Copy and paste for Grade Management

Copy and paste workflows in Color mode are designed to help you reuse adjustments at any level of your grade, whether you’re copying an entire look, a single operation, or even an individual control. Because grades are organized into levels, operations, and control groups, you can choose exactly how much of an adjustment to reuse. This flexibility makes it easy to work faster, stay consistent, and apply changes precisely where they’re needed.

Copy and paste workflows explained

It’s common to find that an operation you’ve made to one clip can be used on another similar clip in your sequence, saving you from having to make a new operation from scratch. For this reason, a variety of copy and paste methods have been implemented as the primary way to manage grades in Color mode for both clip-specific operations and grouped operations.

A Grade is organized into levels or groups

A grade is the sum total of all operations in Color mode that affect a clip. All operations in a grade are hierarchically organized into different levels that affect different sets of clips. Operations at the Clip level affect only that instance of that clip in that sequence. Operations at a Group level affect all clips that are members of that group. Operations at the Sequence level affect every clip in a sequence, except those on excluded video tracks. Grades can be copied and pasted in their entirety.

Operations are organized by levels or groups

Each Clip or Group level contains one or more individual operations. These operations can be individually edited, enabled, and managed to give you as little or as much separate organization of your color operations as you need. Operations can be copied and pasted, either individually or in multiples. When you copy a grouped operation, you have the option of choosing whether pasting enlarges the group you copied from, creates a new independent group, or adds the pasted operations to the Clip level.

Operations are divided into Control Groups or Modules

Each operation consists of groups of color controls. For example, Adjust consists of the Color & Contrast, Color Shift, and Texture groups. Style operations are made of modules, each of which is a group of controls specific to that module. You can enable/disable or reset groups of color controls all at once.

Control Groups or Modules are divided into Color Controls

Each color control group or module consists of individual controls, each with one or two parameters (in the case of 2D controls) that you can adjust using the control to manipulate the image in different ways.

The settings of any color control can be copied and pasted to the same kind of control in any other operation of any other clip, to quickly apply what you’re doing with one set of controls to another operation in another clip. For 2D color controls, you can also choose to paste to overwrite just one of the two parameter values that are copied.

Color Controls are organized into Segments, Zones or Swatches

Additionally, certain color controls can be organized into multiple segments. Segmentation enables a single set of controls to make separate adjustments to different tonal zones of an image (shadows vs. highlights) or to different hues (red vs. green vs. cyan). Zones and color swatches can be copied and pasted.

Altogether, the grade structure described above looks like:

Grade > Clip/Groups > Operations > Color Control Groups/Modules > Zones/Swatches/Segments > Controls

As you’ve read, copy and paste in Color mode has been designed to take advantage of this structure, to enable you to copy an entire grade from one clip to others, expand a group of operations from one clip to others, copy one or more specific operations from one clip to others, or copy a specific color control value from one clip to another. In this sense, copy and paste can be as simple or as specific as you require, and is intended to help you work as quickly as possible whenever an adjustment you’ve made to one part of your sequence can be reused somewhere else.

Copying and pasting operations with Keyframes

You can copy and paste keyframed operations at the Clip level with keyframes intact. All keyframes are offset from the beginning of the clip they’re pasted to by the same number of frames as the clip they were copied from.

Since you cannot keyframe Operations at Group or Sequence levels, you cannot copy keyframed Clip operations and paste them at the Group or Sequence levels without losing the keyframes. Instead, whatever color values were at the position of the playhead when you copied/pasted or dragged/dropped will be applied to the resulting operation.

Paste and replace vs. Paste and append

In addition to choosing what specific parts of a grade you want to copy and paste, you can also choose how you want your copy/paste operation to account for operations that have already been applied to a clip. One of the choices you have is:

• Do you want to paste to replace all existing operations at all levels with the new incoming operations, replacing the old grade with the incoming grade?
• Do you want to append the incoming operations to the existing operations in an additive way, such that the final grade is an aggregation of the previous operations and the incoming operations at every level of the grade?

Paste and replace vs. Preserving Group relationships

Another choice is whether to paste copied group operations into the original group, or create a new group that’s not connected to the previous one and can be customized independently.

• Paste and Replace after copying grouped operations results in the creation of one or more new groups that are detached from the original group. This is useful when you want to use operations from one group as the starting point for creating a new group, which you then tweak to be different in some way.
• Paste to Preserve Group Relationships results in the expansion of the group you copied from to include the clip(s) you’re pasting to. This is useful if you want to use copy and paste to include more clips into an existing group.

Paste as Clip Operations

You also have the option to force all pasted operations into the Clip level of a clip, basically flattening any set of copied operations into a single level of operations that only affect the one clip. Paste as Clip Operations also overwrites all previous clip operations with the incoming clip operations.

Copy and paste whole Grades

A grade in Color mode is the sum of all operations at all levels that are applied to a clip, including grouped operations, clip operations, and any other intersecting operations. Copying a grade copies every single operation that modifies that image.

To copy and paste grades in the Clip Grid, do one of the following:

The Paste Grade to Clip submenu has the following options:

• Paste and Replace: Replaces a clip’s current grade with the grade being pasted. All operations are replaced by the incoming grade, but grouped clip relationships are severed. Good for quickly copying grades without grouped operations, and for copying grades for which you want to make new groups based on a copied grouped operation.
• Paste and Append: Adds the operations being pasted to whatever operations are already applied to the clip. Good for pasting one or more individual operations to add them to an existing grade. Grouped operations are pasted as new groups unless you’re pasting to a clip that already has the same group being copied.
• Paste as Clip Operations: Pastes all incoming operations to the Clip level of that clip’s grade, so that they only affect that clip.
• Paste to Preserve Group Relationships: Replaces a clip’s current grade with the grade being pasted. All operations are replaced by the incoming grade, but grouped clip relationships are preserved. Good for copying grades when you want to expand the groups you’re copying to include the clips you’re pasting to.

Copy or paste one or more operations

You can also copy and paste specific operations from one clip to another at the top of the Color Controls panel.

To copy one or more selected operations:

To copy all operations at the clip level or in a group:

To paste those operations to another clip, do one of the following:

To copy and paste via drag and drop:

Dragged operations will be appended to the same grade level (Clip or Custom Group) from which they originated. Dragging all the operations from one custom group to another clip is a fast way to add a new clip to the same group.

Copy or paste individual controls and parameters

It’s very easy to copy what’s being done by a color control in one operation and paste it to the same kind of color control in another operation. This is useful when you want to precisely match a color adjustment in two places.

To copy and paste color control operations:

Copy and paste zones, swatches, or segments

Color controls that can be organized into multiple segments let you copy and paste everything that’s happening within a zone or hue. You can copy and paste zones in Color & Contrast and color swatches in Color Shift.

To copy and paste color control operations: