Allow me to introduce myself… and a bit of NLE history.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

Good god, you were keeping that under your hat a bit there David. Pretty avidly keen to hear your gathered thoughts on FCPX.

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

[Lee Berger]

Around the same time I was a producer for an interactive media project at Florida State University. The delivery system consisted of Pioneer 12″ laserdisc player controlled by the Apple IIGS with graphic overlay card. We produced four interactive programs for Middle School Science under a grant from the NSF and Houghton Mifflin Publishing. We offlined (3/4-inch U-matic) using a PC based program called Edit Lister (remember 8″ floppy discs) and then onlined to One-inch tape at a CMX facility. Those were the days.

Lee Berger
http://www.leebergermedia.com

[David Lawrence]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Good god, you were keeping that under your hat a bit there David. Pretty avidly keen to hear your gathered thoughts on FCPX.”

@Aindreas

Thanks! BTW, I’m enjoying your threads. Especially amused by posters who put us in the “luddite” camp, lol. It was fun watching in the background but I knew I had to eventually say something.

First post is ready and will go up sometime Thursday.

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[David Lawrence]

[David Roth Weiss] “Did that become E-Pix, or any part of the E-Pix laser disk editing system?”

That I don’t know. Not much info about E-Pix out there!

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[David Lawrence]

[Lee Berger] “Around the same time I was a producer for an interactive media project at Florida State University. The delivery system consisted of Pioneer 12″ laserdisc player controlled by the Apple IIGS with graphic overlay card.”

That’s the exact same delivery system we targeted as well. It’s entirely possible our products appeared together in the same catalogs.

[Lee Berger] “We offlined (3/4-inch U-matic) using a PC based program called Edit Lister (remember 8″ floppy discs) and then onlined to One-inch tape at a CMX facility. Those were the days.”

Similar for us except we had MPS (Econodroid) for offline. The system would generate an EDL and we’d do an online auto assembly at a 1″ CMX facility.

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[Michael Gissing]

Interesting paper David. A year earlier than your 1987 paper, I was invited to hear the guys at Fairlight in Sydney talk about making a post production audio tool, basically an adaptation of their famous Computer Musical Instrument.

At the meeting there was much discussion about screen layouts. I put in a request for vertical track layouts as that mirrored industry experience with dubbing charts. Fairlight said it was committed to horizontal to follow musical notation. Even then the idea was to have a static ‘head’ with the audio waveforms traveling right to left across screen with clip names displayed, something that Final Cut Pro finally offered two years ago!

Within ten years of those talks I was alpha testing multi track audio editing and mixing systems with dSP an offshoot from Fairlight. I pushed very hard for ergonomic custom controllers as the nightmare of multi colored ASCI keyboards on early CMX editors gave me the horrors.

So I have always marveled that the direction and methodologies of audio editing DAWs have so rarely found their way into video editing. Simple things like sample based editing, track based levels, EQ & effects as well as clip based levels etc. But ergonomics is the biggie. How has the industry gone so long with such an awful interface as the keyboard and mouse. Gesture pads and touchscreen, I mean really?

[David Lawrence]

[Michael Gissing] “Within ten years of those talks I was alpha testing multi track audio editing and mixing systems with dSP an offshoot from Fairlight. I pushed very hard for ergonomic custom controllers as the nightmare of multi colored ASCI keyboards on early CMX editors gave me the horrors.”

Great stuff Michael, sounds like you were in the deep in the trenches too. My theory about why DAW software UIs evolved faster than NLEs is that processor, memory, compression and storage technologies of the time were able to handle production quality audio much sooner than they would be ready to do video. It would be years before all the pieces needed for video would be affordable. So sound came first. As you mentioned in the other thread, there’s still a lot of good ideas from DAWs that still apply.

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[Michael Gissing]

[David Lawrence] “It would be years before all the pieces needed for video would be affordable.”

True for processors but not for ergonomics. I still don’t get why the need for custom controllers never translated. With the hours spent at the tools, it is more important to me than what color the timeline is.

It is just that problems that are being argued about here and now for video editing were solved so long ago. I find it frustrating to move between Fairlight and FCS. For Color I bought the Tangent Wave and what is obvious to graders still hasn’t hit home to video editors.

[David Lawrence]

[Michael Gissing] “I still don’t get why the need for custom controllers never translated. With the hours spent at the tools, it is more important to me than what color the timeline is.”

Good point. Custom controller hardware really does make a difference. I never invested in a control surface for FCP even though it would probably help me move faster. But what I did do is map my five-button logitech mouse to FCP. Huge improvement. With custom mouse buttons and the keyboard I feel like I really fly.

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[Michael Gissing]

[David Lawrence] “But what I did do is map my five-button logitech mouse to FCP.”

Interesting. A five button mouse was my first purchase. I tried the Contour Shuttle Pro but it jogged like a dog. I even tried a tablet and pen. All pretty ordinary.

I have dual keyboards – one with all the colored keys like a CMX ASCI and a second one to type on. I was told two keyboards wouldn’t work so I tried it and it does. I don’t edit, just grade & then online in FCP. If I edited, I would look for something better than keyboards and mice.