Favorites Part 2: Adding and Applying Favorite Filter Effects

Yesterday, we began our week-long examination of setting favorite effects (transitions, filters and motion settings) with a discussion of how to set and invoke video and audio transitions. Today we continue by looking at how to set up favorite filters (both video and audio) and how to quickly add them to clips in your timeline with shortcuts.

SETTING UP FAVORITE FILTERS

You can either save an individual effect or a group of effects as a favorite (which is very handy if you plan to apply several identical filters to numerous clips in a project).

Dragging to favorites Bin:  If you have applied filters to a clip and you have double-clicked it open in the Viewer, you can drag the individual filters directly to the favorites Bin directly from the Filters Tab in the Viewer. If you select multiple filters in the Filters Tab and drag them over, they will exist as individual filters. You cannot save a group of filters by dragging, but you can certainly create a new bin within the Favorites bin, give it a name, move multiple filters into it and later use it as a group (more on this shortly).

Using Menu Commands: Here also, you will need to open up the clip in the Viewer and, if you select an individual filter (or say, 2 out of 3 applied filters, or even all of your applied filters) and use the menu command Effects>Make Favorite Effect, you will send the selected filters to the Favorites Bin as individual favorites. If you select NONE of  the filters and use the menu command, ALL of the applied filters will be sent to the Favorites Bin as a group. Yeah, this business of setting up filters takes some getting used to.

Using a Keyboard Shortcut: Using the OPT F keyboard shortcut for saving favorite filters works exactly the same way that the menu command does. If you have one or more applied filters selected in the Filters Tab in the Viewer (or all), they will be saved as individual favorites. If you have none selected, they will be saved as a group.

Bear in mind that, as with all effects, you can also save them to a bin in your individual project (which is great for favorites that you’ll only use in one project–this helps reduce cutter in your universal favorites folder. Remember though, that you cannot call these favorites up with shortcuts.

APPLYING YOUR FAVORITES

OK, so you’ve set up some favorites and you want to start using them on clips in your timeline. Once again, you have several options. You can certainly drag filters directly down to your clips with your mouse and here’s a neat thing: if you have saved a group of filters in a bin of its own within the Favorites Bin (which you’ll recall from above section that this occurs automatically when you save your favorites as a group, but you can certainly create groups later by organizing favorite filters into bins), you can simply drag that group’s bin down to a clip and all contained filters are applied. This is very handy if you have a set containing say, color correction, “bad film” and noise filters configured to create a special look that you want to apply consistently to several clips in your project.

Note that these groups of filters are usually most handy for specific projects that call for a one-off treatment and you might want to save them in the Project Tab rather than the Favorites bin in the Effects tab. You won’t be able to invoke them with a shortcut, but you can’t use shortcuts for groups of filters anyway, so this is the best way to go in many such cases.

You can also invoke individual filters via the Effects>Favorites menu and I think this is pretty intuitive. Note that you do NOT need to have a clip opened in the Viewer to use the menu, just make sure it’s selected in the timeline. Easy peasy.

Finally (and here’s the payoff), you can invoke your favorite video filters via the following easy to remember, intuitive shortcuts!

These will apply, respectively, the first 4 video filters in your Effects>Favorites (the Favorites under Video Filters, that is–there are several Effects>Favorites options in the Effects menu). Remember that the order of appearance of these shortcuttable favorites is based on the order in which they appear in the Favorites Bin, so you may want to append their names with numbers if you want them to appear in a certain order (as I do).

Here are the shortcuts for the first 4 audio filters in your Favorites collection:

Wait a minute… did I lose you back there when I called these shortcuts “easy to remember and intuitive?” What? You still don’t see the beauty of these seemingly ungainly and random numbers and letters? Think you can’t remember them? Well, you sure can and we’ll address that on Thursday!

THE BIG KEYFRAMES CAVEAT AND A WORKAROUND!

OK, before we close today, we need to talk about the “keyframes” problem. You’d think that if you keyframed some of the parameters of your favorite filters, it would be nice if the keyframes could be saved along with the favorites and applied to new clips, but that’s a very quirky problem with FCP–at least for me. When you save a filter, it does in fact save the keyframes. Problem is, how and where they are applied is very unpredictable when you add them to other clips of different length. I think the odd behavior has something to do with how much handle is present in the original clip and the new one, but I’m not sure. I am sure of one thing though: it simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Instead, just use the wonderful Paste Attributes command (OPT V) in situations where you want to copy filters and keyframes from one clip to another (or many) clips. Hit CMD C to copy the first clip (to which all your filters and keyframes have been lovingly applied) then OPT V to send the filters to other clips. Note that you can either maintain the exact keyframe positions OR you can scale them to the length of the clip to which you are applying them. Simply check or uncheck the “Scale Attribute Times” button (see illustration at left) in the Paste Attributes pop-up.