Free Effect: Drop Zone Prep Tool

This effect helps you maintain transform changes to a clip when you add it to a drop zone.

Download at squidfx.com/freebies



1) Make transform changes to a clip on the timeline
2) Add this effect to the clip
3) Turn the clip into a compound clip
4) Add the compound clip to a drop zone

EDIT! The FCPX 10.0.3 update changed some of the Drop Zone functionality and this effect is a little less necessary. Check out this tutorial on how you can use the new FCPX features instead of the Drop Zone Prep Tool:

squidfx.com/blog/improveddropzone/

Now that's what I call a useful "effect". Thank you for this.

Very interesting effect - not least because it's entirely empty except for the instruction pop-up!

It uses a curious behaviour of FCPX which is that applying any kind of effect to a clip (not just this one but any one you like) will enable it to keep its transforms when applied to a drop zone which otherwise tend to get lost (though oddly not always!).

I'm not sure that you even need to make it a compound clip either as it mostly seems to work anyway without that extra step.

Ingenious all the same!

Simon says:

I'm not sure that you even need to make it a compound clip either as it mostly seems to work anyway without that extra step.

This effect won't always work as described unless you turn the clip into a compound clip.

You can skip that step if:

1) You're using the transform tools to scale up a clip and
2) The scaled up clip completely fills the visible area in the viewer

When you're scaling a clip down, or dealing with a tall (portrait) image you must make the clip into a compound clip.


I wouldn't go so far as to call it ingenious, but thanks for the kind words all the same.
Generally, I think that complex conditional instructions can be off-putting.

Thanks for the clarification - you've obviously looked closely at what happens when which given the variables and the apparent unpredictability of certain behaviours is not at all easy to spot. As you say, you've made it dead simple to use - without any confusing conditionals!

I also really like your idea of using the pop-up as an instructions page - nice way of getting round the UI limitations.

Ah, you're using the new Place Holder Motion has, and not a Drop Zone, eh?