Reformat vs resize

I’ve noticed when reformatting, as opposed to resizing, you do not get the option to edit the filtering settings, is there a global setting somewhere for this?

Anyone?

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I had this same thought recently but don’t the clips in the timeline stay in there original format even though the timeline had been reformatted?

This was reformatting in the media panel after importing a whole bunch of 6K motion control takes, before doing the VFX, so not the timeline.

No tweakable setting for reformat.

As far as I can tell, reformat is a fairly old and dead tool. I haven’t touched it since I learned you can copy and paste timelines into differently sized other-timelines. Reformat has, on many occasion, wrecked timelines for me and has always been a last resort.

Best option if it’s pre-work is to re-import with your desired settings.

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Interesting… but how does this work? Making a new reel with the same number of tracks and copying e.g. all tracks (high resolution) from reel 1 to the low resolution tracks of reel Thanks for explaining!

It’s way easier than that.

Right click on the reels, make a new sequence. Resolution and color bit depth are all that matter so you can make it a 1 frame sequence with 1 track.

Then go to your old sequence and select everything—all tracks—and hit Ctrl-C, then go to the new one and hit Ctrl-V. It’ll all be in there and you can adjust any resizes as needed.

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Wow it’s not only totally easy but it did work at the first attempt :slight_smile: Thank you very much Andy for the promt help!

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What confuses me is the fact that right-clicking the new “United Sequences” (displayed as stacks of frames) indicateds the new resolution,
but clicking on a segment in the TL indicates still the old resolution (but now turquoise colored) .

Do you have an idea why the “reformat” is not reflected in the timeline?

PS 1:
Reimporting the clip after exporting it, shows the new resolution:)

PS 2
I am on Flame 2021.2

Heya @joe99 - The reformat operation changes the attributes you change for the sequence only, but doesn’t change the media inside of the sequence.

In this case it’s important to understand a little more about timelines, aka sequences in Flame. A timeline can have a resolution, framerate, bit depth, duration, and any media inside of that timeline can have those attributes be the same or different from the timeline. When you reformat the timeline you aren’t really affecting the media inside of the timeline, although I do know that “things” do happen to the media inside of the timeline when you reformat but that’s another story.

But I’m with Andy Dill here, I don’t like reformat, and I much prefer to take the approach of making a new Sequence with the settings I want and then just lifting the media from one sequence to another.

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Thank you Jeff for the reply! I think I confused you with the term “reformat”.
I just lifted the media from one sequence to another as Andy Dill recommended.

It does work, but probably I do not really understand it…
I defined the new resolution (divided in half).

Option - right clicking the new sequence(stack of frames) in the new Timeline reel, the newly defined resolution is indicated, the AR is still the same,
but it looks like zoomed into the shot, on all sides of the shot, "material " is missing.

What I am doing wrong?

When you put media into a timeline and that media is not the same resolution as the timeline, flame automatically applies a resize effect. The default (found in Prefs> Tools/TLFX>Timeline FX Resize) is “center/crop” so all resize effects applied in that timeline will be set to “center/crop”

Because your new timeline is half the resolution of the media going into it, the edges are cropped out by the resize node’s current settings.

I change the default to “crop Edges” (which takes the shortest distance of width or height and matches that to the edge of the frame).

“Letterbox” is the opposite of that–it takes the longest distance and put that at the edge of frame, adding black to the top and bottom (or sides) to make up for any resolution difference.

“Fill” is the chaotic option: it will match both width and height to the timeline’s resolution and I avoid it in almost all cases.

NOW, because you have already made your timeline, changing the default seeing will not change THAT timeline, so you either have to go into all the resize nodes and change them manually, or change the default preference and make a new timeline. I believe you can select all the clips in the timeline and change the resize on one and they will all follow.

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Alternately, if you just want a half rez version of your main sequence, you can Crop Edges or Letterbox resize the whole shebang on export.