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An editors two cents
The main problem with the new version of Final Cut Pro as I see it is that Apple does not consider the craftsmanship and talent of the professional editor. Instead they assume that editing is just slapping a bunch of shots together and using some really cool plug ins. I come to this conclusion after looking at this new Magnetic Timeline nonsense. To me in hinders my organization and workflow, but it’s there to make it easier for the novice. All seasoned editors have mastered the relatively easy use of the traditional timeline. FCP is just a tool. It won’t do anything you don’t tell it to(well, most of the time anyway 😉 Just because you have access to a powerful tool doesn’t mean you’re going to come out with something brilliant. As a matter of fact an amateur will most likely come out with the exact opposite. Look at vimeo & YouTube. Most of the videos are banal, unskilled attempts at storytelling, shooting some idiot jumping off his roof or a moron’s skateboarding accident. Plus you have a plethora of gavones ranting at their cameras. iMovie is sufficient for this type of filmmaking. Dumbing down a piece of software to appeal to these people is ludicrous. In order to achieve true artistry in editing one must study & practice constantly. One has to learn the language of film before he can succeed at communicating with his/her audience. How many short films make absolutely no sense or don’t affect you one way or another? For all FCPX wants to be it will never be able to apply a cathartic moment into a piece. Making editing more available to the public will just produce more junk. Years ago no one could afford a flatbed or Movieola to have at home. Yet editors developed, why? Because they had a desire to do what they do. Many like myself started as an apprentice syncing mag track to picture all day(and night). Because of the difficulty in the process we learned how to edit scenes in our heads before collecting massive amount of clips off of a phalanx of bins lined up down the long, dark, hall. Making the process easier just makes the editor lazier, and a lazy editor is an unimaginative editor, who in turn is an unemployable editor. Sure many places need to make clip reels or archive stuff, but is that what the definition of Pro has transpired to?
Excerpt from the Third Man-“…You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
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30 Replies
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I completely agree!
Russ
Russell Lasson
Colorist/Digital Cinema Specialist
Color Mill
Salt Lake City, UT
http://www.colormill.net -
I agree on many points, but on most I disagree; particularly that making something easier makes people lazy. Obviously that’s an opinion and one that’s subjective. I am no novice. Changes in technology of all sorts in history does not necessarily create laziness, but rather becomes a catalyst for people to change the way they think about the work they do and presents a new set of challenges while making things, in fact, easier.
Win NLE systems arrived on the seen many film editors preached the same message. Yet soon after it was realized that NLEs didn’t necessarily make things easier because there were then an abundance of choices and decisions to be made and could be undone that made things in it’s own unique way, more difficult. With video form tape to SD cards we’ve been expected to manage significantly more amounts of content because it’s cheaper to shoot. Then of course there’s the “we’ll fix it in post” mentality that NLEs and video catapulted into the lexicon of post-production possibilities.
I love FCP X. I am excited about the direction and what it’s doing for me already despite my disappointment with what’s missing and the realization of how it could impact my profession. I have FCP 7 as well (for now at least :))
Even the shovel was an amazing technology at one point; the steam engine, the calculator, the gun, etc. were in some regard revolutionary technologies that didn’t make people necessarily lazy, but gave endeavors and industries new methods to interact with and progress our world (albeit for better or worse and yet even that is subjective).
There’s always opportunity in chaos. Innovation that makes life easier does not make people lazy. It makes us experience a new reality in the way we perceive the way we do and did things. Our inability or rather unwillingness to adapt and strive I suppose could be perceived as laziness. I will agree that perhaps we don’t like being pushed into something we don’t want, didn’t expect, or doesn’t conform to what we’re used to.
I hope FCP X flourishes over time. I look forward to being right there with it, exploring something new. If it dies a horrible death. I’ll keep telling stories another way and yet be all the better and wiser for what experience I did get from the innovations and faults of Final Cut Pro.
Just for clarity, by the way – I am not angry so please don’t take this as such. Amidst all of the comments about FCPX I suspect many posts are taken out of context because the emotion in our writing isn’t always conveyed and perceived int he way it was intended.
Tangier
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Hm… Actually I really dig the new timeline in FCPX. But that’s about the only thing I dig about FCPX.
Over the past years I have learned how to use the traditional editing tools to get the results I want. With FCPX the results that I want do not change, but the way to accomplish them changes. The paradigm of the new timeline speeds up most of these ways. Let me try that again: Tt provides short-cuts to the results. And it still provides all of the traditional tools, but they are accessed in a different way.
I am extremely angry at Apple for this release and all their FCPX sh*t, but the timeline aint one of the reasons. It’s really good.
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[Nelson Torres] “I come to this conclusion after looking at this new Magnetic Timeline nonsense. To me in hinders my organization and workflow, but it’s there to make it easier for the novice.”
I don’t understand this claim at all. The new timeline, with clip connections, storylines, and compound clips, is actually more complicated than a bunch of generic stacked linear clip containers (i.e. a conventional multitrack approach), and I think it will take novices a longer time to figure out. Rather than being intended to make things easier for novices, I think this approach is intended to allow people who understand it well to work faster (the app can do more for them because it understands these relationships) and manage complex sequences better (because things can be grouped, collapsed, etc.).
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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No. Its designed to connect things for you without you asking, it’s labelled with moronic fisher price terms like ‘primary storyline’, the default behavior of clips is that they are indestructible, the default behaviour of the timeline is that things get out of each others way either vertically or horizontally – if this thing had any more collison detection, and auto behavior you could just sit back and watch the wanky animations as the timeline jumped up and down and slid around itself. It’s a timeline for morons.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Its designed to connect things for you without you asking”
This is not really a meaningful statement. When you place a clip above another clip in FCP X, you are asking for it to be connected. That’s what performing that action means if FCP X. All you’re really saying here is that the FCP X timeline doesn’t do the same things in response to the same actions as the FCP 7 timeline, which is not inherently a bad thing.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “the default behaviour of the timeline is that things get out of each others way either vertically or horizontally “
Because the app now understands the relationships between clips, it can make more intelligent decisions when clips are moved around. What’s supposed to be bad about this? Why should the software make you do something manually if it has enough information to do it for you by default? This is a particularly good idea if it also offers a way to bypass that automated behavior, which in this case it does (the Position tool).
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Oh for the love of Pete – chris, can you honestly tell me that you think it is a good idea, that when I place a clip on V2 that it glues itself immediately to the clip below? Because, and here’s my personal take on this of course, it’s not a good idea Chris, it’s a shite idea, it’s one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in many a goodly long aeon. It’s such an indescribably shite and pompous decision Randy made there that I actually think he has been programmed by adobe like the manchurian candidate to wreak Final Cut – you’re having a laugh mate – Pro.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Oh for the love of Pete – chris, can you honestly tell me that you think it is a good idea, that when I place a clip on V2 that it glues itself immediately to the clip below?”
There is no V2. Your problem is that you’re thinking of FCP X as a traditional multitrack editor that’s broken, when it’s not actually a traditional multitrack editor at all. I think you need to try harder wrap your head around the conceptual model of the timeline FCP X uses, and give it a fair shot on its own terms.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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No no Chris – FCP7 wasn’t a multitrack editor, Chris – editing is a multitrack operation.
The hubris and pomposity of the “solutions” proposed by Randy in this ludicrous piece of software just about take my breath away.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Chris Kenny] “I think you need to try harder wrap your head around the conceptual model of the timeline FCP X uses, and give it a fair shot on its own terms.”
If people don’t like the way it does things, why is the response always “they just don’t get it”…?
“Try harder!” Try harder…?
wow.
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