Can I do this effect in the Edit page?

This:
https://vimeo.com/763498686/a9c38cdac5

I can do this all day long in Ae and Pr, but in Resolve, when I make a Timeline that's 4380 x 1080 and lay out my shots like this, and use that as a source in a 1920 x 1080 timeline and pan it, but the 4380 x 1080 Timeline displays as 1920 x 1080.

When you drag the clip onto the timeline it shrinks to the size of the timeline? If so, at the bottom right click the gear icon for settings, then go to image scaling and select "center crop with no resizing"

Then in the inspector you should be able to animate the position

I don't think that works with nested timelines George, I seem to recall falling victim to it once, or seeing others report the problem. I've not checked, but I've got a feeling it's a fundamental design flaw in Resolve.

Jim, this is very easy to do in the Fusion Page.

Andy, I'm sure it is easy, once you know Fusion. I don't know much, yet, as I've resisted it.

George, Center With No Resizing is my default, and that's the setting for this timeline also.

Thank you both.

It looks like a serious scaling bug to me. Nesting a timeline should not affect scaling and/or aspect.

I agree, there is a serious bug in the way Resolve handles mismatched resolutions of compound clips and nested timelines. One way to workaround this on the edit page is to 'Render' your 4-up timeline (actually, I tried it by making the 4-up a compound clip rather than using a timeline and then 'Render-in-Place' to get a 7680x1080 video). I then dropped this video on my 1920x1080 timeline, zoomed the clip to 4x and used the position X to animate as you showed.

I would prefer if Resolve treated the compound clip or nested timeline as a 'pre-render' - I'm not sure what the heck Resolve is doing at the moment but it makes mismatched resolutions of these types of clips useless.

One way to workaround this on the edit page is to 'Render' your 4-up timeline (actually, I tried it by making the 4-up a compound clip rather than using a timeline and then 'Render-in-Place' to get a 7680x1080 video). I then dropped this video on my 1920x1080 timeline, zoomed the clip to 4x and used the position X to animate as you showed.

Good idea. I tried a similar procedure, and it still is cropping the very wide child Timeline to HD 16 x 9 in my HD parent Timeline.

I created a new Timeline with the wide dimensions, put the Compound Clip in it, Rendered in Place, and then put the Compound Clip in my master HD Timeline, and the cropping persisted. I have all Timelines set to "Center crop with no resizing."

I must have done something wrong. My child Timeline is 5760 x 1080, and shouldn't need scaling / zoom, just position keyframing. I try not to scale up video.

I can import the Rendered in place cache clip, but that loses the reference to the sources and would be useless for sending the project to my color specialist, unless I include the Compound Clip and replicate my workaround after I get the project back from the colorist.

I don't know why I mentioned zooming by 4x - I'll have to check what I did again. I had only one coffee on board so you never know. I didn't drop the compound clip into the new HD timeline, I dropped the render-in-place mov file that was generated and placed into the bin in the media pool. In my case, that was a 7680x1080 mov file. As I mentioned, this is really just a workaround.

Ah, that's not much different from or faster than using After Effects. Thanks for the clarification.

Jim, if you fancy trying with Fusion, here are the steps for setting up this triptych thing:

1. Stack your 3 clips, one above the other, in your timeline.
2. Select those 3 clips, right-click and choose New Fusion Clip... they will become a single clip instance.

3. Now, with your playhead over this new clip, switch to the Fusion Page... and you should see this:

Screenshot 2022-10-24 at 23.34.04.png (60.65 KiB) Viewed 1265 times

There are 3 'MediaIn' nodes, one for each clip, and they are all merged together : MediaIn1 is merged with MediaIn2; the result is merged with MediaIn3; and all that is passed to the MediaOut.

All good... but we want to arrange our 3 clips as a triptych, so next we need to create a suitably sized background canvas to arrange them on.

In the 'toolbar' area, just above the flow area (see below), there are a number of icons that represent the most commonly used tools/nodes... the very first one, at far left, is the 'Background' node.

4. From the toolbar, drag and drop a new Background node to the flow area.

Screenshot 2022-10-25 at 00.05.50.png (95.67 KiB) Viewed 1265 times

5. Next with the node selected, go to the Inspector window, then 1) switch to the 'Image' tab, 2) uncheck (disable) 'Auto Resolution' and 3) change 'Width' to 5670

Screenshot 2022-10-25 at 21.08.52.png (97.18 KiB) Viewed 1265 times

Now we've created our canvas we need to patch it into our flow.

6. Drag the output from the Background node to the output from the MediaIn1 node... what this will do is automatically generate a new Merge node (Merge3) linking the Background over the first clip.


Our Background node is now merged into the flow... but its not quite right yet... notice how it automatically connected to the 'Merge3' node via a green coloured triangle? That colour denotes a 'foreground' connection, but we want it to use the background element (yellow) connection, so we need to switch the connections.

7. Right-click on the 'Merge3' node and choose 'Swap Inputs'

We're nearly there.. we've got an ultra wide 'background' canvas with our 3 clips merged on top. Now, we just need to arrange the clips side by side as a triptych.

8. Select Merge3 in the flow area and, in the Inspector window, change the Center X value to 0.164 (or as needed)... then select the Merge1 in the flow area and change the Center X value to 0.835 (or as needed).

That's it. The triptych layout is complete, now you can switch back to the Edit Page and pan around as needed.
Using the Fusion Page may feel clunky at first, but once you start to poke around in there you should find it makes sense pretty quickly. If you're up for it, I highly recommend working through BMD's classroom training manual for Fusion... its available as a free download on their training page.

Hope it helps.

Nice one, Andy!

Jim, if you fancy trying with Fusion, here are the steps for setting up this triptych thing:

That's EXTREMELY kind of you to explain this for us, Andy. Thanks so much!

I will give it a try, but...

What If I want to crop some of the triptych panels so that they're not 16 x 9, and I want to do some pan & scanning inside some of the image panels, AND I want to add a colored border separating the panels?

That's an academic / rhetorical question. I don't expect you to work up another tutorial for me.

My other issue currently is that I have a lot of work to do, and I can't shut down to take a course on Fusion, although I may take your advice about the training manual when I have a breather. I did my sample in After Effects in about five minutes, and that's what I'll use to finish up this project.

I've set a pattern with this client to do split screens. I can do simple splits in the Resolve Edit page with alpha and luma mattes. If Resolve was more Premiere-like in this ONE regard (nesting), I'd be a happy camper.

8. Select Merge3 in the flow area and, in the Inspector window, change the Center X value to 0.164 (or as needed)... then select the Merge1 in the flow area and change the Center X value to 0.835 (or as needed).

FYI these numbers are 1/6 and 5/6 (0.1666666667 and 0.83333333333), since the centre of the first image is 1/6 of the way along and the centre of the last is 5/6 of the way along, when using 3 images in this way.


Things get more complicated when the images aren't on screen at the same time and you want to add transitions, can't use this Fusion Clip method for that in my experience, which means a fair amount of hassle is involved. Wish you could just construct it in the Edit page with nesting like in other NLEs (sadly, Video Collage OFX doesn't quite work well enough for this, for some reason it doesn't split the screen perfectly meaning some overlap is created)

What If I want to crop some of the triptych panels so that they're not 16 x 9, and I want to do some pan & scanning inside some of the image panels, AND I want to add a colored border separating the panels?

...

My other issue currently is that I have a lot of work to do, and I can't shut down to take a course on Fusion, although I may take your advice about the training manual when I have a breather. I did my sample in After Effects in about five minutes, and that's what I'll use to finish up this project.

For what you're doing in that video, I'd definitely stick with After Effects. I think with Fusion knowledge you can set up templates that include expressions, but editing clip timings in Fusion is pretty rudimentary. I sure wish that Edit Page nesting worked better.

What If I want to crop some of the triptych panels so that they're not 16 x 9, and I want to do some pan & scanning inside some of the image panels, AND I want to add a colored border separating the panels?

Its all very doable Jim. See the little blue triangle on the Merge nodes? That's the node's 'Effect Mask' input. Add any shape you like to limit what part of the foreground input is merged. Want to pan and scan? We already saw how we can use the Merge nodes own transform controls to move its foreground input source around (though normally I'd use sperate Transform node so it's easier to see, at a glance, what I am doing and where). Want a coloured border? Change the colour in the Background node's 'Color' tab... its opaque black by default but it can be any color and transparency.

My other issue currently is that I have a lot of work to do, and I can't shut down to take a course on Fusion, although I may take your advice about the training manual when I have a breather. I did my sample in After Effects in about five minutes, and that's what I'll use to finish up this project.

100% understood, time is of the essence. Was only hoping to illustrate that Fusion is actually quick and easy to use if you know how. I didn't have a clue about Fusion a year ago. I had a few days free around the time those v17 training books came out, so I worked slowly through the Fusion one (and the Fairlight one). Now I honestly prefer it to After Effects (though I was never and Ae power user).


Meanwhile, for what its worth, I'm every bit as horrified as you (and everyone else) that fundamental design flaw issues, like the one you've encountered here, trying to use a simple nested timeline approach, have been allowed to go unaddressed by BMD for so long. It's shocking really.

... and they (BMD) don't acknowledge the flaw - I'd rather that Peter acknowledge it even if to say that the underlying architectural flaw makes it difficult and costly to fix and so it won't be addressed in the near future (but is on the todo list)...

Funny enough, I've just discovered a mechanism for overcoming this limitation in Resolve. I don't know why I never noticed this before but you can have a timeline working resolution that is different than the output resolution (it's sort of like maintaining a much larger working space than the output space). So in the test I did, I created my first timeline as 7680x1080 to hold 4 1920x1080 clips side-by-side. In this I did my framing and prep work).

I then created another timeline with the working resolution also set to 7680x1080 but with an output resolution of 1920x1080 (which is then what you seen in the timeline viewer and also the resolution rendered on the delivery page).

This seems to overcome the bizarre cropping bug that we've reported in this thread and elsewhere. I'm going to play with this a bit more to see what negative impact this will have, if any.

Funny enough, I've just discovered a mechanism for overcoming this limitation in Resolve. I don't know why I never noticed this before but you can have a timeline working resolution that is different than the output resolution (it's sort of like maintaining a much larger working space than the output space). So in the test I did, I created my first timeline as 7680x1080 to hold 4 1920x1080 clips side-by-side. In this I did my framing and prep work).

I then created another timeline with the working resolution also set to 7680x1080 but with an output resolution of 1920x1080 (which is then what you seen in the timeline viewer and also the resolution rendered on the delivery page).

This seems to overcome the bizarre cropping bug that we've reported in this thread and elsewhere. I'm going to play with this a bit more to see what negative impact this will have, if any.

Great Caesar's Ghost! That works. Very bizarre. But, here's another challenge:

If you have more than one of these wide child Timelines in a master timeline, the parent timeline has to be set to the width of the largest child Timeline. If you change the parent Timeline Settings width after you've added one nested child Timeline or Compound Clip, the keyframing you did in the earlier nests will be off.

I suppose you might be able to prevent some of this outcome by creating your first nest and parent Timeline at something excessive - wider than you're likely to need, like 12,000 x 1080.

I was able to cause a complete computer lockup by trying to create a Timeline at a very high number, like 30,000 by 1080. That's very bad - all work is lost on all open apps. I did get an error message first, about exceeding the GPU buffer. BTW, 30,000 pixels is the maximum Comp size for After Effects - or it used to be for years.

Thanks for the sleuthing, Steve.

I'm not surprised that you ran out of GPU VRAM with a huge working timeline resolution. That's probably one of several drawbacks to this approach. I have to say that I am continuing to play with this approach and so far, this seems like the solution to the nested compound/timeline bug and maybe that's why we've never heard this acknowledged by BMD (although I have to wonder why they didn't point us in the right direction).

One of the more common uses for this technique will be for people reframing their content for social media such as Instagram where you need to go vertical or square from an otherwise 16:9 original timeline. Folks have been dropping their 16:9 timeline into a 9:16 timeline in the hopes of reframing and this simply didn't work. However, had they modified the working timeline space to accommodate the equivalent of their greatest width in 16:9 they would have been able to reframe.

Another issue I have with this wacky scaling and nesting is trying to export screening copies that are 1/4 size.

When I start projects, I often have hours worth of interviews to send off for transcriptions. If there are two cameras, I do a split screen in a Timeline that's 1920 x 2160 to show both angles, one above the other. I've had no luck trying to scale them down to 480 x 540 in the Deliver tab to save upload times for big files. My workaround is to Render (export) them full frame, and scale down in Adobe Media Encoder.

When you say you’ve had no luck scaling down, what exactly goes wrong?

When you say you’ve had no luck scaling down, what exactly goes wrong?

Similar unexpected cropping and scaling issues. Either the exported file is the right size, and the images scaled way up and cropped, or the export is 16 x 9 (not the aspect of my 1920 x 2160 Timeline) and the images are tiny with a lot of black space.

I've tried multiple Timeline settings for the Format and Output, and nesting Timelines without stumbling onto the magic formula.

I've done a fair amount of trade show work with screens that are non-standard aspects, like 3000 x 1000. I'm starting to think that there's no way Resolve could handle with without a lot of hoop jumping or using Fusion (AKA hoop jumping until I take the time to learn it).

Yep - I see it. When you change the export resolution it reframes your 9:16 timeline (for example) in the same way (as if) you had change your timeline settings > output resolution. Bummer. Lots of fiddling.