Can FCPX co-exist with FCP 7 ???

[Bill Davis]

If you decide to dive into X in order to work on your client’s request – I for one would be VERY interested in how it goes for someone who hasn’t done any prior hands-on work on X and tries to dive in and drive it on a paid project with little or no direct practical experience.

Probably wouldn’t shock me if it went OK. And it equally wouldn’t shock me if you came back ranting that X is the evil soul of all that’s wrong with the human experience.

Please do let us know!

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.

[Rich Kaelin]

I would be interested in why. What is so different? Screen shots look like standard editing form. I could not get iMovie at all, and everyone says it is like iMovie. I thought hat interface was counterintuitive. But I think motion is counterintuitive because I prefer AE. And no, we are going to work in 7… But 7 is dead, so it’s move up or move over. I have premiere cs6′ just does not work as well. Does anyone know how to throw program window to external monitor playback in PP. just curious.

Rich Kaelin
Kaelin Motion Production Services
https://kaelinmotion.com
New York

[David Powell]

Bill, I did that just 3 months ago. Opened it for the first time and cut a paid 3 camera project for a client who requested FCP X and have been using it with him ever since.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Rich Kaelin] “There is a 3rd party app that let’s fcp7 projects open in fcpx.
https://assistedediting.intelligentassistance.com/7toX/
Don’t know if its the only one. It is really cheap and from all I’ve heard it works.”

It does work. It is certainly not perfect, but it does work.

You have to have a working copy of FCP7 in order to export an XML out of it, however.

It also takes some time to reorganize once you’re in FCPX as the organization formats don’t transfer perfectly.

Jeremy

[Jim Giberti]

They coexist just fine, which makes it really easy to use 7toX.
Over time we’ve comfortably moved all of our 7 projects to X.

[Bill Davis]

[Rich Kaelin] “I would be interested in why. What is so different?”

It’s hard to break down. But here are some things I think are issues that often stress folks coming to X for the first time.

First is the reality that prior editors had basically a single workspace interface. The timeline was where all your editing happened. You STILL edit in a timeline with X, but if you look at the program holistically, X is fundamentally built around a two-stage process with the Event Browser as a place where you can do a lot of truly prep work that can make a whole lot of what you do in your timeline later, easier and more efficient. So if you do that – go straight to the timeline to edit – you’re hopping over a good bit of the power of the program right there. Remember, unlike most editing programs, FCP is built around a pretty robust relational database that communicates to the assets you use in sophisticated ways – so just focusing on putting clips in a timeline to start cutting them works – but you might as well be using a different tool. It’s NOT how X was designed to operate.

And to some extent, the better you prep your assets in the Event Browser, the better they work in your storylines since you’ll spend less time doing stuff like trimming and color correction “in situ” and more time establishing the relationship between clips, sounds and assets – that’s where magnetism becomes powerful, because it lets you move complex pre- constructions as groups easily and fast.

The reason that I said you might NOT have problems at first, is that depending on the complexity and your goals, you might not need to do much more than just build a storyline – and that’s not terribly different from any other NLE – save for getting your head around X’s modal operations (the A, Q, W, E, and T key modes and how to position and manage clip connections so you stop fighting them.

Some people get this stuff fast, others not so fast – perhaps based on how much muscle memory they have to work around.

Some of the real new power and flexibility of X is lives in it’s capabilities outside of JUST your storyline work – so operating it like a traditional NLE where ALL the power is in the timeline is not the most efficient way to do things.

Talent is arriving for my shoot, so that’s all I have time for now. I’ll try to stop back later.

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.

[Neil Goodman]

[Bill Davis] “First is the reality that prior editors had basically a single workspace interface. The timeline was where all your editing happened. You STILL edit in a timeline with X, but if you look at the program holistically, X is fundamentally built around a two-stage process with the Event Browser as a place where you can do a lot of truly prep work that can make a whole lot of what you do in your timeline later, easier and more efficient. So if you do that – go straight to the timeline to edit – you’re hopping over a good bit of the power of the program right there. Remember, unlike most editing programs, FCP is built around a pretty robust relational database that communicates to the assets you use in sophisticated ways – so just focusing on putting clips in a timeline to start cutting them works – but you might as well be using a different tool. It’s NOT how X was designed to operate.”

Not sure about alot of the other guys, but even in most traditional NLe’s most of the fine tuning is done in the source monitor before inserting to a timeline. Not sure why thats different in X.

To many the most obvious is lack of tracks and the magnetism.

Neil Goodman: Editor of New Media Production – NBC/Universal

[Dave Gage]

Bill or anyone,

(I’ll also start a new thread in the Techniques forum, but I thought I’d post here first since Bill brought it up.)

[Bill Davis] “And to some extent, the better you prep your assets in the Event Browser, the better they work in your storylines since you’ll spend less time doing stuff like trimming and color correction “in situ” and more time establishing the relationship between clips, sounds and assets”

I’m now beginning to do more prep work in the Event with a right-click to “Open in Timeline”. Does anyone have or seen a list (or tutorial) of recommended actions to do in the Event Browser before beginning the edit? At this point, I’m only syncing up audio with video. I’ll bet there’s a bunch of tweaks that might make more sense to do in the Event vs. the Project.

Thanks,
Dave

[Bill Davis]

[Neil Goodman] “Not sure about alot of the other guys, but even in most traditional NLe’s most of the fine tuning is done in the source monitor before inserting to a timeline. Not sure why thats different in X. “

Well, one primary difference is that when your working in the Event Browser, it’s unnecessary to even have a project timeline CREATED let alone open. It’s a separate space entirely, not a part of the single window editing tradition.

It’s built that way (as Phil Hodgetts patiently explained to me last year) because the metadata flow inside X takes place in stages with the EB being the first place you typically attach editing metadata to your files, some or much of which then FLOWS into your Storylines. The key difference (at least in my thinking) has always been that the further upstream you make decisions, the more you can leverage the result of those decisions across multiple projects.

I think alot about “persistence” when using X. And try to remember to do things as far “upstream” as I can, so the program saves those decisions so I can use them again and again.

Its one reason I feel X appears to be so productive for experienced users. It’s kinda not a “lets start over again” program. But more a “what did we create before that would be a useful shortcut or starting point for THIS project.”

Look, I don’t want to oversell these concepts. It truly is best to explore for yourself the REALITY behind the stuff I’m talking about rather than imagining what I mean – because it’s easy to, for example imagine the nice metadata stream flowing through X that I often mention as some mighty river and think it’s monstrously transformative – and that’s NOT what I’m saying. It’s there. It’s wonderful to have. It makes sense and is really useful when it solves real world organizational or editing problems. It’s NOT the end of hunger for the human race and I know that. Whether or not it means the same to you that it means to me is debatable.

But there IS a “there” there in my opinion – in FCP-X. One that I find a LOT of fun to explore – AND one that I’ve been able to use to make it easier for ME to cut a LOT of work with over the past year.

YMMV.

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.