Could Adobe (or someone else) adopt magnetic timeline features in a tracked timeline?

[Charlie Austin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “So, why is this ‘bad’ instead of simply a different way to look at it?”

Yeah! 🙂 In all seriousness, i think Davids gripes are mostly related to audio, and while I clearly don’t agree with the criticism of “tracklessness”, I do think Roles could be much better utilized for both organization and audio signal processing. I think Apple is aware of this, they just haven’t ripped into the timeline yet. I’m sure they will at some point…

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Walter Soyka]

Also:

[Jeff Markgraf] “1. Not sure I like the beard. ;-)”

Part of the boutique-y dress code, and required as I don’t have a dog to bring to the office to signify hipness. Looking forward to debating fashion here as well!

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Charlie Austin]

[Walter Soyka] “In the meantime, here’s an experiment to show the difference between absolute time placement and relative time placement. Create an edit with a clip that starts at 15:00 absolute time and never moves, no matter what you do its parent or antecedent clips/gaps. How do you accomplish this?”

You put it in a storyline. You’re correct in that the storyline, primary or secondary, would have Gap preceding it. So your Data Model idea seems correct too. But, you’re experiment is absolutely do-able in X. Put it in a secondary pinned to FFOP. Or in the primary and cut your program in secondaries or connected (which is silly, but people do it) In a “normal” NLE the time reference is the sequence. That’s it.

In X, you can sort of have multiple time references. Every storyline is it’s own “time container”. The Primary time reference is the sequence/project time, what you see in the TC display, and yes, things do move around based on actions to preceding clips, gap or otherwise. Secondary storylines have an “internal reference, which can match the sequence time if you want by connecting at the start frame, or can “float” to wherever you want it to be. To me, this offers way more flexibility, clips in a storyline can be locked to an absolute time if you want, or locked to an absolute time relative to a parent clip, while maintaining “internal” timing. Storylines “are” tracks with absolute time values in X if you want them to be. But they give you the option to, uh… disconnect them from time? lol

I’m not as articulate as you Walter, but does that make sense?

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Walter Soyka]

[Charlie Austin] “But, you’re experiment is absolutely do-able in X. Put it in a secondary pinned to FFOP. Or in the primary and cut your program in secondaries or connected (which is silly, but people do it) In a “normal” NLE the time reference is the sequence. That’s it. “

Hey Charlie. My point is not that it can’t be done — but rather, look what you have to do to do it. You have to pin to first frame of program because that is the only absolute time reference in the project.

Even then, if you do a primary order change that affects the first primary clip, whoosh, there goes your “absolutely” placed clip — because it is not placed absolutely. You have to actively preserve its position.

I am sure the term “storyline” is a very intentional change, and it’s much more apt than the term “timeline.”

To be clear, I’m with Jeremy that this is different, not necessarily bad. It’s an abstraction, a higher-order toolset for manipulating an edit. Like programming in a high-level language versus a low one, it’s more result-focused and less mechanics-of-the-task focused.

Car analogy time: I only dive into this much detail because I think understanding what’s going on under the hood can help you be a better driver.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “The primary storyline is time. It is the first thing I try to tell people about fcpx. I think it is hard to grasp for some people, as it is different (to yours and David L’s point). But it’s not wrong And once that concept is understood, editing with X becomes exponentially faster to people.”

[Jeremy Garchow] “So, why is this ‘bad’ instead of simply a different way to look at it?”

I wouldn’t say it’s “bad”, but I think it’s less flexible.

As you correctly point out, primary storyline is time. The problem is that the primary storyline is also your program, and is therefore in constant flux over the course of an edit.

For some editing styles, this is perfectly fine and I agree enables greater efficiency and speed.

But for spatial edit workflows such as we discussed here, a constantly reflowing, temporal frame-of-reference is a huge drawback:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/16979

I understand Charlie’s point that you can accomplish this in FCPX by spiking a secondary to a gap on frame one, but I consider that a workaround.

The efficiencies of the magnetic timeline come at the expense of important benefits inherent to tracks that I think FCPX designers overlooked. The very notion of “Primary” and “Secondary” reveals a set of assumptions about editorial decision-making that is not simply true for everyone.

I should add that data models don’t make for good user interface models. I think the magnetic timeline design reflects an innovative data model, but it doesn’t fully consider the way many editors actually work.

I wouldn’t say the magnetic timeline is “bad”. I would argue it’s optimized for specific workflows. Yes, faster for some people, but not for others.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
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[David Lawrence]

[Jeff Markgraf] “By default we mix, or add, audio to other audio. Process it, etc., but not so much hard cutting except for specific effect.

By default, we cut video serially, with some blending (hard or soft) for some specific effect. Yes, video tracks, or layers, often run in parallel, but unless we’re keying or some such thing, it’s usually cuts and dissolves.”

Jeff – I get where you’re coming from, but again, I think this is an overgeneralization of how many editors work. Do you do much dialogue cutting?

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
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[Andrew Kimery]

[David Lawrence] “I wouldn’t say the magnetic timeline is “bad”. I would argue it’s optimized for specific workflows. Yes, faster for some people, but not for others.”

The same could be said for non-magnetic/tracked timelines too. They are really good for some workflows though not as good for others.

I’m not necessarily saying this about you, but if someone really wants X’s timeline/storyline to act like tracks in FCP Legend/Avid/PPro, etc., then maybe that person should just stick with an NLE that has tracks.

The magnetic timeline is probably one of my biggest hangups with X, not because I don’t think it can work in general, but because I don’t think it can work the way I like to work (which is heavy use of track assignments). What some people see as added steps that get in the way of their editing I see as organization that helps me edit. Bill is okay maybe spending a bit more time up front adding keywords in X because it helps him in the long run and I’m okay maybe spending a bit more time keeping the tracks in the timeline organized because it helps me in the long run. 6 one way, half dozen the other.

[Charlie Austin]

[David Lawrence] “Jeff – I get where you’re coming from, but again, I think this is an overgeneralization of how many editors work. Do you do much dialogue cutting?”

Not to hijack the reply but… well, I’m gonna. lol First let me reiterate, I’m not some blind fanboy who thinks the X timeline is perfect, it’s not. (I don’t think Apple believes it is either, but that’s speculation) And I’m with you and others on the need for signal processing, mixing, better ability to group/organize Roles etcetera. I’d even like it if there was a way to temporarily “decrease” the magnetism of the Primary, especially when cutting dialog. Clips would still have primary parents, but roles would stick to each other rather than madly flying up or down to the Primary. Using dummy clips to constrain that movement is a workaround i’d prefer not to do. So, there’s definitely room for improvement. On that we agree.

I disagree that the implementation is flawed. And things you feel are workarounds, (pinning something to FFOP to “lock” it to an absolute time) is just how it works. It’s trivial to do if you need to. If anything I’d argue that it’s a more flexible setup, It’s only less flexible if your workflow or style/preference requires you to always have clips fixed in sequence time. And if you “fix” it so it suits that workflow, it breaks it for other workflows. That’s like trying to “fix Pr to make it work like X. They are different apps, even though they do the same thing ultimately.

Clearly we’re on different sides here, but all your examples, cutting music, cutting dialog, cutting fixed-to-the-exact-frame length programs, are things I do all day every day with no problem at all. I’m not some genius who’s good at making some messy system work, I just work with the system, if that makes sense. Nor am I cutting simple little things that are easy to wrangle, i cut things with with 10’s of layers of audio, music chopped up within an inch of it’s life, assemble FrankenDialog out of disparate words, phrases and phonemes, etc etc. And I do this in X, 7, and Pr often jumping between them for the same gig.

Cutting audio in X is fine, and if I could do everything in it alone I would. There’s room for improvement, in some cases a lot of it, but there’s nothing wrong with the model, implementation, whatever you want to call it.

IMO of course. 😉

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Lawrence] “As you correctly point out, primary storyline is time. The problem is that the primary storyline is also your program, and is therefore in constant flux over the course of an edit.
“

Why is this a problem? Do you mean because then, time is in constant flux?

A lot of these discussion we had back the day were before the tilde key, when connected clips couldn’t be left alone. And while I agree that the FCPX UI could use a few more tweaks, and that controlling time in FCPX is something that takes a while to get used to when you’re used to a tracked environment, it doesn’t seem to be less flexible.

[Charlie Austin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “A lot of these discussion we had back the day were before the tilde key, when connected clips couldn’t be left alone.”

Oh, hey you’re right! So… back to Walter’s “fixed position” experiment (you here Walter?) the solution is:

Press and hold tilde, then shift, release both keys. Place a connected clip at an exact point in time in the Project, and never turn connections back on. It would stay right where it is, no matter what you did to any clips anywhere in the timeline. Temporally anyway, spatially it might well fly all over the place. 🙂

It would also, you know… defeat the whole point of having connections at all, but you can do it. No workaround required, just a keystroke.

See? X is more flexible. 😉

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~