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Adding ‘Favorite’ to a clip on the timeline
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[Oliver Peters] “So what you are saying, is that he can’t do the function he’s asking about. Or is there a way to create Favorites based on the ranges in the timeline?
“Look, I can absolutely hammer a nail with a big, heavy wrench. I’ve done it. It’s just not a good idea to do that in the long run. And I’d think that when training a carpenter, showing them how to do that would be a very bad idea.
Use the tools in X to do what they do really, really well.
Keywording and tagging have a place in X. That place is the Event Browser. For a reason. It’s the initial place for organization. Tagging there gets leveraged across all the subsequent work you use your clips in. More importantly, since tags are inherited downstream, you tag early and tags are auto inherited.
Bill the editor selects 10 Favorites. Carol the editor selects another, different 10 favorites. What’s now in the event clips? 20 Favorites? When I Show Favorites, do I get all 20? 10? How is that managed?
Metadata flow keeps things trackable and easy. There’s just one, simple “loop” back upstream from a Storyline to the EB and that’s the Compound Clip – and even that has a “disconnect” feature built in to make sure that one downstream editor doesn’t reflect their changes back upstream and subsequently into everyone elses’ work.
Taggin the the timeline sounds so simple. But I sincerely think it is NOT. Not when that tagging is, by necessity, altering the central database that every user is potentially pulling resources from.
FWIW.
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.
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[Michael Garber] “Curious to know how favorites are getting in the way on the feature? How are they slowing the process down for you?”
When I’m cutting a scene in a feature, I tend to use a bit of many takes. Sometimes pieces of all takes, regardless of whether they were initially deemed good or bad by someone on set. When I cut, I look for a line or a reaction that I feel is good and simply cut it in. There is no benefit for me to marking that range of the clip as a Favorite first. That’s an extra step I don’t need.
The exception is when I’m later working with a director next to me and I need to note something they liked. That’s in order to later cut it in based on session notes, but when they are no longer in the room.
[Jacob Brown] “Then I view the clips within that keyword sorted by scene. The FCPX basically groups all the takes for a given shot for me and I just favorite the relevant parts of each take. Then when I’m ready to start editing I can switch to viewing favorites only and get nice blow up versions of each in event viewer.”
I follow the same keyword strategy, but without the Favorites. The reason I don’t like ranged-based Favorites for cutting the scene, is that it’s a jigsaw puzzle. Especially when actors improvise or scene blocking and continuity is fluid. I may view a take and decide I like a section as a Favorite. Then when I go to cut it in I find the continuity doesn’t work or the line reading order was swapped. Now I have to go to a section of a different take that was not marked as a Favorite, because it fits the continuity better, yet still is an OK read. If you have really good actors who are consistent, you could potentially mark everything as a Favorite.
Also, in a two-camera production (I’m on one now), my first swipe at the scene is to edit in the best take with both cameras stacked and then cut the cameras back and forth. Not a multicam edit per se, but effectively the same result. I do this by watching the two cams together (one PIP’ed over the other) and cut/blade the edit points intuitively. Again, in this scenario, ranged-based Favorites selections are not terribly useful.
The bottom line for me is that I tend to use Favorites where I might use source markers/locators or subclips in a different NLE.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
“To me, the characters are everything. I begin with them, and if a story doesn’t come out of their interactions, I don’t have a book.” Elmore Leonard Interview By Jean Henry Mead.
The mantra for some time now in production circles is that the story is the thing. This is good news for producers because you can sell a story without being able to write it. You don’t need to write to have a subject or a concept.
Editing is a lot like writing. People work differently. There is the story (subject and plot) that serves up the message, the theme; and then there are the interactions, the spaces between, the beats, pregnant moments, which appear and die of their own will.
I think when you set favorites you are serving the needs of your project’s concept. No question an efficient way to organize and find the eye and ear candy among the huge amount of media that litters your browser. But these chosen ones, these segments are not necessarily the best fit in relation to the moments, the beats that they interact with on the time line. They can be, but not always.
It’s not a matter of either/or; it’s a matter of both/and.
I do think that FCP X, which clearly has its eyes, set on being popular and user friendly, would benefit by being more consistent in the mechanics of its interface. What works here should work there. This type of cross-functional consistency is what has always made Apple apps seem more intuitive. They were never really more intuitive but they seemed more intuitive to anyone with experience on a Mac. Apple simply repeated (now familiar) patterns much more consistently than other interfaces.
FCP X clearly has retained some of this tradition but has also almost self-consciously broken with it. Most of its new features prove to be very useful. Most of the features that were sacrificed for no reason would still be useful. Some have been added. They are useful. New features are cool. Renaming old ones to make them less familiar … not cool. Being able to connect clips to a story line (a track by any other name)… very useful. Not being able to connect clips to anything but the primary… not so useful. Yes there are workarounds but it’s less intuitive.
For example in the project I am working on – a model shoot set to music – I had a choice to use the sound track as the primary or the sequence of shots (which tells a story within the story) the primary. I have tried it both ways. Each has its advantages and each has moments where I had to learn what I felt was a work around to get things in the order I wanted them presented. If I could attach clips to either the primary or any other storyline, I would be spending more time composing my piece and less time learning the program.
There is no reason you should not be able to save an edit back to the browser. It’s just a missing feature. The browser is not designed to create sequences. But that said I would not mind hearing your workflow in the browser that replaces the work that before X was left for the timeline.
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.
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[Craig Alan] “There is no reason you should not be able to save an edit back to the browser. It’s just a missing feature. The browser is not designed to create sequences. But that said I would not mind hearing your workflow in the browser that replaces the work that before X was left for the timeline.
“Well, I can think of a reason.
Since the “edit” is just a text string of metadata – if you could simply “save an edit back to the browser” – what you’d be doing is saving a bunch of metadata references – inside another metadata reference.
Then I suppose you’d want to USE those second tier references in yet another project. Making them THIRD order references. And what happens when you edit some more and save THAT edit back to the browser? Now you’ve got a set of metadata references that include, first, second and third order internal metadata references of their own.
Does that kinda seem like a snake that’s eating itself?
Six months from now, are you going to inadvertantly delete some seminal clip – and wonder why content goes off-line in 25 unrelated projects!
Really, please it’s just a tremendously good idea to STOP trying to make X operate according to expectations that were formed in NLEs before X. It does NOT operate the same in some critical plumbing ways. (In fairness, in many other basic “editing ways” it operates EXACTLY like all other NLEs and if you can get past the differences, it’s honestly not that different to edit in X compared to anything else. But you DO have to understand the differences or you’ll drive yourself crazy.
It doesn’t make copies of clips every time you want to use part of “this” in “that.” All it does is create pointers. And pointers have to POINT to things that are dependably there. I suspect it’s a REALLY bad idea to point to virtual things that were created by other virtual things – that reference other virtual things stored in temporary places that originally came from a thing that you burried deeply in an EVENT you did a year ago. But that’s what I suspect you’d start facing if X let you simply “LOOP” the virtual pointers that are your projects back up to the Event Browser without restriction.
There are legions of editors who quite properly THINK in the systems they’ve been operating for decades. If or when you decide to move into X – it’s time to STOP thinking exclusively in terms of how things USED to work.
To the extent you can, you’ll find X much easier to warm up to.
It might never become the editing solution for you. Or it might. But it will NOT be easy if you keep thinking that to learn it – you can just keep all of what you already know and just add new stuff.
All the folks here who keep echoing the “that’s when I finally started to “get” X” are not reflecting the discovery of how to push different buttons. They’re reflecting the discovery that to learn the new way, they had to RELEASE the old ways from their previous thought conditioning and open themselves up to new thinking.
That’s the hard part. Only after you start to change your underlying expectations will X typically make huge sense rapidly and you can start to “see” what’s useful and enjoyable about editing with it. And you might see why some of the things it presumes about editing are awfully useful, efficient and smart. If those things don’t outweigh the functions in your workflow that you can’t or just don’t want to give up – then go ahead and switch to software that CAN do what you need – the way you need it done.
It’s slowly but steadily earning the approval of a pretty wide range of editors these days. And it’s been extremely interesting to me that it appears to almost be doing better in terms of adoption globally, rather than just here in the US. I’ve actually seen more stories of higher end adoptees from the international community than coming out of Hollywood or NYC over the past year.
When Apple was doing their “pro” adoption stories, it wasn’t US broadcast TV or films – heck they didn’t even officially highlight X’s use in the Superbowl highlights stuff – it was major projects from the wider world they highlighted. And right here on Or NOT – the voices here have a truly international flavor, I find that fascinating. I have no CLUE what that means – other than perhaps in the new era, some of the innovation in content creation might be as likely o come from Budapest or Berlin as it is to come from Burbank?
Weird world we’re in these days.
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.
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[Bill Davis] “Really, please it’s just a tremendously good idea to STOP trying to make X operate according to expectations that were formed in NLEs before X. It does NOT operate the same in some critical plumbing ways.”
With all due respect, you are fond of pointing out how great a database manager FCP X is. In fact, the kind of functions people are asking for are actually quite possible in a truly robust database. Maybe FCP X isn’t a very good – or at least versatile – database at all.
The function of saving sequences in a “bin” and then using those sequences as sources, has been in many “legacy” NLEs for quite a while. Those were also databases and didn’t seem to have any problem with doing it. In fact, when you save a compound clip of an edit, that’s exactly what you are doing.
I do agree that this might not be advisable, as I’ve run into issues doing it. Yes, FCP X is simply a different approach, but the more issues that are brought up, the more one has to wonder whether Apple’s engineers painted themselves into a corner with the program’s design.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I don’t buy this, Bill. Compound clips created in the timeline are saved in the browser. If they are not saved as a new parent then all other uses of them are modified with each future change. This was modified behavior from when X was first written. I can copy and paste sections of my timeline to other projects. But because it’s a database I can’t save a single clip with a different “favorite” section (modified I and O points, color correction and other filters) to the browser? And just for the record, I rarely have this need. Rarely used it in 7. But sometimes when I perfect an edit early in the timeline and then decide I’d rather use that clip later in the timeline or want to reuse that clip later in the timeline, I want to store it somewhere and the browser is my storage cabinet. I can live without the feature but its non-existence has nothing to do with X being a database.
Yes it’s all references. And you cannot delete your source files without having those references go offline. But seriously how it is referenced in different windows of X is just a matter of programming. There is nothing about databases that does not let you save a clip edited in a timeline in the browser. This reminds me of early posts in the computer age where people would tell less experienced users that once they understood that it was all a matter of ones and zeros then they would “get it.”
Now I am interested in what part of your workflow that you used to do in the timeline in FCP 7 you now do in the browser in X. I suppose that with the feature that allows you to open a clip in the browser in “the timeline” you could preedit entire sections of your project. Haven’t heard from anyone who is working this way. Like I said people work different ways. There are writers who write their whole screenplay on 3×5 cards and the script itself is just a matter of assembling and inserting them in Final Draft. If your inspiration comes from the characters interacting with each other, you will not be working this way. You might still use 3×5’s to keep track of locations and scenes but you will be working in script pages for the flow of each scene. For me the browser is where media is stored and the timeline is where the writing takes place. And I think X is capable of accommodating this workflow and needs a little work in this regard.
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.
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[Oliver Peters] “I do agree that this might not be advisable, as I’ve run into issues doing it. Yes, FCP X is simply a different approach, but the more issues that are brought up, the more one has to wonder whether Apple’s engineers painted themselves into a corner with the program’s design.”
But Oliver – the very language you use “painted themselves into a corner” – is an idiom that indicates you can’t make further progress either forward or sideways.
And I think any argument that X isn’t continuing to make progress is a simple non-starter.
If you’re seeing something in X that indicates it can’t continue to solve motion content editing problems for a huge swath of editors now and into the future, I’d LOVE to hear them articulated.
I just can’t see them.
I can certainly see where it doesn’t meet the needs of ALL editors. No program does. But the swath it is capable of supporting right now is pretty huge.
And I think at best, the only class where it’s likely to get stuck is with a particular type of facility editor who needs to work inside a traditional shop environment. And even in those cases, what’s the issue with such a shop, or the editors within it, using X for what it’s excellent at?
It’s not an all or nothing deal.
What it is, IMO is a deal where you need a pretty agile brain to keep X actions up front, till you need to cut in Y, then shift mentally to those.
But editors here seem to be doing that all the time.
So nothing really to worry about regarding the future.
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.
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[Bill Davis] “But Oliver – the very language you use “painted themselves into a corner” – is an idiom that indicates you can’t make further progress either forward or sideways.
And I think any argument that X isn’t continuing to make progress is a simple non-starter.”I’m not saying it won’t make progress – just not in the way many hope. There are very specific limitations in how FCP X was designed, as there is with any software. For example, the complete lack of a third-party effects API. Or the very weak FCPXML structure.
A lot of folks point to Apple adding the event viewer as a sign they listened. That’s complete BS because it’s very badly implemented and does almost nothing you want a second viewer to do. They simply split the source/record toggle from the unified viewer into two windows. They didn’t change or add functionality. To me this says they couldn’t do it, rather than they wouldn’t do it. It was a lackluster approach and I don’t consider them lazy, so clearly there were technical limitations.
It’s things like these that simply have me ROFLOL when I see all the discussions about 10.1… As if it will somehow be revolutionary and different, rather than simply more features and improvements added to the current structure. The software is what it is for better or worse, which is what you’ve been saying all along 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Craig Alan] “But sometimes when I perfect an edit early in the timeline and then decide I’d rather use that clip later in the timeline or want to reuse that clip later in the timeline, I want to store it somewhere and the browser is my storage cabinet. I can live without the feature but its non-existence has nothing to do with X being a database. “
But it’s not nonexistent at all.
You can simply export any part of any storyline and re-import that exported clip back into the EB and you’ve got your permanent “edited state” clip ready to go.
Plus your original timeline remains if you need to go change things. I do this all the time when I get stuff like title sequences finished. I kinda think of it as the video equivalent of “flattening” an image in a graphics program.
So you’re sorta telling me to miss something I kinda don’t really need to miss – to my thinking 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.
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That’s true Bill. Many things that seem to be “missing” in X (or any program) can still be done. However, a NLE’s interface is all about making these operations as ergonomic as possible. It’s just a feature request. And it’s a fairly common need. Plus to me it’s less intuitive to have a compound clip automatically saved in the browser but modified clips cannot, even by choice.
To create a still and use it in some NLE you needed to export the frame and then import it. FCP X now has this feature added within the program. Very nice.
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.
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