Copy a grade

When one clip looks right, Paste Attributes gives its grade to any number of other clips in one undo step. This page covers what that means for a grade. Paste Attributes covers the command in full.

Menu: Edit ▸ Paste Attributes
Keys: ⌘C⌥⌘V
Agent tools: paste_attributespaste

Copy a grade with Paste Attributes

Select the graded clip and press ⌘C.
Select the clips that should take the grade.
Press ⌥⌘V, or choose Edit ▸ Paste Attributes.

The copied clip’s video settings replace each selected clip’s, as one undo step called Paste Attributes. If nothing would change, Frame Job beeps.

What comes with the grade

There’s no way to paste the grade alone, because it travels with the rest of the clip’s picture settings:

Light, Color, Wheels, Curves, and the look with its Amount
filters
everything else about the picture, including position and scale
the audio settings too, where the copied clip has sound and the target can take them

A clip’s place, speed, actions, transitions, name and label never come across.

The paste replaces, it doesn’t merge, so anything the target had that the copied clip didn’t is gone. A grade that lives in an action doesn’t travel either, because actions stay behind. The target takes the copied clip’s own values, not its animation.

LUTs travel with a paste

A look that uses an imported .cube LUT keeps working when you paste it into another project, with Paste Attributes or with Edit ▸ Paste. The LUT arrives in that project’s media along with the clip, and if the project already has the same file, the paste uses that one.

A pasted look never lands on the wrong file. If what’s being pasted doesn’t carry the LUT, the clip gets no look.

Keep a grade for later

A clip holds one grade. There are no grade versions, no gallery of stills and no way to save a grade or a look of your own, and Frame Job can’t export a grade as a .cube LUT.

A grade can still move between projects, because Paste Attributes works across them. Copy the graded clip in one project and paste onto clips in another. A project of graded clips you keep for this works as a library.

A qualifier between clips

A qualifier belongs to an adjustment clip, so what happens to it depends on the clips at both ends of the paste.

Pasting	The qualifier
Onto a picture clip	Is dropped
From a picture clip onto an adjustment clip	Stays as the adjustment clip had it
From one adjustment clip onto another	Is copied

When a paste stops

An adjustment clip has no picture of its own, so some settings can’t land on it. If the copied clip has a blur, sharpen or pixelate filter, or a blend mode, pasting onto an adjustment clip shows an error naming the clip and the setting, and nothing changes on any selected clip.

Sepia, noir, vignette and invert filters paste onto an adjustment clip without trouble.

To get past it, take the setting off the copied clip and copy it again, or leave the adjustment clip out of the selection. When a paste stops has the full list, for every kind of clip.

With an agent

The menu item always copies each of the picture, sound, text and shape groups both clips have. An agent can list the ones it wants in paste_attributes’s groups, out of video, audio, text, shape and graphic, so ["video"] brings the picture settings and leaves the sound alone. The grade is still part of video, so to set a grade and nothing else, an agent uses set_video. See Tools: copying and nesting.