Apple’s bet against Tracks by Alex4D

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Craig,

His examples and understanding of the timeline are interesting for two reasons: they are based around the visual elements (primarily) and the focus on visual elements is modelled on A/B roll editing.

It’s also interesting that he starts with this statement:

“… track-based editing has been flexible enough to allow for hundreds of different methodologies to be used over the last 25 years.”

and works toward:

“The primary benefit of the new Final Cut Pro X timeline is that it makes the relationships between clips clear.”

Franz.

[Charlie Austin]

[Craig Seeman] “Alex does a good job explaining the intent at least.”

He does. I think that FCP X *does* have tracks though, they just move around and you don’t need to “patch” stuff anymore. Plus, it’s nice to be able to work with this:

When what’s really going on, more or less one keystroke away, is this:

Looks like tracks to me. 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Herb Sevush]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “His examples and understanding of the timeline are interesting for two reasons: they are based around the visual elements (primarily) and the focus on visual elements is modelled on A/B roll editing.”

It is a good article and a good explanation and it lays out the editorial limitations of the thinking behind it. Both assumptions, the primacy of the visual and the primacy of the “b roll” conception of editing, do not work for me nor for many others. Again it is not that this concept doesn’t work, it does work quite well for many editorial situations, the issue is that it doesn’t work as well for as many types of situations that a tracked environment does.

This is from the article:
If the B-roll clips were locked to specific tracks, there would be no way of maintaining the relationships between the clips.

Why assume that in a a tracked environment B-roll clips are “locked to a specific track? While I’m working I rarely think of shots as “B” roll – but when I do they can be on any track. The sync indicators in FCP will alert any following editor to the nature of the clip, you don’t have to use tracks to do that. You can use tracks that way, but you don’t have to. You can use them that way for part of the show, but not others. You can use them that way and then change it as you go. You can organize you material in many many ways – visuals are never locked to a specific track. Audio is another story entirely.

Again from the article:

It seems to me an application that can encode the relationships between clips is more powerful than apps that leave the relationships to be recognised by whichever editor is looking at a timeline.

Why this emphasis on vertical clip relationships. I place much more emphasis on horizontal clip relationships. Also I understand that the magnetic concept is great at maintaining relationships of groups of clips as you move them across a timeline, but quite frankly this has never been an issue for me – as I’ve said before it’s a very elegant solution to a problem I’ve not been having. And I definitely wouldn’t trade it’s advantages for the loss of visual organization provided by tracks.

I don’t begrudge those who find that the positives far outweigh the negatives for their style of editing, I just bemoan that this option came at such a high price.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Craig Seeman]

A long while back I mentioned that Apple’s use of the term “trackless” was yet another marketing mistake.
Rarely anything called “…less ” would be used as a marketing term unless the thing that it is “less” than was considered bad. No one thought of tracks as a bad thing. A better term would have been “virtual tracks.”

[Herb Sevush]

[Charlie Austin] “Looks like tracks to me.”

So what track is audio EFX on ?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “So what track is audio EFX on ?”

Right here:

One click to visually isolate, or solo, whatever I want…

Hopefully they’ll add the ability to group roles, then it’ll be even easier to see different “tracks”

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Herb,

I’ve been trying to think of a term to refer to non-A/B modeled editing – the best I can come up with is “Film Editing” (which only works if described historically, I think). Part of the problem is that A/B editing describes a very specific approach and model as opposed to a broader approaches.

Any ideas?

Franz.

[Craig Seeman]

[Herb Sevush] “So what track is audio EFX on ?”

That would be a ROLE.

[Craig Seeman]

Fundamentally I’ve always thought that using tracks vertically to edit and horizontally to organize was at cross and often conflicting purposes.

FCPX starts in the direction to resolve that conflict for me. While Roles still needs to develop and there are times where I’d hope for better visual representation of Roles, I do think they are in the early stages of heading things in a viable direction.

For those who like the “cross purposed” track they have Avid and Adobe to chose from. At least I know have an NLE that works they I’ve wanted for nearly 20 years. While I may not be in the majority (at least not for the time being) I know I’m not alone.

[David Lawrence]

[Herb Sevush] “It is a good article and a good explanation and it lays out the editorial limitations of the thinking behind it. Both assumptions, the primacy of the visual and the primacy of the “b roll” conception of editing, do not work for me nor for many others. Again it is not that this concept doesn’t work, it does work quite well for many editorial situations, the issue is that it doesn’t work as well for as many types of situations that a tracked environment does.”

Bingo.

[Herb Sevush] “Why assume that in a a tracked environment B-roll clips are “locked to a specific track? While I’m working I rarely think of shots as “B” roll – but when I do they can be on any track. The sync indicators in FCP will alert any following editor to the nature of the clip, you don’t have to use tracks to do that. You can use tracks that way, but you don’t have to. You can use them that way for part of the show, but not others. You can use them that way and then change it as you go. You can organize you material in many many ways – visuals are never locked to a specific track. “

Well said.

[Herb Sevush] “Why this emphasis on vertical clip relationships. I place much more emphasis on horizontal clip relationships. “

Exactly. For me, the only relationship that has any meaning is a clip’s relationship to time. And even in FCPX, time is represented horizontally.

Clip connections are a form of grouping. The main advantage of FCPX’s connected clips is collision avoidance. You can achieve similar results in Premiere Pro by simply grouping clips together. You don’t get the collision avoidance behavior, but you can group anything to anything so the group relationships are actually much more flexible and potentially meaningful.

_______________________
David Lawrence
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