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Clip picture

Every clip plays fitted inside the reel's frame: the whole picture showing, with bars where its shape differs from the frame's. Scale crops in from there.

Scale a clip

  1. Select a clip on the reel timeline.
  2. Set Scale in the settings panel, or choose Fill Height or Fill Width.
Control Does
Scale Zooms from the center. 1.00 fits the whole picture, larger crops in, and smaller shrinks it into more letterbox. From 0.10 to 10.00.
Fill Height Sets the zoom so the picture fills the frame top to bottom, cropping the sides if it is wider than the frame.
Fill Width Sets the zoom so the picture fills the frame side to side, cropping the top and bottom if it is taller than the frame.

The viewer shows the crop as you change it, and each change is one undo step.

Shot clips and image cards have a scale. Color and title cards already fill the frame.

What happens

  • The zoom stays centered. There is no way to pan the crop yet; see Position and letterbox.
  • Export Video crops exactly to the scale. The viewer is a close preview of it.
  • Export Timeline writes the scale into a Final Cut Pro XML timeline, where it matches Shotwork only when the footage is the timeline's frame size. Otherwise, check the clip's scale in your editor. An OTIO timeline carries the scale as a note for your editor, not applied.
  • Speed never changes. Shotwork does not slow clips down or speed them up. A clip at a different frame rate from the reel is covered in Reel settings.

Position and letterbox

Not built yet

Per-clip position and letterbox are not built. Roadmap, reel feature backlog, "Per-clip reframe".

With a clip scaled in, set Position to choose which part of the picture stays in the frame, instead of the center. Letterbox and Fill choose, per clip, whether a picture whose shape differs from the reel's frame shows bars or fills the frame.

Compare two takes

Not built yet

Compare mode is not built. Roadmap, reel feature backlog, "Per-clip compare mode".

Set a clip to compare against a second shot, such as a lighting pass against the final render. Split shows the two side by side, Wipe reveals one across the other, and Toggle cuts from one to the other. Compare belongs to the one clip: a reel has a single video track, and never a second.