Bill Davis’ LACPUG demo on Multicam…

[Charlie Austin]

[Shane Ross] “If they get tracks back and drop the stupid magnetic timeline!! Or make it an option to use tracks. Tracks are just too dang useful…and needed for what I do.”

Not to hijack the thread (he said while hijacking it…) but specifically what is it you can’t do in X without tracks? Not being combative or anything, I’m just genuinely curious. You’ve probably posted about it before, but I can’t seem to find it… 🙂

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

[Shane Ross]

Not having used FCP-X since 10.0.1 (before Roles)…I might be a little behind the times. BUT…

Easily organize what tracks are your SFX tracks, DIA tracks, MUSIC tracks…so you can see what is where. When you need to adjust things, knowing it is SFX and knowing exactly where that is saves time. Guessing as to where that might be (“is this small clip it? no…how about this?”)…searthing the…uh…trackless area for what might be the clip takes time.

And it’s just cluttered and messy. Completely disorganized. I’m used to having between 16 and 48 tracks of audio. And assigning audio to specific tracks helps me keep track of it. If it’s all helter skeleter all over the place…it’s madness.

All this touting of metadata to track things, and how it is highly organized…yet the clips are all a jumble all over the place (video too)…messy.

VIdeo tracks…we do the same thing. Footage on tracks 1-3…text on track 5…stills on track4…or whatever arrangement. SO we can easily spot what is where.

My main thing is that I work in long form, and many people acknowledge that FCP-X isn’t quite ready for long form in any stable way. But lacking tracks is HUGE. I just can’t wrap my head around not having them.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Bill Davis]

Thank you.
I had a lot of fun.
It was great to put faces to a few names from here.
We bicker a lot here, which is kinda fun sometimes, but it’s also good to remember that behind the easily misinterpret able typing are real people.
In fact my biggest disappointment last night was getting slightly “rental car lost” and being the last guy at the mile long table for food after the event. Turned out OK cuz I was down there in Siberia across from primary presenter, IronMan editor Dan Lebenthol who has some great stories about his early days cutting Snoop Dog and NWA music videos. But being stuck at the end of the mile long table I didn’t get to spend more time with more people. Which I regret.
But it was a fun evening.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[David Powell]

Most of the users/switchers came from FCP 7. Knowing that you use Avid Shane (as do I) was there anything that you saw in X that you felt was a huge leap over MC 6 in terms of workflow efficiency?

[Charlie Austin]

[Shane Ross] “Not having used FCP-X since 10.0.1 (before Roles)…I might be a little behind the times. BUT…

Easily organize what tracks are your SFX tracks, DIA tracks, MUSIC tracks…so you can see what is where. When you need to adjust things, knowing it is SFX and knowing exactly where that is saves time. Guessing as to where that might be (“is this small clip it? no…how about this?”)…searthing the…uh…trackless area for what might be the clip takes time….
And it’s just cluttered and messy. Completely disorganized. I’m used to having between 16 and 48 tracks of audio. And assigning audio to specific tracks helps me keep track of it. If it’s all helter skeleter all over the place…it’s madness.

I hear ya… Roles really do take care of most of that, except for the messy part. 😉 Hopefully they’ll implement Role grouping to address that. However, the organization and ablity to find stuff is, IMHO, leaps and bounds above any track based system, provided you set your source clip Roles up in the Event. It takes about 2 seconds, and can be done on timeline clips, but if the sources are “assigned” correctly it’s essentially pre-patched for you. I too use a ton of tracks and finding specific bits in X is ludicrously easy. Just Highlight the Role you’re looking for in the index:

And you get this:

Which, for me, beats the crap out of counting down say, 16 tracks from the top to get to what I need.

Click the little expansion arrow:

And just the clips I want open up for editing:

And with clip skimming turned on, all I need to do is hoverscrub, for lack of a better term, and I can hear just that clip without needing to solo it. Of course I can solo it, and add nearby clips to the solo group etc. It works way better than clip soloing in 7. Not sure about Avid… been a couple years since I cut on that…

[Shane Ross] VIdeo tracks…we do the same thing. Footage on tracks 1-3…text on track 5…stills on track4…or whatever arrangement. SO we can easily spot what is where.

Well, roles do give you the same options here, and clip skimming is freaking awesome for video too if you have a pile of clips composited and want to quickly see only the clip in the middle of the pile. Again, grouping roles would (will?) help out a lot here as well.

[Shane Ross] My main thing is that I work in long form, and many people acknowledge that FCP-X isn’t quite ready for long form in any stable way. But lacking tracks is HUGE. I just can’t wrap my head around not having them.
“

Fair point, though there was a poster here who said Apple had contacted him to figure it how to make long form work better, which is encouraging. It does take some serious “head wrapping” lol, but It’s not bad at all once you’re wrapped. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next!

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

[Steve Connor]

[Shane Ross] “My main thing is that I work in long form, and many people acknowledge that FCP-X isn’t quite ready for long form in any stable way”

Many people who haven’t actually used FCPX for long form!

Steve Connor
‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure”

[Steve Connor]

[Charlie Austin] “I hear ya… Roles really do take care of most of that, except for the messy part. 😉 Hopefully they’ll implement Role grouping to address that”

Colour coding Roles would be useful here

Steve Connor
‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure”

[Andy Field]

I second Shane’s remarks and add my perennial plea for a real time, records keyframes mixer.

It’s in virtually every other NLE including legacy…we use it every day, every hour.. and I still can’t see how editors actually prefer adding keyframes by hand for every volume change and duck.

Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852

[Shane Ross]

[David Powell] “Knowing that you use Avid Shane (as do I) was there anything that you saw in X that you felt was a huge leap over MC 6 in terms of workflow efficiency?”

FCX has built into it something akin to Pluraleyes…using audio waveforms to automatically sync the footage…lacking that, Bill said there were like 4 other ways to sync as well. So that speeds things up. Being able to see all 16 cameras at once is big. Avid has 4 and 9 camera options.

A BIG thing is being able to add angles to the multiclip later…not having to redo the clip. And have single “tracks” for cameras that start and stop. Although if you use the automated feature it will spread out the angles…so I hear from another friend of mine that used it on a music video.

Bill had the project playing from a single 1TB FW100 small external drive. Frames dropped, sure, but it all played back without stopping.

And then the main issue of the fact that FCX is all new software…new code from the ground up. Avid is stacking new on the old. It is slow, it is bulky…it’s a beast! It needs a complete re-write too. Issue there is that the dinosaurs of our industry resist change of any kind. One didn’t want to change the look of the IN and OUT markers to something more curved and cool. “No! They look fine now. Leave them alone.” I bet he wanted the weightlifter to stay too. Avid has to contend with a huge base of people who don’t want change, and the flocks of people who want change. Tough balance.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Charlie Austin]

[Steve Connor] “Colour coding Roles would be useful here”

Absolutely. Color coding, grouping, maybe some sort of Z-order type thing, especially for video, and as pointed out below, maybe the ability to mix roles as a group. Not sure how that last will work. Personally I don’t miss riding faders, but many people do. Range selection and KB volume adjustment works well for me, but the mixing aspect of X could certainly use some improvement…

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