Using Custom Groups

Custom Groups let you organize clips so they share the same color adjustments, making it faster to grade related shots together. Any operation you apply to a group automatically updates every clip in that group, helping you maintain consistency without repetitive edits. This makes groups especially useful for working with scenes, camera angles, or clips with similar characteristics, so you can make changes once and see them applied everywhere they’re needed.

How Custom Groups work

Groups in Color mode work via a model of clip membership to a group you create, such that all operations you add to that group are applied equally to every clip that is a member of that group. In the following example, all nine clips of a behind-the-scenes segment in the first half of the sequence are assigned to the default group, Group 01. As a result, every clip in the group shares Adjust 2. The group icon displays a badge showing the number of clips in that group, and an outline (think of it as a container) surrounds all operations added to that group. Each unique set of grouped clips has its own name and container for operations.

You can add as many operations as you need to a group using the Plus (+) button, though you may often only need one. Furthermore, you can add any kind of operation, mixing them as needed to accomplish whatever you need.

Hovering over or selecting any of these group operations lets you see which clips are part of that group via a group badge displayed at the top right corner of each clip’s thumbnail in the Clip Grid. In the following example, the top row of clips corresponds to a behind-the-scenes section of the sequence, and they’ve been grouped to use Adjust 2.

In this example, modifying Adjust 2 immediately updates all clips in Group 01 at once. In this case, the behind-the-scenes segments are adjusted in Adjust 2 using the Contrast, Exposure, and Balance controls to be brighter and cooler than the rest of the sequence. In this way, a single change updates the entire scene.

Groups make an efficient choice

Groups make it quick to make changes that affect a collection of related clips all at once. Once a clip is part of a group, any change updates every clip in the group, making it fast to iterate on grades without copying and pasting or other cumbersome methods to ripple changes across multiple clips. For example, groups can help you in the following situations:

• When every reverse shot from the same camera angle in a scene can be adjusted together to better match the rest of the scene.
• All clips from a particular camera can be isolated via Codec, Resolution, or Frame rate to apply a camera-specific Adjust operation.
• Every clip in a scene can share a Style that sets that scene apart.
• All clips that share the same source media, such as a series of talking-head interview clips, can be grouped to share the same Adjust or Style operation.

Bottom line, groups are useful in any situation where multiple clips with similar color and contrast characteristics can be treated with the same operations. Instead of making an adjustment to one clip and then copying it to the others, you can create a group and manage a single operation from that point forward.

Limitations of Custom Group operations

Sequence operations cannot be masked or keyframed because they encompass multiple clips.

Using multiple overlapping groups

A further advantage of this system is that a clip can belong to multiple groups at once, with each group adjusting specific properties of overlapping sets of clips in your program. For example, you can have a clip with a grade that includes three groups, where:

• Group 1 (named “Director Group”) applies Adjust 2 to lighten and shift the reds of all clips with the Director.
• Group 2 (named “BTS Group”) applies Adjust 3 to every clip in the behind-the-scenes section of the sequence to improve his visibility.
• Group 3 (named “Sequence”) applies two operations: Adjust 4, which alters the color temperature of the entire sequence, and a Style operation that applies a cinematic look to the entire sequence.

Lastly, as you can see in the screenshot above, clips in groups still have Clip operations available (in this case, Adjust 1). Clip operations enable color adjustments specific to each clip, even when clips are grouped. This gives you the freedom to make both specific adjustments to individual clips and shared adjustments to groups of clips, all by selecting the right operation at the right level in the grade.

This system lets you work from the outside in, applying operations to large collections of clips first in order to do the most work with the least amount of adjustment, and then progressively making changes to smaller and smaller collections of clips that share common issues, until you’ve accomplished your color goals for the sequence.

Alternatively, you can work from the inside out, making individual tweaks at the clip level and then progressing to larger and larger shared operations until you feel that your work is done. Neither way is better, it all depends on the type of project you’re working on, how much time you’re given, and what kinds of adjustments you need to make.

Creating Custom Groups

To group multiple clips so they can be adjusted together:

Using Filter and Sort in the Clip Grid to create Groups

Since step one of creating any group is selecting the clips you want to group in the Clip Grid, an easy way to speed up group creation is to take advantage of the Filter and Sort controls to automatically isolate all clips you think would be useful to turn into a group. For example, you can filter all clips that come from the same Source media, or that were recorded on the same Date, or that use the same Codec, or that share the same Scene metadata, etcetera.

Once you’ve filtered and/or sorted a set of clips, it’s much easier to select the ones that you want to group for shared adjustment.

Editing grouped operations

To edit any group, first you need to select a clip that’s part of that group. This is because Color mode keeps your workflow streamlined by only showing the operations and groups that apply to the current clip in the Clip Grid (the clip with a white outline).

Otherwise, there’s nothing special about editing grouped operations. Once you’ve created a group with at least one operation, any change you make to that operation updates every clip in that group all at once. Not only does this make it easy to grade a bunch of clips all together (such as when you’re applying a Style to a whole scene of clips at once), but it simplifies making changes to that group if you or your client later decide on something different.

Modifying clip membership to grouped operations

From time to time, you may find that you need to add or remove clips to or from groups that you’ve already made. There are a variety of methods for doing so using both drag and drop and copy and paste. These techniques can be as simple or complicated as you need, so the procedures described in this section are meant to get you started with how to think about the many methods available for grouping and ungrouping operations.

Add an additional clip to a group by copying entire grade

Add a clip to one or more grouped operations via drag and drop

Add a clip to one or more grouped operations via copy and paste

Remove one or more clips from a previously existing group

Change grouped clips to operations by creating a new group

Copying a Group to create a new Group

You’ll often find yourself wanting to use a grouped operation you’ve already created, such as a Style, as the starting point for another group you want to apply to different clips that’s based on the previous Style, but different. This is easy to do.

To copy operations to an entirely new group of clips:

The group operation you paste groups the selected clips together as a brand new group, unconnected to the prior group. You can now customize it to fit the new clips.

Moving operations among different grade levels

If you find that you’ve created a Clip operation that would work really well as a grouped operation, or a grouped operation that only really applies to a single clip, it’s easy to move operations from one level of a grade to another.

To move an operation from one level of your grade to another, do one of the following:

Deleting Custom Groups

Removing all operations from a custom group also deletes the group.