Editing scenario

[David Lawrence]

[Chris Harlan] “The thing is, I’m just happy now between MC 6 and Pr 6. Especially Pr 6. And I’m working through the finer details of those things right now. I’m coming to a fairly general agreement with your glowing early review.”

Glad you’re enjoying it. Here’s another early look from Scott Simmons. Check it out:

Random notes from my first “real world” Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 edit

_______________________
David Lawrence
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[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Lawrence] “And you’re OK with going from 10MB to 200MB with one blade cut? Try splitting it again and watch what happens to the file size. Or compound the compound and split that.”

This was probably like 30 cuts.

David, the bloat thing is a serious issue. It was the very first thing I tried when .0.4 came out. While the compound clip still acts slow, the file size does not double as it used to, and once all of the freaking autosaves happen, a 2-ish hour compound clip split in to 30ish cuts did just fine. I’m sure you won’t care to trouble shoot, so I won’t even try to help.

I’m not 12 years old. I do know what I’m doing. Just becuase I don’t mind the direction if FCPX does not mean my brain stopped working. If you like something, you learn to live with a few faults, you will find some in Pr as well. As I mentioned before, I still can’t use FCPX every day in all of our productions. It’s not stable enough quite yet. We need reliability. When compared to fcs3, that is going to be hard to beat for quite a while.

I really want Pr to work for us. It is a right powerful suite of tools. There’s no question, with minimal “training” we could get up and running in fairly short order. But, for us, the media management is a big issue.

I am not saying any of this to flaunt, I just want you and others to understand where I am coming from.

Our tiny little shop has 22TBs of footage active right now and there’s more coming. I don’t know how we acquire all of this, but we are fortunately very busy, and I am very thankful for it. Because we are so small, all of us work on a lot of projects at any given time, on no less than four different machines, some in and some out of the office. It’s small potatoes, and not a huge operation by any means, but we do need accuracy, and we do have a lot of projects “online” at any given time.

This is going off on a tangent to Simon, and I’ll get back on track in a minute, but I’m not ashamed to admit, that Simon’s post about him being too busy to learn FCPX because clients pay him to do real work seemed to make many assumptions about what it is I do. This was done in a very passive aggressive few short words without coming right out and saying that he thinks I’m not busy, or something to that effect. If you want to ask me something Simon, please do.

Simon, I know I post a lot. The cow is really the only place I can talk about this stuff. I rarely work with a client next to me. My time is flexible, I do not punch a clock even though I go to an office every day. But I do work, and I work hard. If three days with a passing glance at FCPX is enough for you to know that it’s “not it”, more power to you. As I mentioned in my previous post, before you used the very clever words of “Mr Complacent Certainty of Inflexible Opinions Inc” and you were using keyword collections that were perhaps mocking some of my language, if X doesn’t work for you, that is quite alright. I can tell from your post, you are looking at what FCPX can’t do, or it doesn’t work as you might expect, and you aren’t trying to look at it as to how it might work, or accept a few work arounds as perhaps they feel unfamiliar to you. It’s probably because beyond those quirks, FCPX truly won’t work for you right now, or perhaps you simply don’t like it, and that’s fair enough.

While clients don’t pay me directly for testing, you better believe that they rely on us to deliver. Testing is delivering.

Aindreas says that Apple balled up the piece of paper that was FCS3 and through it in the trash compactor. Yes, yes they did. I am not mad. Almost every single NLE out there is based on a model created in the late 80s that was based on model since the beginning of film-to-video. Over all of those years, a system, a language, and architecture were developed that more or less worked. It wasn’t perfect, but it took a lot of time to get where we are today.

Apple says it’s a different time. You can agree with them, or you probably don’t. I happen to be in the camp that I want to see this out, as in a way, I do agree with them. This business, this language, is changing very fast. I don’t mind checking out a new way of doing things, even if it’s unfamiliar. Right now, there’s a lot of unfamiliarity out there, perhaps it is time to rethink a little bit?

3 days has not been enough for me, my skull is probably too thick.

The reason why I need to talk about this stuff is that many people in my general vicinity are looking at me to make a decision, and I can’t turn to them with many questions, so here I am. And when that decision is made and we move on to another NLE/platform, and then that NLE/platform breaks or doesn’t work as expected, guess who they look at for answers?

If compound clips are screwing up FCPX, what’s my answer? Stop using compound clips for now.

If there’s 30 “0000.MTS” clips on our SAN for one project and a colleague is trying to reconnect the media after transferring the media from local drives to the SAN when a project is started in the field, and they ask me which of the 30 clips they are supposed to choose, I literally do not have an answer for them besides, “trial and error”. And it will be the same (if not worse) when coming off of LTO tape restoring an archived project for updates.

Sure there’s ways to defeat this. I can use Prelude to transcode to named clips before editing, but aren’t we trying to move to a native environment in Pr?

I can also “project manage” the project from local to SAN. But what if a directory changes later on?

I look and test all of this stuff, David, and I look intently. We are facing a decently sized decisions that will have a bearing on the future of our business.

I’m not try to slam Adobe here. Far from it. Our requests do not fall on deaf ears and you can see they give a crap about us whiny little content creators. I know they hear our concerns, and I’m sure they will do their best to fix it whenever the next cycle might happen.

I see, David, that you deeply care about the creative side of the edit, i.e. the timeline and how you interact with it.

I do too, when it comes down to it, it’s what our clients pay us for. I promise you, I do creative work every single day. No, it’s not the next Prometheus or award winning documentary, but in my eyes and to our clients it’s still creative work that we enjoy doing and are proud of. You have my word on that.

I approach the NLE as a whole. As much as it might not seem, there are real people making real decisions that write this software. I tend to try and think what they were thinking (and in some cases not thinking) while using it. Despite the timeline, you can see what this software does. I think the media management, the SAN interaction (if it works for you), and the Event structure are pretty great. A huge step forward, and I don’t don’t give a shit if iMovie looks similar. So. What. I am also extremely curious to see what Apple is going to do with the “native” camera support as things can get more complex in terms of workflow pretty quickly. Apple has traditionally “hidden” that from the user, or at least forced transcodes before working.

All of that stuff, that’s the hard stuff. The timeline interactions, while NO small coding task, it’s the stuff that changes. Look at Pr 5.5 vs 6. A lot changed, a whole lot. But you know what hasn’t changed after all these years? Their media management. Maybe it’s not a priority, or maybe it’s users don’t work like we do? I have no idea and my guesses are probably wrong, I just know that it hasn’t changed, and I know it’s no small task. We will see what they do with it.

So, using fracking favorites to mimic a few in and outs points? Really, it’s not a big deal to me. Not being able to reconnect media properly is a bigger deal to me.

I’ll try and do an Apples to Apples bloat test.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thought this might be of interest to some of you.

As Oliver aptly said, there’s no free lunch.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1006808

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1006471

Perhaps this might of of interest to some of you as well 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

Jeremy

[Walter Soyka]

I guess that makes Avid or Autodesk the winner on project bloat?

I’m with David that I don’t mind a big project file, as long as it’s still efficient. I’ll go a step further — I’m even ok with doing some extra work here and there as long as there’s an overall time or work savings.

If I can work around Warp Stabilizer data in Pr by pre-rendering clips in massive stabilization projects, that’s ok by me. I would have pre-rendered them out of AE anyway a version ago. If I can have fix Pr’s excessive preview file tracking by importing the old project into a new one, that’s ok by me, too. I am very used to having to take some time out to tidy up (or refactor [link]) projects after they’ve grown in scope or complexity under tight deadlines. It’s a necessary step before collaborating with another artist or archiving the work (read: collaborating with Future Walter who will surely not understand the tangled web of a project Past Walter wove, no matter how good an idea it seemed at the time).

If I can avoid bloat in FCPX by remembering not to compound my compound compounds, that’s ok with me. Part of our job is to know where the tools are strong and where they are weak, and use them accordingly. Sometimes that means workarounds, and sometimes that means adjusting to an app’s quirky behavior — like remembering to hit the F key after IO in exchange for keyword smart collections.

I’m curious about the infamous FCPX structural bloat torture test: does this in any way reflect the sort of work anyone here actually does, or is a totally synthetic test that’s not relevant in practice? Or is this part of the random project corruption trust issue?

Finally, one good Carl Sagan link deserves another. Or if not a good link, at least one with Auto Tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

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[Timothy Auld]

I never really understood that either. And the “no more clip collisions” comment got one of the biggest rounds of applause at the Supermeet two years ago.

Tim

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “Finally, one good Carl Sagan link deserves another. Or if not a good link, at least one with Auto Tune:”

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. That’s a good link.

[Walter Soyka]

[Chris Harlan] “I think, for me, the thing of it is that when I have any kind of collision its usually because I have two things that are fighting for a space that only one of them belongs in. So, one of them has to go anyway. I just really don’t understand the fracas over clip collision at all.”

Clip collision is only half of the benefit of the magnetic timeline. The other half is simplified selection.

With a traditional timeline, you have to make a complicated selection based on implied clip relationships when you want to make an edit around that point in time. With the magnetic timeline, because those clip relationships are explicitly defined, so making an edit around the parent automatically deals with the children correctly.

[Chris Harlan] “Everything still needs to healed a bit, doesn’t it?”

Sure, but FCPX preserves all the original durations for you to massage, whereas FCP7 will clobber some of them in collision.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. That’s a good link.”

And even relevant to the “building applications at this level is not easy” quote!

The auto tune part was just a side benefit.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Chris Harlan]

[Walter Soyka] “llision its usually because I have two things that are fighting for a space that only one of them belongs in. So, one of them has to go anyway. I just really don’t understand the fracas over clip collision at all.”

Clip collision is only half of the benefit of the magnetic timeline. The other half is simplified selection.

With a traditional timeline, you have to make a complicated selection based on implied clip relationships when you want to make an edit around that point in time. With the magnetic timeline, because those clip relationships are explicitly defined, so making an edit around the parent automatically deals with the children correctly.”

I certainly get all of that. I guess my point is that a lasso is much more useful to me. It clumps things together in a very temporary relationship, which is far more useful to me than that clump having a permanent relationship. It would be nice to have a command where I could group or ungroup lassoed clumps, at my will, but I prefer a simple lasso over the magnetic timeline any day.

[Walter Soyka] “[Chris Harlan] “Everything still needs to healed a bit, doesn’t it?”

Sure, but FCPX preserves all the original durations for you to massage, whereas FCP7 will clobber some of them in collision.
“

Yes, but temporal relationships are far more important to me than any damage done by an overlay. And, when I want to move everything out of the way, using a combo of ctrl V (to split the time line) and the t key is no biggie. It’s a couple of keystrokes and I know where everything is. I also don’t have to worry about a lot of ancillary stuff like which clip the sfx that covers the transition is actually attached to. If its lassoed, it comes along. If its not, it doesn’t.

It just seems to me that the magnetic timeline is giving up an undue amount of control for a modicum of speed in certain circumstances. And, I would further argue, that in my particular circumstances–which requires a high amount of interweaving in a short amount of time–that it doesn’t offer any speed value at all.

[Walter Soyka]

[Chris Harlan] “It just seems to me that the magnetic timeline is giving up an undue amount of control for a modicum of speed in certain circumstances. And, I would further argue, that in my particular circumstances–which requires a high amount of interweaving in a short amount of time–that it doesn’t offer any speed value at all.”

Are you giving up control — or are you changing how you control it? The magnetic timeline has its physics, and if you need to change them, can’t you just move the clip in question in or out of the primary as required? Wouldn’t that be more or less the same as making a complicated track-based selection?

As for speed, I would think that there could be some gains if you spend a lot of time moving sections around in time; you still have to make the trims after an edit as you would in FCP7, but you don’t have to make the initial selections every time.

Then again, I only know what I need — I have no idea how it would impact your specific workflow.

I would have thought, though, that clip connections, especially with SFX, were practically made for you. For example:

[Chris Harlan] “The sfx of the hand grenade pin being pulled still has to be cut and placed back where it was taken from to rest under the transition that precedes the clip you just pulled.”

Connect the pin pull to the right frame of the visual once, and you never need to think about that SFX’s placement again.

This goes back a bit to Oliver’s original question: is there a structure that you can use in your project that will minimize the amount of timeline acrobatics you have to do?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events