a really good quote

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Well I work in docu and I agree wholeheartedly with the methodology of scrubbing and thumbing through shots, looking for who-knows-what, and then it hits you. In fact the great Walter Murch also talks about this process…

This is a very common thing in visual editing: you categorize shots according to what you THINK they are about or how you will use them, but inevitably you are stuck with a narrative problem and you sift around until you find — exactly as the commenter describes — a shot that NO ONE thought would ever end up in the movie, and it becomes the perfect piece, re-purposed in a way not imaginable during ingest/organization.

HOWEVER, guys, if you ingest and smart-collection/keyword your stuff using FCPX, which I think IS a great way to organize material, you will benefit from the meta-data organization system of the new app for 95% of your work.

When it comes time to troll through all your collections in search of that random “miracle” shot, well you are free to poke around and scrub through everything waiting for inspiration to hit.

I don’t feel that any kind of FCP7 “inefficiency” ever made me accidentally work more creatively. The process described was ONLY done when I needed to solve something, and then yes, I might scrub through EVERYTHING on the theory that there is a shot somewhere that has been ignored but will now save me.

Doug D

[Keith Koby]

This is one of the more ridiculous things i’ve heard on the subject. If you are going talk picture, then why would you even think of bashing fcp x? Besides the organizational stuff, X is going to give you the editor something you never had in 7. That is the ability to dare: To try something new out without the penalty of killing time to see your results.

To bash metadata is a shallow, shallow argument and tells me that the original poster hasn’t spent any time actually playing with X. The new tools for tagging whole clips or parts of clips and sorting those tags into bins is extremely useful.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND NETWORKS
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Tom Matthies]

I just wish that they simply kept what works and fixed what didn’t rather than reinventing the wheel. It’s a nice perfectly round wheel. It’s just that it faces sideways from the direction that I want to go…
Tom

E=MC2+/-2db

[John Pale]

While we are at it, why don’t we just go back to 1 inch VTRs in a linear bay…

I always found the best shots rewinding the damn things to the beginning to change reels….I used to do my best screening and logging making dupe reels so I could do a dissolve.

There’s a lot to justifiably complain about …. even more to be angry about in this FCPX debacle…but this is one of the things it actually does well.

[Keith Koby]

patience. it will be all good. in the meantime, 7 still works. I used it all day and so did every one else in my facility.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND NETWORKS
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Gary Pollard]

Unfortunately, it reminds me of the argument I heard years ago that:

“I like my processor working slowly. It gives me more time to think”

____

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

[Aindreas Gallagher]

yeah, I take it back – it doesn’t make whole hooting amounts of sense maybe.

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Tom Brooks]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “doesn’t it ring true with anyone? that we’re being forced into stupidly autistic OCD organisation methods by a bunch of self regarding OCD asbergers software engineers?”

Your terminology is offensive. Grow up or evolve a little, will you?

[Aindreas Gallagher]

yeah – i formally take back the autism crack – although maybe not the OCD thing, Jeffery Harrell had a go at the inability to simply make piles of things – I’m not saying its a well developed point, but that there cannot be a container before there is a word – tagging is a different beast to making sometimes loose piles of things, you feel a different kind of intent carefully assembling tags, I don’t personally feel I’m throwing things around as much.

I do know tagging is essentially best practise – I use it pretty thoroughly in google reader – outside of me thinking of mean hurtful things to say to apple software engineers – like that they are OCD asbergers types wrecking my editing application – yes thats right – my editing application and mine alone, it belongs to me! – outside of all that the tagging of everything and its mother in FCP rubs me wrong – but I have no real intellectual justification for that, its a purely personal thing.

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Chris Stevens]

“It’s the very ‘inefficiency’ of FCP7 that immerses me in a project. It’s endlessly scrubbing backwards and forwards through the rushes that means that when I’m recutting a scene, I know there’s that shot of that thing, which I never thought I’d use, which an assistant editor wouldn’t have flagged, which I wouldn’t even have looked at, but which turns out to be just the shot I need for this sequence.”

It’s not an original thought. Walter Murch worried about this exact same thing when switching from a flatbed to a computer editing system. You can read about it in his wonderful book, In The Blink of an Eye.

Murch argued that the old flatbeds forced you to scan through loads of footage to reach the material you needed. Because of this, sometimes you would come across footage you might otherwise have discarded, or you might subconsciously absorb images to generate new ideas.

Of course, Murch then switched to Final Cut Pro. So we have to assume the convenience outweighed the Zen qualities of the flatbed for him.

Imagine how much more thoughtful our editing would be if we hand-drew every frame like a Disney cell-animator. Then we’d really get ‘immersed’ in a project. Personally I’m going to embrace the evolution of technology and use FCPX. If I want to get ‘immersed’ I can always print out the rushes, sellotape them all end to end and run them across my lap, simulating a flatbed.

Let’s leave the past behind.