip.

nick

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Nick Meyers] “no reason we cant use “painting” words”

I didn’t say you couldn’t, but not everyone in the film & video post business has been properly schooled in medieval and renaissance alter paintings.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Eric Johnson]

With no intention of jumping on your back, Triptych was also used as a film term to describe use of 3:1 aspect ratio. An example would be “Napoleon”.

Granted not a widely used descriptor, but still used.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’d do this with travel mattes. Walter Biscardi has great tutorials here on the cow. You’d make three white squares and composite the three pieces of video over them. This will require more rendering but the control is very easy as you won’t have to worry about the crop. You can simply scale and position the clips in the Luma matte you have cut. It makes swapping clips much easier.

Jeremy