From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

Using FrameFlex to modify shots in the timeline - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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Using FrameFlex to modify shots in the timeline

- [Instructor] I'm going to explore the settings for the frame flex effect in the effect editor. And before I do that, I'm going to make a duplicate of this sequence. So I'll select the sequence in the bin and I'll press control D, that's command D on MacOS, and I'll just name this copy of the sequence, "R San Francisco Frame Flex." There we go. And now I'll double-click to open up that copy. You can achieve similar results to the frame flex effect by going to the effect pallet and looking for the resize effect. I'm just typing into the search box at the top and I'll drag this onto one of my clips. If I go into the effect mode now, opening up the effect editor, you can see I have both effects listed. The resize effect allows you to change scaling or position and cropping, but there are a few more options available on the frame flex effect that's applied when you import a mismatched clip. So I'm going to focus here on the frame flex effect and notice that these are distinct. Ordinarily, when you apply an effect on top of an existing effect, you just get one effect icon in the timeline window, but these are two distinct types of adjustment. And the adapter is applied to the clip in the bin. Or if you like, it's applied to the master clip that's incorporated into the sequence. So it's kind of a separate category of adjustment altogether. We don't need to auto nest to put our first effect on top. I'm going to line up my play head and click the remove effect icon to get rid of that resize effect. And now I'll click again to open up the effect editor. This gives me access to the same types of controls that I had in the source settings window. The difference is that now I'm in the effect mode, I'm seeing the results of this frame flex effect in my preview monitor. So if I do something like maybe adjust the size, you can see exactly what's happening. The left side of the composer window is showing me the output and the right side is showing me the controls. I can choose a new aspect ratio. Let's go for full cinema scope widescreen here, and I'll reposition. And you can see that we're getting this squashed a little bit in the reformat menu. I've got this set to stretch. So if I center the image and crop out the edges, you can see the result. And this is because my timeline, my project format, is set to 16 X 9, but I've got my selected region of the clip set to 2.39:1. That's a full, DCI-compliant widescreen image. If I set this to pillarbox and letterbox, you can see I get my letter boxing inside the 16 X 9 image. I'll just set this back to a 16 X 9 crop and maybe reframe the shot just like that so we get the beginning of the bridge. This media is UHD. That's four times the resolution of full HD. So if I set my size to maybe as much as 50%, I'm just going to select the control, type in five, zero, and enter. And that gives me exactly 50% but it's 50% horizontally and vertically, so I can reposition the shot, something like that, without losing image resolution. I'm just going to push up my preview quality a little bit here. So I'm seeing the full image quality on screen. Having access to the frame flex controls right in the timeline is useful because of course, you're making your adjustments in the context of the rest of your footage. And that context can make an enormous difference to the choices that you make.

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