-
And here’s why there is a separate Project Library…
Just a heads up for proponents of cutting everything in CC’s in the Event. A cautionary tale…
So somehow, yesterday at some point late in the day, a master clip got deleted from an event. A very active Event with foaming at the mouth client deadlines. I’m sure it was user error, I was messing around with XML exports at the end of the day, creating and deleting stuff, for an issue unrelated to the project. Oops. Coincidently, I had replaced my backup drive before I left, ran a new backup, and took the old drive home. And left it there. I haven’t needed a backup ever running FCP X, what could possibly go wrong? …
This morning i opened the Event and it’s associated Master Project Folder (I put all cuts, organized in folders here) … all seemed good, until I realized the master feature was gone, and thus, all my KW collections of selects… a *lot* of them made over the last 4 months, were empty. “No biggie”, I thought, “I’ll just restore the event from my backup”… Nope. Apparently it was already messed up when I ran the new backup last night, and the drive containing older backups was uh… not here. Uh, Oh. Now… the good news here is that all the projects, in the Project Library, were online for whatever reason.
Now, because I’m crazy, I run another backup program to my internal HD as well, so i opened it up, only to find that, for whatever reason, the last backup was from last Thursday. Uh, Oh number 2. I’d cut/revised a ton of stuff since then. But… what I hadn’t done is change the Event, other than maybe importing a few graphics and stuff. So, I restored the 5 day old Event, pulled in the stuff that wasn’t there, The Master Clip and all my KW collections were there… Back in business. It’s a rambling story, but this took all of about 5 minutes. 5 minutes of terror… 😉
Anyway, the morals of the story are…
1 – Have a lot of backups! (I use Pro Versioner and Backups for Final Cut Pro) and make sure they’re running!
2- If I had been cutting in CC’s in the Event, everything I had done for the last 5 days would have been gone, poof!, and I woulda been cooked. Majorly, totally screwed.
The Project Library being separate from the Event saved my ass.
Just thought I’d point that out. 🙂
————————————————————-
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
4 Replies
-
Thanks for the cautionary tale, Charlie.
I’ve always had a vague feeling of unease when reading about people who tried to “out-smart” X by trying to make it’s organization align with their conditioned use of flat file methods such as the multiple timelines and nested clips we commonly used in Legacy.
It’s always seemed to me that constantly trying to make X work like “not X” is a short road to hell.
I know it’s difficult for many experienced editors to simply un-learn the old ways and learn new ones instead, but your story reminds me that the best way to learn a new tool is to actually learn to use the new tool!
I’m delighted that you only had to spend 5 minutes in stomach acid land – not five or fifteen or fifty hours!
Again, thanks for sharing. There’s a lot of “protection” built into the way X does things – provided the driver sets up and uses it’s toolset properly.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
-
[Bill Davis] “I know it’s difficult for many experienced editors to simply un-learn the old ways and learn new ones instead, but your story reminds me that the best way to learn a new tool is to actually learn to use the new tool!”
I mistrust CC’s, at least as far as cutting spots in them. Last week I had made some keyed green screen shot masters (XAVC with sync audio) in CC’s and was rendering them out as Prores 4444 with alpha so FCP 7 guys could use them. At some point, they just stopped exporting the audio. Cut them into projects, broke ’em apart, and they were fine.
But to your point above. Telling people they need to “un-learn” things just isn’t true. You just need to learn how X accomplishes what you’re used to doing. The Event/project organization is new, but you don’t need to unlearn anything to use it. Just use it. I’m astounded by people who happily exist in the button and menu filled multi-paned worlds of most other NLE’s and think FCP X is complicated and unintuitive. I like Pr, I like MC, I really like X, more so after this AM :-). They all do the same thing, it’s not brain surgery…
In retrospect, I probably had just accidentally hit CNTRL-0 with the clip selected and removed all the keywords. That would explain all the projects still being online, the clip was probably still in the event. But I’d have lost a boatload of work without the backup, especially had all my cuts lived in the event… Being able to restore an old event and keep my up to date cuts was pretty cool…
————————————————————-~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
[Charlie Austin] ” Telling people they need to “un-learn” things just isn’t true. You just need to learn how X accomplishes what you’re used to doing. “
Well this may be a matter of terminology and approach.
I know plenty of Legacy editors who are pretty much muscle memory conditioned to “package” their timeline assets into smaller “blocks” of content in the form of separate, nested sequences, and other “sub-groupings” in order to do what they want to do in Legacy.
They come to X, and they carry that same thinking along. So it’s natural for them to attempt to “package” their work via the over-use compound clips attempting to do the same thing in the new environment.
I think that’s a clear mistake since it presumes that a compound clip operates the same as a nested sequence. And as we know, that’s simply untrue.
THIS is the stuff that I think many legacy editors need to “unlearn.”
There are absolutely plenty of things in X that are direct reflections of the same thing in any NLE including Legacy, so I’m not saying that anyone has to “unlearn” everything. But from what I’ve been reading right here for the past nearly 2 years, there are a LOT of legacy editors who come to X and the VERY FIRST thing they get upset about is that the can’t work the way they used to work in terms of organization and “sub-grouping” of timeline elements.
It’s not appreciating that in X a lot of the sub-grouping and asset management that they HAD to do on the timeline in Legacy is now much better done in the EB and that process DOES require new thinking as you’ve obviously learned.
In fact I’d go so far as to argue that anyone who learns X by STARTING with storyline editing and skipping mastery of the EB and key wording is going to take MUCH longer to settle into the software than those who understand and follow the meta-data flow through the program from day one.
And I think that’s born out by the fact that we still get regular comments here from those new to X that demonstrate that they have at best a pretty tenuous grasp of where editing decisions are best made in the software for maximum long-term value.
I will, however heartily second your overall idea that X has a boatload of “user error protections” built in – provided you don’t do anything too foolish. The growing realization in my early days that X was “tracking” all my input via simple real-time metadata update – rather than “auto-saving” every so many minutes – and therefore, even the odd crash rarely lost even the last keystroke I’d entered – has been a true pleasure to live with!
My 2 cents, anyway.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
-
What differences do you see between compound clips and nested sequences? Other than some trivial functional things, I see them being very similar. In fact, compound clips really work the way nested sequences were supposed to work. Like a precomp in AE. But that only recently changed in an update. Before that, compound clips sorta lived on their own in the void, very much like nested sequences. But if you know what you’re doing in legacy, you can use nests just like compound clips. For example, drag a sequence (nest) from a bin to a sequence and that nest will always refer back to the sequence in the bin. UNTIL you duplicate the sequence or copy and paste the nest. Then it exists only on the timeline. So 7 actually worked both ways. You could have a master nest that updated across all sequences it was placed in, AND you could have nests that existed only in the timeline, mainly as compositing tools. X now only works with compound clips that exist somewhere in an event, and personally, most of the time I have no need for a bunch of compounds to be cluttering up the event when they are only being used as a compositing tool. I don’t use them for this “sub grouping” thing you’re talking about. I’ve rarely ever seen a FCP 7 editor use nests for any sort of subgrouping because it seems that 99% of the FCP editors I come across hated nests. But if you watch Apple FCP X demos, they’re compound crazy. They love to point out the organizational benefits of compound clips and secondaries alike. Obviously Apple likes compounding for organizational sake.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up