[Tim Mackey]

I use compound clips a lot, I just wish it was possible to edit them in place within the main timeline. It can be annoying in some situations having to pop in and out of the compound clip to see what’s going on in the main timeline.

[Tim Mackey]

[Bret Williams] “Glad it helped! Now get back to us when your timeline looks like this – “

Ha! If I double the tracks in my tallest section, I think I still wouldn’t match that. ?

[Tim Mackey]

[Bret Williams] “[…] You’re not holding it wrong after all. ?”

Thanks for that explanation, it makes me feel more comfortable 😛

I ended up taking your suggestion and lifting clip 2 from the storyline along with it’s transitions—this experience finally made it clear to me what the “Lift from Storyline” shortcut is meant for! Super quick solution.

Just for fun, I also made a new transition with a color matte in Motion. It works well, but now that I grok the purpose of lifting clips from the storyline, it makes more sense to just do that.

Thanks for all the help!

[Tim Mackey]

[Noah Kadner] “Next the Transition and white matte together into a compound clip and see how that effects it.”

Yeah, that’s more or less what I’ve been doing, it’s just kind of annoying to doit this way because if I need to adjust the alignment on anything I either have to break the compound clip apart, or just eyeball it as I flip back and forth between the main timeline and the compound clip editor.

[Bret Williams] “If clip 2 is full screen, you can also achieve what Noah suggests by putting clip 2 above clip 1 but below the text and simply dissolving clip 2 in.”

Now that’s an obvious solution! That would definitely make things easier. I only wish though that there was a way to do this while keeping everything on the primary storyline—any time i’m forced to move my primary clips above the primary storyline, I feel like I’m reverting to track based editing and there must be either something wrong with what I’m doing or an oversight in Final Cut that breaks the usual editing paradigm.

Since I run into this issue fairly often, I’m thinking about just making a new transition type in Motion that adds custom color background mattes to the in and out clips. I’ve tinkered with Motion a bit, and this doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to do.