Be STILL my BEATING HEART.

[Gary Huff]

[Walter Soyka]
Going OUT to a traditional edit is relatively easy, but some FCPX-specific information (clip connections, storylines, compound clips, etc.) will be lost as there’s no way to store that data in other formats.

Going IN to FCPX in a meaningful way is a whole other matter, because the same FCPX-specific information I mentioned above doesn’t exist in other apps or formats and must be guessed or deduced by the translation application.

I guess you’ll keep tossing up this argument until someone goes and does it, and then I suppose in response you’ll just throw up your hands and, say, “I don’t know. Must be magic.”?

[Mark Morache]

[Jeremy Garchow] “[Walter Soyka] “Can I import projects from Final Cut Pro 7 into Final Cut Pro X?””

I gotta think you could take that 7 timeline and make it trackless. V1 would be a direct translation. V2 could be a direct translation as well if you put everything into a secondary storyline. That would leave the reconnecting to the editor. Reconnecting is much easier than re-editing.

Or if all they did was connect the first frame of each V2 clip to the frame directly under it on V1, that would go a long way. Dissolves on V2 could be converted to keyframed opacity. Wipes and other transitions could force those parts of a V2 timeline directly into a secondary storyline.

Then do V3 and above the same way.

Seems like the audio could be done just as easily.

I’ll be they could come up with a translation for the 3 way color corrector, or they might even be able to create a version of it for the FCX effects bin.

Frankly, anyone who uses plug-ins and tried to open that project on a machine without the plug-ins has some fixing to do, but at least their edit is there. Why can’t we be afforded the same opportunity in FCX?

There’s some wicked irony here when you consider that AE can open an FCX project, but FCX can’t round trip to motion. And that Premiere Pro can open a FCP7 project but FCX can’t.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Being of the “there must be a pony in here somewhere” school of philosophy, I’m expecting that the long delay from Apple for an update to FCX is because of the extra work it’s taking them to put the tracks back in the timeline.

Seriously, they could have created their non-conflict timeline with tracks. They could have kept a version of connected clips by locking clips together, in tracks. They could have given us 64bit with backround rendering, crazy powerful metadata, even a version of the magnetic clips, and still given us our tracks.

I’m glad there’s still room for Aindreas to be shocked and awed.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[John Davidson]

Oy. I thought that was a joke. Oh fun.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Walter Soyka]

[Gary Huff] “I guess you’ll keep tossing up this argument until someone goes and does it, and then I suppose in response you’ll just throw up your hands and, say, “I don’t know. Must be magic.”?”

Gary, I’d love to be wrong about this. I’d love for someone to figure out how to make a meaningful translation. Someone who says something is impossible should never interrupt someone who is doing it.

I still think you’re dramatically oversimplifying the challenge. These new conceptual constructs (storylines and clip connections) are foundational to the FCPX timeline, and they’re totally independent of and unrelated to the clip identification and temporal information expressed in EDLs and FCP7 XML.

Take your last complicated timeline and export an EDL for each track. Load them all in Excel, and with no information other than reel and timecode, can you correctly identify each edit as what would have been a clip in the primary storyline, a clip in a secondary storyline, or a connected clip, if you had originally edited in in FCPX?

My argument is that making a traditional timeline into a fully-functional FCPX timeline is an incredibly complicated problem, and that’s why I think Apple has not included that feature. Do you disagree?

I’m with Mark and Jeremy — there are several very reasonable ways to get the clips into FCPX at the right points in time, then let the editor hand-magnetize the timeline. If you make mistakes, the magnetic timeline features still won’t work right, but like many here, I’d certainly rather have my edit in with limited magnetic functionality than not have it at all.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[David Lawrence]

[Mark Morache] “Being of the “there must be a pony in here somewhere” school of philosophy, I’m expecting that the long delay from Apple for an update to FCX is because of the extra work it’s taking them to put the tracks back in the timeline. “

Oh how I wish you’re right about that. Not holding my breath tho…

[Mark Morache] “Seriously, they could have created their non-conflict timeline with tracks. They could have kept a version of connected clips by locking clips together, in tracks. They could have given us 64bit with backround rendering, crazy powerful metadata, even a version of the magnetic clips, and still given us our tracks. “

Word. The UI is an abstraction of the guts under the hood. The trackless magnetic timeline is a design choice, not an engineering choice. Apple could have absolutely kept tracks if they wanted to. In fact there’s evidence in the program itself that at some point tracks were there. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when they decided to dump this for their “magical” new paradigm.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “If you make mistakes, the magnetic timeline features still won’t work right, but like many here, I’d certainly rather have my edit in with limited magnetic functionality than not have it at all.”

Walter — just curious, what specific features are you thinking wouldn’t work right?

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[Chris Harlan]

Heym maybe 3rd time is the charm. Quicktime X. FCP X. Logic X. I’ve been wondering if I should switch to Pro Tools, anyway. So, if the release is a pile of puss, off I go. Makes Avid all that much prettier.

[Walter Soyka]

[David Lawrence] “Walter — just curious, what specific features are you thinking wouldn’t work right?”

If you just connect all the clips to a gap as the primary, you get no magnetic rippling as you rearrange clips.

If you guess at the primary storyline and connected clips, but you guess wrong about the connection points, or guess wrong about what’s primary and what’s connected, the rippling will be wrong.

FCPX works because it encourages you to establish these relationships in context at the time you make the edit. I don’t think an imported timeline missing these contextual cues would feel like an FCPX timeline which relies on them.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “If you guess at the primary storyline and connected clips, but you guess wrong about the connection points, or guess wrong about what’s primary and what’s connected, the rippling will be wrong.

FCPX works because it encourages you to establish these relationships in context at the time you make the edit. I don’t think an imported timeline missing these contextual cues would feel like an FCPX timeline which relies on them.”

OK, makes sense.

But the more I think about it, I’m not sure it would be that big a deal. FCPX forces all connections to be in relationship to the primary. I find that to be one of its biggest constraints and weaknesses. What if the relationships expressed by track groupings have nothing to do with a notion of “primary”? As long as vertical and horizontal relationships in time are maintained, grouping wouldn’t matter and could left for the editor to decide after import.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[Gary Huff]

[Walter Soyka]FCPX works because it encourages you to establish these relationships in context at the time you make the edit. I don’t think an imported timeline missing these contextual cues would feel like an FCPX timeline which relies on them.

FCPX does not, at least to my knowledge, use any sort of artificial intelligence engine to establish this context. The “context” of which you speak is a simple run of IF…THEN…ELSE statements in the code (more or less) that governs the behavior. Whether it does it at the moment that you place clips on the timeline, or whether it does it later with clips that are arranged in time by another NLE, the end result is the same. Undesired linkage could easily be fixed after import.

It’s curious to me because you can’t seemingly claim that all of this will be messed up when FCPX will import iMovie projects, so that must be an admission that iMovie has a lot in common with FCPX under the hood if that sort of importer was provided on Day 1. Yet there are those who claim that it only bares a superficial resemblance with the UI, so which is it?

I’d love for someone to figure out how to make a meaningful translation.

Ah, I’ve seen the out you’ve left for yourself there.

My argument is that making a traditional timeline into a fully-functional FCPX timeline is an incredibly complicated problem, and that’s why I think Apple has not included that feature. Do you disagree?

Yet another out. No one is saying that an importer will do a 100% perfect job time in and time out. That would be dumb. However, I will say that an importer will be able to import a lot of projects that will play correction from time 0:00:00 to the end. There will probably need to be some connections made, but that’s it.

Are you really unable to grasp that most of what FCPX magnetic timeline does it automatic linkage? You can still do the exact same thing in any current NLE, you just have to do it manually.