Digital Heaven LegalText replacement?

[Mitch Ives]

[Michael Sanders] “Quickly went into Motion and added the logo and saved this back to the FCP X titles. Then I simply dropped the re made slide over the existing ones and FCP X copied the text and transitions over.

Job done.

I wonder where it’s written that that’s not Professional?”

More professional would be eliminating the need to drop the new one over the old one… you know, the kind of auto updating that we had in FCP7 with Motion & Livetype.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Michael Sanders]

But would’t that way require you to make each caption up in motion wouldn’t it?

This way I make up a base caption and change the words at will from within FCP.

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Mitch Ives] “More professional would be”

Yes, there are aspects of the workflow that are less “professional” (and it’s a big frustration still) but for my money the quality of the rendered output is quite clearly superior, especially in terms of compositing graphics in a typical TV spot type scenario.

Back in the summer I had a hideous problem with FCP7 not being able to render a certain colour/opacity combination without serious artefacts – but the same composite in FCPX is very clean.

The floating-point architecture is, I think, a major step forward in terms of overall image quality …

Not to say there aren’t other issues to be resolved before it becomes the ideal tool!

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Mitch Ives]

[Michael Sanders] “But would’t that way require you to make each caption up in motion wouldn’t it?

This way I make up a base caption and change the words at will from within FCP.”

I suppose that depends on how you set it up, but yes probably. In FCP7 we made titles in Livetype, graphics in Motion, and round-tripped them into FCP7. I think FCPX will probably get there in the end, don’t you?

[Simon Ubsdell] “[Mitch Ives] “More professional would be”

Yes, there are aspects of the workflow that are less “professional” (and it’s a big frustration still) but for my money the quality of the rendered output is quite clearly superior, especially in terms of compositing graphics in a typical TV spot type scenario.

Back in the summer I had a hideous problem with FCP7 not being able to render a certain colour/opacity combination without serious artefacts – but the same composite in FCPX is very clean.

The floating-point architecture is, I think, a major step forward in terms of overall image quality …”

FWIW, the problem you describe in FCP7 was more than likely a QT issue. It seemed like every other QT release caused keying and/or opacity problems in FCP7. We now know it’s because fixing things in FCP7 was no longer a priority with FCPX in development.

The floating-point thing is huge, no doubt. More quality is always a good thing, isn’t it?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Bill Davis]

[Simon Ubsdell] “My point was based on my observation of the majority of users of FCPX who post on the various forums – for now the hobbyists vastly outnumber those who may or may not be using FCPX to make a living. From looking at the take-up on FCPX templates (which is obviously an inaccurate guide), there is a huge enthusiasm for cheesy graphical and other cliches and virtually none for templates like this which address issues of technical delivery.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
https://www.tokyo-uk.com“

Simon,

Hang in there.

This is history repeating itself. With FCP-Legacy, for the first 3 versions, only a few of us who wanted to play.

When the “masses” of editors caught up around Version 3, those of us who already had the FCP skills to shine were the ones able to concentrate on the work, rather than playing “learn the software” catch up.

I suspect the same thing is happening here.

You and I and Craig and Jeremy and the handful of others who’ve seen the truth behind X have to build as great a lead as we can in these early days.

With your talent for creating tools, just keep learning and refining. The market WILL catch up. Because every time an editor with similar general purpose editing requirements like me – someone who does corporate communications, web, training, and other non-broadcast “meat and potatoes” editing decides to actually learn and give X a truly fair shake, I suspect like me, they’ll never want to go back.

Once again I had a client the past 24 hours who required me to re-cut some work in Legacy. It felt like I’d taken a HUGE step back in time. And I literally couldn’t wait to get that project out of my shop because I know that every minute I’m cutting on it – I’m NOT learning more about X.

Peace.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Michael Sanders]

Mitch,

If you do a lot of caption work and haven’t tried the FCP X/Motion 5 combo yet, may I humbly suggest you give it a go. Certainly in this respect FCP X isn’t just there it way past FCP 7 and speeding along the motorway.

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Andreas Kiel]

I like the image quality as well and it seems to be more reliable than before. I love that you don’t need to render while working on an edit, that save a lot of time – though you’ve to render anyway if you want to export.
I love all the search options and roles. I love that you are do ‘Find/Replace’ in titles, that’s a real huge timesaver for projects with really many titles. And I love many more things.
But there are many things I don’t understand the way they are implemented.
Let’s take the example for why FCPX is ‘professional’ Michael Sanders gave:

A client asked me to change to all the slates (about 10) on a video this week, they decided they did, after all want their logo on them..

In total honesty it was no more than 10 mins from starting the process to finishing it.

Quickly went into Motion and added the logo and saved this back to the FCP X titles. Then I simply dropped the re made slide over the existing ones and FCP X copied the text and transitions over.

Job done.

I wonder where it’s written that that’s not Professional?

If that have been 10 totally different slates (by design and appearance, text and settings) it’s a reasonable amount of time, but nothing which is super fast.
If those had been all the same design but just a different text, it’s very slow – 1 minute per title. That would have worked in legacy version of FCP in the same amount of time or even faster.

Let me tell you why.
With FCP legacy and Motion legacy you had been able to create your own Motion Templates which had been available in FCP, this feature was rarely used by editors from my experience. Also the parameters couldn’t be published by the user, publishing was fixed to text, size and tracking.

With FCPX and Motion 5 you are able to create Motion Templates as well. But now with more custom publishing options – which is definitively very cool (see Simon Ubsdell’s example). Compared to FCP legacy this works much better in the UI as you can search for your custom title instead of using the ugly and time consuming popup stuff from the old FCP versions.

So the difference is nothing which makes me say “Wow” as long as I’m organized! It’s just ‘cool’ – nothing else.
If I would start a project where titles, subtitles and slates are used, I would made some short roughs for myself, decide what matches for those and present it to the client. The client decides what to use and we start. Before starting editing I would make duplicates of all the titles, subtitles and slates within a custom folder and go from there. If I need additional ones the dupe will go into the custom(ers) folder as well. That’s the same with legacy and X.

Now with this example Micheal Sanders gave it’s more or less the same with both versions: in FCP legacy you clicked one of those titles and selected ‘open in Editor’, with X you control click the title and choose ‘Open in Motion’ (that again only works, if you’ve done the ‘dupe homework’ before).
In both versions you do your changes (like adding a logo) and save. The stuff will be updated for even hundreds or thousand of titles in a few seconds.
Beside the parameter publishing there are other differences between legacy and X. With the rough explanation given above there is one big difference between those when saving the template! In legacy the Save only saves/changes the selected title – that can be good or bad. You had to republish/replace it again to add the changes to all titles of this group. With X the Save command will automatically apply to all templates affected.

So let me resume (and give some advices)
The handling of Motion Templates didn’t change that much – it’s been somehow easier with the new version. And it didn’t become anymore professional in a standard environment.
The main difference between the versions is that you can work with X without rendering.
With X more people got aware of this nice feature, but are not really aware of the options and risks IMHO.

Here the advices:
Never do what Micheal Sanders did (doesn’t mean he’s not a professional – no offense at all. I’ve to learn a lot of things as well).
If you replace a template the way he described – at least as I understood – any custom changes in X will be overwritten. If you don’t have the same amount of text entries in the changed template, you will loose text as well (same as in legacy).

If you have used the ‘original’ templates in other projects and change it the template will be changed everywhere – again that might be good or bad.
So some thoughts upfront on how to work with copies is very very important and could save your ‘life’ sometimes.

The bad thing about working with duplicates is that the titles got more and more cluttered in the interface – both for legacy and X. So think about the names of dupes as well. X gives you big chance to organize better.

My 2 cents

Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Andreas Kiel] “I love that you don’t need to render while working on an edit, that save a lot of time – though you’ve to render anyway if you want to export.”

I don’t know whether you have observed this but a lot of people seem to be finding that, unless it’s actually preventing them from working, there is really no need at all to render anything.

The difference in time taken between rendering the timeline (alarmingly slow) and simply exporting an unrendered timeline (remarkably fast) is very dramatic, to the extent that not rendering is clearly the most desirable option in most cases.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Andreas Kiel] “The handling of Motion Templates didn’t change that much – it’s been somehow easier with the new version. And it didn’t become anymore professional in a standard environment.”

Exactly – I think people have got excited about something that was actually always there and they never noticed before, as you say.

The big downside with FCPX/Motion 5 is surely the lack of round-tripping – if and when this is implemented, FCPX will be a whole lot stronger, but currently the Motion/FCPX interchange process is actually materially weaker than it has been in the past.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Mitch Ives]

[Michael Sanders] “If you do a lot of caption work and haven’t tried the FCP X/Motion 5 combo yet, may I humbly suggest you give it a go. Certainly in this respect FCP X isn’t just there it way past FCP 7 and speeding along the motorway.”

Haven’t yet in FCPX. Thanks for the tip… will do that.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill