Asset Mgr Vs Timeline

[Mark Raudonis]

[Bill Davis] “Everyone in the car business is talking about Tesla, right?”

Bill,

I drive a Tesla… does that mean I have to agree with you now?

[Bill Davis]

[Mark Raudonis] “I drive a Tesla… does that mean I have to agree with you now?”

Uh, pretty much?

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[Jok Daniel]

[Walter Soyka] “For me, the significant difference with FCPX is the Gmail-style “search, don’t sort” mentality, with smart collections acting as saved searches.

From the user’s perspective, this is a very significant difference with how they interact with their footage.”

It is different, but not necessarily all that new. In some ways, it reminds me of how Lightworks operates. In Lightworks, all clips live in a database, and whatever you see in your bins are just representations of the underlying clips. In fact, in original Lightworks lingo (since abandoned), bins were called “galleries”, which is actually more descriptive of their functionality and somewhat analogous to collections.

Lightworks makes it very easy to have multiple instances of the same clip living in different bins. Bins are used for everything, but they are not necessarily permanent, and you can use them as a kind of temporary workspace if you wish. Search results, imports etc are all presented to the user in transient bins that can be made permanent by renaming them. Closing a transient bin deletes it, but it does not delete the underlying clips – they are still in the database, and can be searched for and put into new bins. (Searches are not dynamic however, i.e. search result bins don’t auto-update with newly added clips like they do with FCPX smart collections.)

The cool thing about Lightworks is that clips and sequences are pretty much interchangeable, and so are sequences and bins. A clip can easily be turned into a sequence, which can then be turned into a bin, populated with all the clips in the sequence. And going the other way is just as easy. Everything opens up in its own viewer (if you wish), and everything has its own timeline. You can play clips straight from the bin, or open up multiple timelines or viewers side by side. Cut sequences into other sequences, or even into other clips, which turns them into sequences themselves. The original clips are still in the database from where they can be retrieved at any time.

The result is a very fluid and malleable workspace, where you can approach each task as you see fit. You can easily edit scenes “storyboard style” in a bin, and then turn them into sequences with a few clicks. Or make a timeline of selects, which can then be turned into separate clips in a transient or permanent bin. It’s a really beautiful and in some ways surpisingly modern feeling system that should appeal to a lot of creative editors. And it’s all about metadata, just like FCPX.