wfolta wrote:Argh. I was following the discussion with interest until I suddenly realized that some people are using compound clips, etc, to do AE-style compositing. Nooooooooooo.... please no! Therein lies insanity, inefficiency, copies upon copies, accidental offsets, and strange menus that pull in keys from other layers that are created only to be immediately made invisible.
I'm not sure how one should draw a line between editing/formatting uses for nesting and misguided compositing.
Sadly, I don't see a future where people won't try to do that. Compound Clip has been used for far more than formatting for a long time.
If you want to grade a clip in the Color page before sending it to a composition, BMD officially recommends that you
wrap it in a Compound clip.
That only works on one clip though. if you want to grade
multiple clips in the Color page before sending them to
one composition, then you need to
wrap it in a Fusion Clip. Unfortunately, if you want to change the grades and effects on the clips after they're fed into the composition, you need open the Fusion Clip as timeline which means you can't see your changes in the context of the composition.
If you want to do that then you need to composite using the Color page. That's fine because the Color page is actually pretty decent for doing some types of compositions but it has some weird limitations. For example, you can't apply effects to Titles in the Color page, so if you want track a title to a clip in the Color page, you need to
wrap it in a Compound clip. If you want to apply a vignette to a Generator you gotta
wrap it in a Compound Clip. If you want to encapsulate that composition into a single clip, you can just select of the used clips and
wrap them in a Compound clip.
The has a lot of other downsides though. Now new Compound clips are being created in the Media Pool for every title or generator you want to include in the composition. If you want to change the settings for those titles or generators then you need to open each Compound clip as a timeline which, yet again, means you have to make those changes without seeing them in the context of the composition. To make things worse, since they technically aren't timelines, you can't apply Timeline Grades to them.
The one big advantage that comes with using the Color page for composition and then wrapping those clips in a compound clip is that that outer Compound clip exists within the Media Pool. That means you can drop that Compound clip into any timeline and, whenever you make changes to it, those changes propagate to all other instances of the Compound clip.
You'd think that would apply to Fusion clips, too, but it doesn't. Dragging a Fusion Clip or Compound Clip into a timeline will drag it in a blank composition. The only objects that can have compositions associated with them in the Media Pool is a Fusion Composition but it's not really treated like a container, it's treated like a black clip that has a Fusion Composition on it. If you use that clip to make a few clips in the timeline, then changing the version in the Media Pool won't change the clips in the timeline. The clips in the timeline actually have no connection to the version in the Media Pool at all. You can delete the clip it was made from in the Media Pool and it won't effect the one in the timeline.
If you want multiple clips in the timelines to linked to same composition, then you need to take whatever clip has the composition on it, whether it be a Fusion Composition, Compound Clip, or Fusion Clip, and
wrap it in a Compound clip.
Effectively, Compound clips become the only way to make instances of Fusion compositions which makes them exactly like pre-comps.
I tried to propose an
alternative to this and other behaviors. but that topic didn't even get to two pages of responses within a year so I guess no one was interested. I would prefer that BMD actually fix the shortcomings in Resolve's VFX workflow and processing pipeline, but it seems people are perfectly happy with using Compound clips like pre-comps to sloppily get around them.
It's scary how much I've seen community members defend behaviors in Resolve that have inherit inefficiencies and instead prefer patchwork solutions that further complicate the software. The answer to a lot of Resolve current problems is to remove and condense, not to expand.
wfolta wrote:But to the extent that the discussion is asking BMD to spend time and effort to enable AE-style compositing, it's scary.
They already spent time on that already since Track mattes and Adjustments clips are part of the Edit page. There's really no attempts by BMD to actually consider how to best integrate features into Resolve as a whole anymore and they see the multi-page paradigm as their excuse to get sloppy.
wfolta wrote:Multi-cam clips make sense totally.
I feel like they make sense until you try the Cut page's method of multi-cam editing. Then you kind of realize how backwards the traditional method of multi-cam is.
It's my belief that Resolve only really needs one clip container: timelines. The only real advantage I can see to Compound Clips is that they're hidden from the timeline list but I'd be just as happy with a "Hide From Timelines List" option in the context menu. That could even be the default for timelines made within other timelines. If any other tools were added for timeline organization and readability, I'd prefer they be something unique instead or four different types of clip containers with slight differences.