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BrickSculpting and Classical Conditioning.
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[Walter Soyka] “[Scott Witthaus] “Perhaps he and Tim can have one final “Who Can Write the Longest Post” battle for all the marbles? ;-)”
I can only assume subtractive edits would be banned…”
My point was that I personally only made subtractive edits.
And u ppl have no idea how long my posts are before I post them. ???? I cut way, way more than I post. Easily a 5:1 ratio, and probably more.
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[Richard Herd] ” Acquisition is more like knowing by doing and errors are seen as developmental. Learning is more like knowing by being told and errors as seen as mistakes.”
Richard,
I’m still struggling to understand both how you pull these ideas from Bill’s post and where you’re trying to go with them.
Are you saying that Bill’s swimming instruction was “knowing by doing” or “knowing by being told”?
Here’s my charitable run at it:
[Bill Davis] “… [he’d] drill us with a particular stroke cadence … loudly enough for us to hear underwater”
… so I’m going to guess that even though Bill talks about both instruction and doing (assuming they were underwater because they were swimming), the swimming lesson falls into the “knowing by being told” category because he was being instructed (and that is condition enough to include it there) and it is not learning by doing (even though he was also “doing” and the drill could be supportive to that action).
Bill doesn’t mention errors or how they were handled at all. I can imagine the instruction allowing errors and falling back on the supportive chant of the swimming cadence, but I suppose “bellowing” evokes a bombastic character and thus errors were mistakes.
So in your interpretation Bill’s knowledge of swimming was learned knowledge not acquired?
I’m also guessing simply by process of elimination (since there is nothing in his post to tell us how Bill learned browser-based editing) that you’re implying Bill’s browser-based editing skill was acquired knowledge?
Is “the point” simply to contrast the two ways of gaining knowledge? How does Bill’s concern for habits fit into that? Is acquired knowledge more or less susceptible to become unquestioned habit?
As a final aside, is non-behaviorist “classical conditioning” enough of a thing that it doesn’t even need to be remarked on?
Franz.
(Edits: for clarity)
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[Bill Davis] “What part of this implies ANY luddite or dinosaur thinking whatsoever? “
A: your history on the debate.
B: “Classical Conditioning”You are implying that they are stuck in a certain (dated) mode of editing due to how they have been conditioned rather than what IS the most efficient and creative approach for them.
Further you feel that they are anchored to this workflow based on instruction rather than experimentation.
I didn’t agree with critics that said early on that FCP X was a different way to edit and misguided (though everyone agreed that it was missing needed features) and I don’t agree with your assumption that it is a different way to edit now.
Ultimately, it produces a linear sequence of clips produced in an app that allows non-linear access to media. The mechanics of the types of edits are as traditional as you can get.
My take: The browser and timeline are linked. They work in tandem. They complement each other. FCP X certainly has features in the browser that make it THE most powerful workspace for organization. If it was a plugin, it would sell.
But ultimately its the exported timeline that the audience experiences. It is the timeline in which you fine tune your film. The art is in the details.
If you can see the final composition in your mind and the timeline is just a place to dump (assemble) it after you create it in the browser, then you have an exceptional ability to compose entire films in your mind.
If that ability could be conditioned then all hockey players would be Gretsky, all the basketball players would be Magic, all the composers would be Mozart, all the song lyricists would be Dylan.
Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.
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I have long been informed by my personal unimpeachable source (my wife, a trained instructional specialist) that whenever you try to shoehorn something inherently complex into a set of simple descriptive shoeboxes – things get ugly fast.
People are complex.
Conditioning in ALL its forms is also complex.
Worse, I suspect it nigh onto impossible to neatly say “learning took place exclusively due to this or that educational modality.
I have carried that swimming cadence in my head for decades because the association was myleanated DEEP in my brain by my instructor that when I swim – it will likely help me swim efficiently.
But when I sprint a bit and need more oxygen – I screw with the cadence. It’s situational. Like all good conditioned responses maybe should be?
When I sit to start a new editing project now and Launch X – in a similar fashion the simple question of “can the database at my disposal help me do my work.” Is triggered. Before X that stage was missing. I understand that a Premiere editor may similarly get triggered to ask themselves “will a pre- sort of selects into a pancake array help me do my work? In each, the editor seeks to “pre-sort” and thereby narrow their focus.
How they build the habit to seek “presortedness” is kinda irrelevant. Most editors seem to find the step valuable. Mostly.
Those like Simon who feel more comfortable going for the ultimate universal stringout and full-tilt carving approach should have everyone’s blessing.
The bottom line for my wife always appeared to be “if the kid learns differently but effectively – and that’s demonstrable, you’re still good.”
Same here I suspect.
This is arguing differences without distinctions because there are WAY to many variables on the table to reach solid conclusions about this stuff.
Not that that’s ever slowed us down here much!
My 2 cents.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
I find that post much more balanced and self reflective than your first. A swimming technique and the debate about editing workflows modified by the strengths and weaknesses of a given editing application has extremely different relationship to ergonomics. Editors and production workflows have used metadata and organization of media from the get go. Apple and FCP X did not event this. There were editors that did everything in the timeline and others that took carefully constructed notes on every shot and its timecode. They used index cards like some scriptwriters do to preconceive what the sequences would become. And others used Excel to do the same. The browser in FCP legacy had columns of metadata much the same as X.
All this has been debated to death on this forum. The ergonomics of constant evolution or just plain changes vs mastery is the thing that I find interesting. In the arts and all crafts, “masters” produce on a high creative level and they know their tools inside and out and the learning curve to the mechanical mastery is way in their past. If software companies keep changing how a program works, then much of the craft and time in it is spent relearning and updating how to use the tool. At some point you want the tool to become an extension of your brain – completely subconscious, effortless, except for the creative input the human brain adds to the equation. In the current digital realm, the learning curve never seems to end and a lot of it is arbitrary and not really evolutionary. But some of it is. The best of both poles would be a return to a set of standards that all apps would adhere to, core basics that you would not need to relearn and develop new motor memories to use. The hardest thing to do in any discipline is to express something in its most basic form in a very simple way that also has layers of complexity. I think the original Ipod’s mechanical navigation nailed it. I think it should be used as a model for home to interface with layers of organization. But it got replaced with screens and a lot of tapping and swiping and other gestures.
On the latest iPhone, which is an amazing device, something as simple as select, copy, and paste can be frustrating. Its a operation which is used in many apps in different devices including FCP. Yet on the iPhone how this basic function behaves and how successfully it can be performed varies wildly within different apps. As Apple once claimed, it should just work. Sometimes the wheel does not need to be reinvented. And sometimes it never has gotten perfected. No one has ever invented the perfect and perfectly humane mouse trap.
The thing that I think would solve this conflict, evolution vs mastery, is to come up with a system that teaches its end users in a simple and easy manner how to do what they want to do including using a standard based vocabulary. The next huge improvement replacing the help menu.Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.
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ON LEARNING
[Bill Davis] “People are complex. … I suspect it nigh onto impossible to neatly say “learning took place exclusively due to this or that educational modality.”
Bill,
Agreed. This is why it’s important to call out stuff like this:
[Bill Davis] “”Without conditioning – we have to re-learn EVERYTHING anew each time we face it.””
[Bill Davis] “The question isn’t ARE we conditioned.””
[Bill Davis] “It’s how we learn to hit a baseball – OR type, for heaven’s sake.”
https://forums.creativecow.net/docs/forums/post.php?forumid=335&postid=96118I found this, an overview of Piaget’s constructivist theories about learning:
“Piaget’s hypothesis that learning is a transformative rather than a cumulative process is still central. Children do not learn a bit at a time about some issue until it finally comes together as understanding. Instead, they make sense of whatever they know from the very beginning. This understanding is progressively reformed as new knowledge is acquired, especially new knowledge that is incompatible with their previous understanding. This transformative view of learning has been greatly extended by neo-Piagetian research.”
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts/learningWhat’s interesting about that is the idea of transformation rather than accumulation – learning isn’t a stockpile that gets bigger, it’s continuous chemistry between the environment and the individual. It’s a pretty stark contrast to behaviorism and conditioning.
[Bill Davis] “For any editor who’s … conditioned to equate “build your timeline” as where successful editing happens – I wonder if it’s … difficult to conceive editing [in other ways]”
When you’re saying things like this, I’m suggesting that you’re relying on a behaviorist understanding of how and why we do things. Why are you speculating that timeline-based methods are “conditioned” and not part of a more complex learning process? How are you contrasting the way these approaches are learned with the way other (browser-based) methods are learned?
ON SORTING AND OTHER APPROACHES
[Bill Davis] ”… the editor seeks to “pre-sort” and thereby narrow their focus. How they build the habit to seek “presortedness” is kinda irrelevant. Most editors seem to find the step valuable. Mostly.”
You seem pretty confident of you knowledge about the way “most” editors work.
But I think you’ve missed the subject of the discussion; “sorting” or “pre-sorting” are precisely what are in question. Some editors would define sorting or pre-sorting as the important foundation – the first step, the preliminary necessity. Others very much do not describe editing this way.
Simon is good on this – you should read his posts, he’s taken the time to try to explain a bit.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/95831You are in fact using the very words he’s said don’t apply. He doesn’t “pre-sort” or have a “habit to seek presortedness”. Here he is on how sorting relates to what he does:
“If I were simply sorting through material in a Browser/Bin, this process would not be happening or at least not happening in anything like the same way.”
Here are a few aspects or qualities of his process that he points to that are important to him, and that are not sorting:
“I can see how one clip flows into another “
“I can already get a feel for the pacing.”
“The ability to reorder clips as the thought occurs to me”
“I have a continuous read-out of … length”
His focus isn’t on identifying clips or portions (though this could be said to be happening), it’s on working with things in context. What might seem a simple question of emphasis to you is an important distinction to him. He’s actually pretty insistent on this distinction:
“I have my editing hat on, not an organizing hat.”
“I am already thinking editorially (in the sense of creative timeline-based editing) and not wasting any time merely thinking organizationally.”So it strikes me that you’re trying to claim a certain universality (“mostly”) for a certain approach, and you might be missing the things he is pointing out as very important to him, in an attempt to shoehorn things into something that makes more sense to you.
Personally, I wouldn’t say that “sorting” is a thing I do as an important part of the edit. There is a basic organizing stage, but it doesn’t really address the meaning or function of material or even consider whether I will use it or not or why, so I don’t think it could be considered “sorting” in the way you’re using it. I’d call it basic organization and it is a task that can be done by others in preparation for the edit. I’d describe the early stage of the edit as understanding the material. “Understanding” is a pretty broad and nebulous thing – it might mean categorizing (“sorting”) to some, but it also means looking for relationships, looking for meaning maybe, or just finding a way to connect to the material.
I do that in a the timeline.
… AND ON A MORE COMEDIC NOTE
[Bill Davis] “… whenever you try to shoehorn something inherently complex into a set of simple descriptive shoeboxes – things get ugly fast.”
What’s your wife’s take on browser-based keywording and tagging?
Franz.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “The uniquely useful property of timelines as against other types of container is that they allow you to manipulate your assets in time and in context.
I think that some people only ever see the timeline as a place for putting together their final edit, but once you recognise it’s just another container like any other, you can start to free up the way you work.”
Well said, Simon. They’re great as scratchpads for organizing, roughing things out, experimenting, and a ton of other things!
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David Lawrence
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