Cutting a major Hollywood Feature on FCPX

[Charlie Austin]

[Andrew Kimery] “I think that might be more indicative of the level of professionalism and/or experience of the other editors rather than the software used. I’ve seen some ugly organization on very simple timelines so it’s obvious that the editor either doesn’t give a crap or, through inexperience, doesn’t realize how much work it is for the mixer to sort everything out later.”

I think it’s probably way more likely for people to do proper preps in scripted, and maybe agency-type advertising. And again, I’m not saying everybody does this at all. I keep stuff organized as much as I can as I cut, and then make it all nice when it goes to finish. So do folks I work with.

But, in talking to mixers, they get a lot of stuff that’s a god-awful mess. And not just from inexperienced editors. I think there’s more “not my problem” attitudes out there than in the past. And, at least in smaller places that do what I do, maybe less people who are strictly post supervisors. All anecdotal 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”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Andrew Kimery] “If the mixer Charlie uses rarely gets organized timelines that’s not an NLE shortcoming, that’s an editor being unprofessional shortcoming. If you hadn’t guessed, this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.”

FWIW, it’s not just one mixer, it’s guys and gals at most of the post audio places in town. (LA) Trailers tend to be better organized, but when people are cranking out spots, all bets are off.

I also share your pet peeve, if for no other reason than I used to be a mixer and had to deal with it. Back in the dark ages of elements coming in on DAT with 2 pops or DA-88’s or something, I think people were more careful, because they had to be. Now it’s “here’s the AAF, you deal with it.” Another pet peeve of mine is layering 10 stereo effects or more when 3 or 4 would have done. I’ve deleted more superfluous tracks from preps than I can remember. And I say superfluous because, when the mix was done, nobody ever noticed. 😉

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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”~

[Shawn Miller]

[Andrew Kimery] ” If you hadn’t guessed, this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Being lazy, ignorant and/or just plain unorganized makes other people’s jobs significantly harder and it’s just incredibly rude and unprofessional to pass the burden onto someone else like that.”

This is a pet peeve of mine as well, even though I’m a one man band most of the time. I rarely have to deal other people’s project files when editing, but I do have to use/fix AE templates and projects once in a while. Naming conventions or organization of any kind seems to be a mystery to some people. Nothing worse than opening an AE project to see an unorganized assembly of “comp 1-200”, and 500 variously named solids; Light Gray Solid 1-75, Black Solid 1-100, White Solid 1-50, etc. And don’t get me started on “Pre-comp 1, Pre-comp 1 Comp 1, Pre-comp 1 Comp 2…”!

Shawn

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Andrew Kimery] “Being lazy, ignorant and/or just plain unorganized makes other people’s jobs significantly harder and it’s just incredibly rude and unprofessional to pass the burden onto someone else like that.”

Then I take it you don’t get other people’s After Effects project all that much? 🙂

I hear you, I like to stay organized too. I think by default, X’s timeline organization is completely different than say, a track based program. And Apps like X2Pro, can organize the information from an unorganized person (potentially) better than a track translation. And even if you have to assign roles first, that can be a lot easier with the timeline index, rather than trying to go through a tracked timeline clip by clip and organizing the tracks that way.

You see, this is really hard to get across, but with trackless or Roles, or whatever you want to call it, you don’t have to rearrange the timeline to get different output results. You simply reshuffle the information to way that suits the output. It’s pretty nice like that.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Shawn Miller] “Nothing worse than opening an AE project to see an unorganized assembly of “comp 1-200”, and 500 variously named solids; Light Gray Solid 1-75, Black Solid 1-100, White Solid 1-50, etc. And don’t get me started on “Pre-comp 1, Pre-comp 1 Comp 1, Pre-comp 1 Comp 2…”!”

Yeah…our posts crossed paths.

Ae projects are a whole different level of disorganization.

[Bill Davis]

[Steve Connor] “I completely disagree with Bill’s thoughts on this, I look at a lot of FCPX forums and I’ve never seen this mentioned, people on here don’t needlessly “trash” FCPX anymore. They’ll comment on missing features for their workflow but the days of talking about FCPX as “IMovie Pro” are gone.

The only thing left from those days is Bill’s evangelical zeal for FCPX”

I’ll just note your own phrase…
“people on here don’t needlessly “trash” FCPX anymore.” and point out the last word.

And then note that what I’m pushing back against in this thread is public discussions with an editor who doesn’t use X indicating that the very REASON he doesn’t use it is because it “fails” in a necessary operation – that I then pointed out that it actually handles that specific operation rather brilliantly.

I rest my case.

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[Shawn Miller]

[Jeremy Garchow] “[Shawn Miller] “Nothing worse than opening an AE project to see an unorganized assembly of “comp 1-200”, and 500 variously named solids; Light Gray Solid 1-75, Black Solid 1-100, White Solid 1-50, etc. And don’t get me started on “Pre-comp 1, Pre-comp 1 Comp 1, Pre-comp 1 Comp 2…”!”

Yeah…our posts crossed paths.

Ae projects are a whole different level of disorganization.”

Yeah, just saw that. FWIW, I would love to see the tagging and keywording capabilities of X in AE… batch renaming of assets would also be a welcomed addition.

Shawn

[Charlie Austin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “You see, this is really hard to get across, but with trackless or Roles, or whatever you want to call it, you don’t have to rearrange the timeline to get different output results. You simply reshuffle the information to way that suits the output. It’s pretty nice like that.”

I honestly feel this way about the timeline in general. I agree that some sort of visual cues (other than clip names) like color coding would be great. And I also wouldn’t mind being able to group roles, as long as i could turn it off. I’m honestly not sure this would work well at all with multichannel/multi-Role sources. The “solutions people are offering are a kludge…

I do organize the X timeline in a “traditional” way where possible (DIA/VO more or less at the top, FX more or less in the middle, MX at the bottom) but because of the way the timeline/timeline index work, I don’t care if things get a little intermingled. And It’s really easy to separate things if I want with secondaries or a silent audio slug. FWIW, I didn’t feel this way at all when I first started cutting in X, but I’m used to it now and it’s perfectly fine. Again, Role colors, (and audio Role bussing of some sort) would be nice…

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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”~

[Steve Connor]

[Bill Davis] “I’ll just note your own phrase…
“people on here don’t needlessly “trash” FCP X anymore.” and point out the last word.

And then note that what I’m pushing back against in this thread is public discussions with an editor who doesn’t use X indicating that the very REASON he doesn’t use it is because it “fails” in a necessary operation – that I then pointed out that it actually handles that specific operation rather brilliantly.

I rest my case.”

Michael was unaware of a feature, I don’t think he was needlessly “trashing” FCP X.

It’s true after you shouted at him a bit then he realised that he could do what he wanted and that’s exactly what this forum is good at.

[Steve Connor]

[Charlie Austin] “I honestly feel this way about the timeline in general. I agree that some sort of visual cues (other than clip names) like color coding would be great”

Number 2 on my wish list!