A bit of a retreat by Apple

[James Ewart]

I would rather it is like it is now then how it was in the first iteration.

I like my clips and timelines in the same project/library. I like that way of organising it. It’s logical.

Having projects as separate entities is something I got used to but never really liked. And now that I’ve tidied up I found that sure enough I had quite a few projects that were not in the Event I had thought they were in.

Default Event – now that’s pretty helpful I think. Not sure if have got my head round it yet but it means those mistakes are easier to spot.

Don’t get me wrong I am very happy. If it sounds like I’m moaning I’m not. I’m just curious about stuff and why people do stuff like they do.

[Mike Most]

One can justify Apple’s renaming of common constructs any way they want. But the fact remains that they came up with a product with the same name as an existing one, marketed to a specific audience that includes some very experienced professionals, and then invented new terminology that is confusing, annoying, and unnecessary to many, if not most, of that audience. Just because you’re doing things in new ways doesn’t mean you change all of the terminology that has been established over a long period of time. You don’t see car manufacturers suddenly calling their products “transportation devices” simply because they now have sophisticated electronics and hybrid engine systems. And you don’t even see Apple calling something a “digital communications center” when it’s really a more sophisticated version of a cell phone. Hell, we still call entering a number on a phone “dialing” even though we haven’t had dials on phones for over 40 years.

When you’ve got something new it helps to make it as familiar as possible so that your users know what it is and what it’s doing. What Apple did was a bit heavy handed, a bit presumptuous, and to my mind, quite a bit arrogant. It’s done, so there’s no point in talking about it any further, but to justify it as something necessary and useful is, at least to me, a bit presumptuous as well.

[James Ewart]

I suppose the new language is a way of “staking out their territory”.

It took me some getting used to. A longer time than I care to admit if I’m honest.

But at least they have moved Projects into Events.

So if it’s not a “retreat” I am still thankful they did it.

[Craig Alan]

I agree with all these thoughts. If your master (top level) folder is a collection of media to be shared across projects then library is an appropriate label. If your Master folder is a container for a single project or even a single client or even a series of related projects then Project folder is appropriate. Master folder I think would do the trick and can be labeled and used universally. Since you can label a library folder with whatever name you like and since on the finder level it is a library style container then its easy to get used to. What remains PROBLEMATIC is the use of the word ‘project’. Timeline and sequence as names for what they are are perfectly descriptive and universally understood and it’s hard to communicate without using them in their traditional way. Unlike other terms borrowed when film was the media, these work regardless of media. We can edit in non-linear ways but ultimately we produce a linear sequence and timeline describes this perfectly. If you want to keep ‘timeline’ as the name of the space/window of FC then ‘sequence’ would have been suitable as well. When all is said an done, however, you can label all these folders and subfolders as you will.
We have a bunch of panasonic P2 cameras and I love working with them. Panasonic however decided to rename their manual white balance button ATW for automatic white balance. It iS true that when you press a manual white balance button the camera does the rest for you so it is automated. But renaming a function that is universally understood is a poor decision.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Bret Williams]

Project is by far the worst. It’s hard to even discuss the topic of media management without it being confusing, because everyone nearly universally calls a group of assets and sequences a project. Not just on video world. Contractors all over bill by the project. That project might be 100 videos or a single video. A Subdivision of homes or a single house. It could be ongoing or have a set start and stop time. By naming a single sequence a project is saying that’s it. That’s THE project. But you might have 100 projects in your project(library). At least when they were separate they kind of made sense. There were the events (media) and the outcomes (projects) but now they’re grouped into a container that appears is going to be used by most as a project container. I’m going to have to train my clients to call and ask how the library is going or I’ll get confused. Do we still call them clients or did Apple rename that too? Are they librarians or something?

[James Ewart]

How about we keep the Library and call an Event a Project and a Project a Timeline?

But as Jeremy points out Apple are defining their own language for their own territory and as Mike Most says there’s not much point quibbling now.

At least the structure appears the same now.

Merry Winter Solstice all of you in the Northern hemisphere.

And enjoy the beach all you lucky people in the antipodes.

http://www.jamesewart.co.uk

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Mike Most] “When you’ve got something new it helps to make it as familiar as possible so that your users know what it is and what it’s doing. What Apple did was a bit heavy handed, a bit presumptuous, and to my mind, quite a bit arrogant. It’s done, so there’s no point in talking about it any further, but to justify it as something necessary and useful is, at least to me, a bit presumptuous as well.”

Sure. It’s presumptuous. I don’t think that we are arguing that the whole of the launch of FCPX has not been presumptuous and arrogant. But that doesn’t make it wrong. More on that later.

I just don’t think that the Libraries naming convention is all that misguided. I don’t know about you, but our amount of media for any given job is growing exponentially and the media often gets used across many different jobs and timelines. Not only does the media have to serve one final timeline, but it has to serve many different timelines, and most of the time when serving different timelines, it serves different uses. The Library and Events allows the media to exist in more than one “state” or place to serve all of the different needs. A Library allows a top level repository for all of the media, and then from there, it could be separated out to specific Events and then out to Projects, and all of that organization is ONE file, not split across several projects in the FCP7 sense, or several Events and Projects in the FCP 10.0 sense. I guess it just makes sense to me, so therefore I don’t really mind it.

With FCP7, we would share projects, and then there’d be my project and other people’s projects.

I don’t know if you read the article linked on this page yet: https://www.10dot1.co.uk/guides

but they bring up an excellent point which has to do with hardware:

“An important note about Local flash / SSD storage

As mentioned at the beginning of this document, if you have a recent Mac, your internal drive is very likely to be your fastest storage solution.

This is a potential game changer and has implications for both media and Library storage.

Mac Pro flash storage is offering up to 1200MB/s and with Thunderbolt 2, the ability to copy files to and from shared storage is very very fast. The copy / move / consolidate commands in Final Cut Pro X, facilitate this easily and what is more perform tasks in the background.

As an example; copying media to or from an Xsan. Using the above architecture, the Xsan now becomes the bottleneck – what a luxury! Transfer times may be less than 15 minutes for 500GB of media.

We may soon be looking at set-ups where central storage is used as a media repository but files are copied locally for playback – this goes against everything we have been taught!! Until now!

A couple of examples of how this may affect workflow:

1. Portability – if media is moved locally, computers will have all that is needed for full resolution playback, offering true portability for up to 4K playback from a laptop. No longer are offline quality proxy files always needed (although Final Cut Pro X retains the ability to create these files).

2. Load-sharing – consider a 40-seat Xsan trying to playback 40 (or more) streams of 4K video.
It may be easier to copy and playback these files locally taking the load off the server.
With current transfer speeds and background processing, the copy process is no longer a major obstacle.”


So, all of a sudden, our fast external storage is slower than our internal storage, or perhaps, it’s just as fast. This does require a bit of different thinking in an NLE and it requires a few new options and tools in order to facilitate how that workflow might work. An FCP7 project simply couldn’t do this, nor would the nomenclature make any sense. So, Apple started over because they had to.

Jeremy

[Bret Williams]

Because a library is a project and an event is a bin.

[Craig Alan]

Here’s a question: is Mavericks a kind of horse, a surfing location, or a type of politician? Will the next Mac OS be called Abaco Barb or Jaws Beach or the Original Tea Party? And what number OS will that be?

Here’s my take. I love that Apple prides them selves on thinking different. But thinking different than what? Calling an OS a Tiger or a timeline a Project is just plain stupid. And when I say stupid I mean counterproductive. Now you hear a conversations about installing Leopard and then 2 minutes about which number OS that was. And now in ( ) that you meant actual project not a timeline. You get to name Asteroids when you discover a new one; you don’t get to rename an old one. Yeah we live in the future where relearning is a requirement. But let’s leave the relearning to things that are new.

I can see calling the browser a library – after all in FCP X in the Library window you not only browse for a piece of media but you begin to edit it as well. Sort of like finding a book and taking notes on it and combining that with notes from other books. And like a library of old, you can find the piece of media by searching for it using key words like you did with the card catalog. But a book within the library is a book not a library. And the new Library pane in Final Cut Pro X 10.1 is on the left, and the Browser is on the right. So you edit in the half that’s called the browser?

And lets take a step back. Apple came up with ‘event’ from iPhoto where consumers would come home from a party or a vacation or graduation etc and ingest the event, which would be auto-organized by date. Pros and serious hobbyists would use Photoshop so that wasn’t an issue. It made sense in a family friendly way and when you added things like face detection so you could find photos of the same person across events it made some sense. Not so much for someone who just liked to shoot photos; but it wasn’t too distracting to call a day’s shoot an event.

Video is a different beast. A documentary is not an event. A scripted film (short or long form) is not an event. A commercial is not an event. A PSA is not an event. A promo is not an event. Yes there are videos of an event, but they usually contain B-roll that did not take place at the event. An industrial is not an event. An instructional is not an event. They are, however, all projects. And for theater, movies, and video shows, an ‘event’ is called a ‘scene’ – something that takes place at one time in one location.

The first version of FCP X assumed that editors wanted access to all their clips all the time. But you also store music in your “event” browser. That makes little sense. Or stock footage in the event browser. No. Stills that may or may not have been shot during that particular shoot. No. To me it’s a media browser. The composition takes place on a timeline. I like to keep all the components of a given project in a project folder but I’m aware that others need to organize differently. And I do also steal media from previous projects but most often these are small files that I can copy over to the new project and close the old one.

The problem I have with “library”, and it’s much less of a concern than “project”, is a library implies a collection of diverse subjects and diverse projects and diverse media. So your projects might be stored in a master folder called the library, but you wouldn’t have a library containing only one book or one film or one of anything. Again library came from apps, which span your entire life collected in one folder/file: your contacts, your email, your bookmarks, your photos … it’s the master folder not “one event.” And when you call it a library book it implies it belongs to the library or to the public and that you do not own it. It does not imply that it’s one kind of book.

Then again Apple wrote it so I guess they get to name it. And I’ll use it but I’ll continue to call it a project that I edit on a timeline and store my media on my media drive and in FC’s browser (which is the finder within the app). When I read the tutorials I know that each project will be stored in its own library and the media can begin to be edited in the browser. And that timelines are stored there too but they’ll be called projects. But I won’t get too used to this cause Apple will need to rename these things when .2 comes out and I’ll still call them projects and timelines and browser and if they want to call the viewer a black hole and the timeline a current and a clip a denominator and the inspector the reformatory which contains the transformer, I have no problems with that.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[James Ewart]

I agree if you want new terminology that’s fine but nobody would have the gall to come up with a new Word Processing App and to call “Paragraphs” “Sentences”.

Calling “Timelines or Sequences” “Projects” is confusing UNLESS in the future we will be open to open a number of different timelines (or sub projects, or versions) within one Project.

Is that a possibility?