Apple’s bet against Tracks by Alex4D

[Herb Sevush]

[alban egger] “And if you absolutely need a visual reference you can select the Role SFX and hit OPT-G to compound them into one long line called SFX, so when another editor comes he can see it even without the item list.”

I absolutely do need a visual reference, that’s what this little discussion is about. So if you make your various compounds – one for sync, one for efx, one for music and then put each on it’s own track, can you see the individual clips in those tracks and their relationship to the individual clips in the other compounds?

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

[Alban Egger]

[David Lawrence] “The guiding philosophy behind Apple UI design is that computers should work the way people intuitively expect; that the computer should adapt to the human, not the other way around.”

That is exactly why finally Apple dropped the FCP7 approach.
When I take a clip and move it elsewhere I want to do that. But in FCP7 I maybe can´t, hmmm , why…oh of course, because when I move the clip from Track one to track two I move the audio at the same time to tracks 3 and 4…but I locked 3 and 4, because there is my music bed.

X more often than not (and more often than7) does what a human wants it to do. !!NOT a seasoned FCP7 editor, but someone who simply wants to do a simple task of moving a clip from here to there.

Many call FCPX not-pro-ready, because it is making these tasks simplified and “too easy” and especially different from their conditioned work-patterns.

[Alban Egger]

Herb,
no, you can´t look into a compound – actually a nice feature request to have a 50% opaque compound!).

This compound-track-trick would only make sense so an editor who gets the Project could fast see what´s going on. He would then uncompound and stick to the roles highlights.
Compounding would not help your work as you need it. Sorry for the bad news again 😉

[Herb Sevush]

[alban egger] “Sorry for the bad news again”

It’s not bad news for me since I don’t currently use FCPX. What it means is that no matter how many work arounds and kludges you come up with X is incapable of presenting an editor with the type of clear visual representation of the project that any tracked NLE can provide. The importance of that visual info is subjective – I demand it, others don’t seem to care.

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

[Alban Egger]

[Herb Sevush] “X is incapable of presenting an editor with the type of clear visual representation of the project that any tracked NLE can provide. The importance of that visual info is subjective – I demand it, others don’t seem to care.”

No NLE is perfect. And it is up to us users to find the one or two that work best for our purposes. And for me the clumsiness that comes with tracks is a bigger drawback than the loss of visual representation during one certain process of the whole work (I don´t care about where which soundeffect is until I output stems). While I put the effect in place I am in a microsomos of a few frames to seconds anyway, where I have enough visual reference anyway. It is the finishing, when you look at the big picture where it would be nice to see better what is what on the timeline. I agree.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[alban egger] “no, you can´t look into a compound – actually a nice feature request to have a 50% opaque compound!). “

I’d like a secondary that can hold more than one layer of clips, but keep a layer structure, an “open” compound clip if you will, or a “bubble” of clips if you need it.

Or, you should be able to “expand” a compound clip like you can expand audio and video and look in to the guts but keep context.

All the basic tools and design ideas seem to be pretty much already in FCPX, they just need further capability as X diverges from it’s iMovie sensibilities.

As far as time, the primary story line equals time. That’s it. You want to control time, you control the primary, and that sometimes mean the clips attached to it via a gap. When time is of the utmost importance, it is really easy to edit with the position tool on at all times and only use the more magnetic arrow tool when you absolutely need it.

And I still think Role based “Zones”, as we’ve talked about before, would be pretty sweet at least in the audio section. Although, it would be hard to implement in practice especially if audio is attached to video.

Also, keyboard shortcuts to move a clip to the top or bottom of the stack depending on where you’re working, would be ideal. That would mean less clicking and dragging layers around, and one keyboard press to get the layer above/below everything else. This functionality is already present with the move clips in/out of primary storyline, it just needs to be expanded upon.

[Don Walker]

[Bret Williams] “Bottom line, it has been immensely more fun learning something completely new (FCP X) than learning something different (CS6).”

[Bret Williams] “Learning Premiere feels kinda like that. It’s nothing really new and exciting. Just a chore to switch to another similar but different thing.”

BINGO!

I have been having a hard time figureing out why I don’t want to learn Premiere. I think you just put it into words

don walker
texarkana, texas

John 3:16

[Richard Herd]

And color coded tracks/roles too.