How can I revert my Final Cut Pro project back to its original color?

I am creating a project in colour and want to create an identical version but in black and white, so I created a snapshot of the original because, so I was told, altering the snapshot will not affect the original project.


This was working fine until I opened FCP a third time, and now the snapshot in b&w has affected the entire original project — it too is now black and white.


What on earth has happened, I though the snapshot cannot alter the original?

And can the original project be reverted to its original colour?



[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 12.7

Posted on May 16, 2025 11:22 AM

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May 17, 2025 2:50 AM in response to lovely272

I don't know which method you used but they should all work the same.


In the below example I used the B&W effect and as such when you select the clip in the timeline the effect is shown in the Inspector.


To remove it simply deselect the tick box or drag the slider to zero or click your Delete/Backspace key.


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May 16, 2025 11:37 AM in response to lovely272

When you create a snapshot it doesn’t change which project is open in the timeline. It often happens to people to continue editing the wrong project. I can easily imagine the wrong project being in black and white. But I fail to see how they’d BOTH become black and white…


Reverting the original to color may be extremely easy or require more work, depending on HOW you turned it into black and white in the first place. If you just added an adjustment layer (or adjustment clip in the latest version) and turned saturation down, just change that and it’s done. If you did manually to multiple clips it can be trickier. Tell us more and maybe post some screenshots

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May 16, 2025 12:33 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

The clips in the snapshot project were each converted to black and white manually ONLY in the snapshot project timeline. And initially, when I switched between projects, the colour original was still colour. Exactly as expected. But opening FCP for a third time, somehow the original has become black and white also. Should not be doing this at all.

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How can I revert my Final Cut Pro project back to its original color?

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