Blackmagic Forum

I create video content for businesses and we distribute on multiple platforms. Some require 16x9 some require 9x16. Because of this I film in 16x9 and make 9x16 versions in post.

Specifically I'm going from 16x9 UHD to 9x16 FHD.

The "Use Vertical Resolution" option is great! Thanks for adding that!

My issue is "Mismatched Resolution" still doesn't have an option that works for my vertical workflow.
What I would like to do is bypass this setting entirely, so that my clip preserves its full extents even in the vertical timeline.

"Center Crop with No-Resizing" works to preserve my frame extents if I'm working with the actual video clip itself. However, in my workflow I'm rarely working with the clips themselves. I'm usually creating a timeline where I apply color to the whole clip(s), and then I use Audio Transcription to append sections of that timeline into a new timeline, and then from that timeline I create my final edited videos & create vertical versions of them.

The above is all to say that when you are working on a timeline within a timeline, as we often do for a number of reasons, we lose the extents of our frame when conforming to a vertical resolution.

The only option that preserves these extents is "Scale Entire Image to Fit" but this creates a noticeable loss in resolution, because instead of the scale being set to 50% it's set to 100% even though 100% is actually representing 50% scale. When I scale back up I'm scaling into a downscaled image and losing resolution.

I think what's needed is to change the architecture of how timelines work within other timelines. I've experienced other issues with color management in timelines within timelines, especially if some clips within those timelines have color management bypassed and others do not.

I really believe that fixing this issue would help Resolve stay competitive with Adobe when it comes to editing and creating deliverables for social media. The workarounds now are too tedious and require a big compromise on workflow, or exporting the wide version and creating verticals out of it, but this makes it difficult to make changes down the line and work with subtitles.

Compound Clips, Multicam clips and Nested Timelines all have their own resolution. When you work on one of those, you're not accessing the original media and are limited by the resolution of the Compound/Multicam/Nest.

Given that, I think you might be better off not nesting your timeline. Copy/Paste clips instead, so you have full access.

I understand that they have their own resolution, their resolution is determined by the timeline resolution. If I was limited by the resolution of the compound clip, nested, or timeline I wouldn't have an issue. My issue is I'm limited by the aspect ratio (not even the resolution) of my working timeline.

If my compound clip is 3840x2160, shouldn't I have access to all of those pixels in a smaller 1080x1920 timeline?

Currently I have to decompose compound clips, but this is an extra step and makes creating multiple deliverables for the same edit very time consumptive and difficult, especially if the client asks for revisions.

jasonedelstein wrote:If my compound clip is 3840x2160, shouldn't I have access to all of those pixels in a smaller 1080x1920 timeline?

You do.

(Just tested in Studio 18.6.3 on Windows 10.)

jasonedelstein wrote:I understand that they have their own resolution, their resolution is determined by the timeline resolution. If I was limited by the resolution of the compound clip, nested, or timeline I wouldn't have an issue. My issue is I'm limited by the aspect ratio (not even the resolution) of my working timeline.

If my compound clip is 3840x2160, shouldn't I have access to all of those pixels in a smaller 1080x1920 timeline?

Currently I have to decompose compound clips, but this is an extra step and makes creating multiple deliverables for the same edit very time consumptive and difficult, especially if the client asks for revisions.

I had that same problem. It's if pixels are missing.

Jim, not necessarily. There is actually a bug with nested Timelines, Compound Clips, and Mulitcam Clips in vertical resolution timelines. I believe it only shows up if the footage has been transformed, or effects applied to it within that nest. There could be other factors but I haven't done extensive testing.

Here's a screenshot of footage inside a compound clip. The footage has been scaled up a tiny bit.

And here's a screenshot of that compound clip in a vertical timeline. I've scaled down the compound clip so you can see the clipped edges.


The edges of the pixels are cropped off and none of mismatched resolution settings fixes it. There's something strange about how Timeline resolution works with nested items. It's as if it ignores the dimensions of the nested item itself and instead references the media inside of it when factoring in Mismatched Resolution scaling. I think any Timeline, Compound Clip, or Multicam Clip should have static, unchanging dimensions just like any source footage does.

There's lots of advice on the forum to just not use compound clips or nested timelines, which might be a necessary move. They have the potential to be so handy though, so I think a feature request like this is important to show Blackmagic that we do, in fact, want them to work properly.

The current way around this is to not actually make your Timeline resolution vertical, keep it at 3840x2160, and instead change the Timeline's output settings to 1080 x 1920. This has some downsides but at least your images are not getting cropped.