Editing scenario

[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Lawrence] “But I also notice on the first link, an Adobe employee posted 24 minutes after the OP, asking for detailed steps, a screenshot, and anything else he could supply to help him reproduce bug so it could be fixed.

An Adobe employee also acknowledges the bug in the second link. It’s obviously a bug and obviously on their radar.

Apple’s comments on project bloat:

“crickets”

Just sayin’.”

And this is par for the course between the two companies.

Adobe lives out loud, Apple does not. This is nothing new.

I think we can all appreciate Adobe’s communication. It goes a very long way.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Herb Sevush] “I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that Adobe will fix this bug in less than half the time it’s taken Apple to already not fix their bug. And Adobe’s customers will not be left in the dark about what’s going on. While their are no free lunches, Lou Malnati’s is worth the price, while Domino’s isn’t.”

Certainly you mean Giordano’s but that’s another conversation.

I have no idea what it will take to fix it. It might not be an easy fix.

Building applications at this level is not easy.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

And now for the pictures.

Here’s a clip that I have for a current project in FCP7. It has extended markers to persistently mark the parts of the clip I like, always and forever.

It is a goalie leaning down in to the camera, and there’s multiple takes on this one camera roll:

01_fcp7_extendedmarkers.png

Here’s the same clip in FCPX, but instead of extended markers, I know have favorites:

02_fcpx_favorites.png

I now sort the Browser by favorites (control-f) and by filmstrip view (command-option-1). Some might call these “subclips”:

03_fcpx_sortedbyfaves.png

So, if I were to mark in and out on all of those favorites and have FCPX remember all those in and out points (in this case it would be 5 from this one clip), when I sort by all clips (control-f), which one of those in and points will be displayed on this clip? Right now, FCPX chooses to display none of them (except for, of course, I have my favorites marked already, so they never go away until I want them too. Perhaps those are PIOPs, maybe?)

So, it is right here, that non “user set” PIOPs would get more complicated as which one should FCPX remember? This same rule also applies to keywords, that is, if you had one keyword on multiple sections of a clip.

Let’s work the other way (which presents a bit of a different scenario).

Let’s say I select all the favorites, this marks a range that FCPX, actually sort of remembers. For example.

Here’s all of the favorites selected, this creates a new range, really:

04_fcpx_allfavesselected.png

Then I sort by Favorites (control-f):

05_fcpx_allfavesselected_sortbyfaves.png

See what happens? All clips are selected but not really ranged. If you notice, the icon is different, it’s not a range icon, but rather just a thin yellow line. I can in fact add all of those clip to the timeline through the normal edit features (q, w, whatever you want).

If I sort back to “all clips”, then only the last favorite is selected:

06_fcpx_sortedbyallclips.png

Discuss,

Jeremy

[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Thanks, David. I appreciate the comments. I do enjoy these conversations as well. I think in the end, it will help make everything better, no matter what platform/NLE we end up choosing, as we have all said from the inception of this forum.”

Jeremy, you’re welcome, thank you and agreed. I can’t think of another place on the interwebs where there’s as much passion for understanding the tools we rely on everyday. Props to Ron and Tim for creating this place and keeping it going.

[Jeremy Garchow] “It’s not only in reconnection, but it’s also in project/timeline/bin sharing. While FCP7 isn’t perfect in this regard, having the ability to have multiple projects open, and copy/paste between them was pretty essential to our workflow. With Pr you can import new project to your current project, but there’s a lot of duplicity, and things tend to disappear if you delete them from the project mistakenly. So if you import a timeline via a project, it makes new master clips. If you delete those master clips from your project, the clips simply disappear from the timeline (they don’t even go offline as everything in the timeline is directly represented by something in a Pr project). So if something mistakenly gets deleted, you will go to open a timeline and it will be empty.”

Yes. This is a very big deal. For our typical workflows, about half the time it’ll work to our advantage. Like today’s scenario – I just got a hard drive in the mail with a bunch of pick-up material from last week’s shoots. These come in as new folders in the capture scratch where the AVCHD material has been log and transferred in an new project. The project just has the master clips and nothing else. When I start a new project, I might get up to ten log/transfer projects like this. What I usually do in FCP7 is open all these projects at once in tabs, then copy the clips into appropriately named bins in a new master project. I work from the master project going forward and never have to touch the log/transfer projects again. PrP will actually save me work for this scenario because it essentially does what I’m already doing manually. So I’m not worried about that.

[Jeremy Garchow] “As someone who receives offline projects and needs to finish them, this can make for some confusing moments when it comes time to finish as the rule will become, don’t delete anything, but that means you will have multiple project level (not Finder level) copies of all the same media in your project when complete.”

Yes, I absolutely agree. It’s that other 50% of our workflow that I’m concerned about. This is where we’re doing the same thing as you describe, sharing sequences back and forth throughout the editorial process. I can see the duplication getting out of hand really fast. I’m really concerned about confusion and destructive mistakes. No avoiding it, the change will be bumpy. Sigh…

[Jeremy Garchow] “There’s always a trade off in releasing something that you know isn’t quite right. I am sure Apple has heard the feedback. I don’t know what level it’s their “must-fix” list. Maybe they are fixing it, I don’t think we have that information.”

Yes. And I do believe they’re paying attention. They fixed that destructive bug where nudging a gap with the position tool would eat clips in 10.0.3 so maybe they’re looking at this too.

[Jeremy Garchow] “I still haven’t done the Apples to Apples. I plan to, though, as I would be curious if it exactly doubles.”

Cool. Curious what you’ll find.

[Jeremy Garchow] “But if you look hard enough, David, you will find weird bugs and inconsistencies in any software. It just so happens that FCPX is under the microscope at the moment, it is very new, and is not as mature as other offerings. When looking at it’s release state, and the state that it’s in now, they have done some remarkable programming in a very short time. I believe they will fix issues, but other’s might not. That’s OK. It’s a choice and preference at this point.”

True enough. PrP certainly has its share of them, that’s for sure.

I guess I’m partly holding Apple to a different standard because I’ve always considered their UI and UX design to be world class and the gold standard for usability. I think Apple’s success in the consumer space is a direct reflection of this. But lately, I’ve notice a lot of what seem like really basic UI mistakes slipping thru the cracks across the board in Apple software products. Stuff a first-year UI design student would catch. Maybe this is a result of massive growth and the pressures to build fast. Eventually things do seem to get fixed. But in the interim, I seem to be having a lot of WTF moments with Apple software these days.

[Jeremy Garchow] “I hope to post images later, and thanks for the response.”

Looking forward and thank you!

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[David Lawrence]

Great post Jeremy. Will respond with some pics when I get a free minute.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[Walter Soyka]

Jeremy, earlier in this thread, I wrote the following:

[Walter Soyka] “I’d want it to feel almost physical… Apple chose to make keyword ranges and favorites look and feel like clips from an editorial perspective. If an in and out is set from a keyword or favorite range, my intuition is that it should live on that “virtual clip.” If it’s set outside of those selections, it should live on the clip itself. (Perhaps Apple should come up with another way to indicate the relationship of ranges to their parent clips, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

In other words, PIOPs should always be local. They should be children of the user-facing object they were created in. It’s ok that they’re not more global or data-centric, because they are not meant to be used that way. That’s what favorites are for.”

What do you think of that? Shouldn’t IOPs marked on a favorite be attached to the favorite, not the clip itself (like how IOPs on FCP7 subclips don’t flow back upstream to the master clip, nor do clips in the master flow downstream to the subclip)?

Or how about another, more data-centric view that may fit better with the FCPX no-physicality, drive-by-data idea and still provide many of the “scratch use” benefits of PIOPs? What if FCPX remembered the last 10 or 20 ranges (or some other user-defined number) that you set in a special “Recent Ranges” item in the browser, almost like levels of Undo? It’s not persistent, but it seems that most folks don’t need true persistence — they just want IOPs to survive a click away from a clip and let them flip through a few other clips. Of course, this approach has its dangers as well…

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “What do you think of that? Shouldn’t IOPs marked on a favorite be attached to the favorite, not the clip itself (like how IOPs on FCP7 subclips don’t flow back upstream to the master clip, nor do clips in the master flow downstream to the subclip)?”

There’s a big difference. Favorites are not really subclips, they are just further sorts of the master clip. They do not exist on their own like subclips do in FCP&, for example. Any information you tag on to any part of a clip anywhere on matter how you are sorted at the moment, will be displayed on that master clip. If you keyword only one favorited range, that keyword will show up when you sort by “all clips” as a range on the “master” clip. So if you marked an i/o range on multiple favorites of the same clip and FCPX could hold on to it, this means that multiple in/out ranges will show up on one clip. Is that necessary? I don’t know. I don’t think it is, but then again, I use favorites for some of this functionality. Look at this picture again, now imagine putting a range that FCPX could remember on all of them, then sorting back to “list view” and “all clips”:

03_fcpx_sortedbyfaves.png

The Event system is very dynamic. I constantly sort between list and filmstrip view (even remapped the keyboard for 1 and 2) and if you have a range selected in a favorite or master clip, and choose the sort (by either list, favorites, or filmstrip) the range sticks with that clip through all those sorts. If you started assigning elements to just favorited or keyworded ranges, in my opinion, it would take away a powerful feature of X. Plus I think it would just start to get kinda messy. I think that using a combo of keyword ranges (if that’s your thing) and favorites allows more sorting and retrieval in many different ways than a typical bin system. It does take some adjusting in learning how to use it. I am still learning.

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “There’s a big difference. Favorites are not really subclips, they are just further sorts of the master clip. They do not exist on their own like subclips do in FCP&, for example. Any information you tag on to any part of a clip anywhere on matter how you are sorted at the moment, will be displayed on that master clip. If you keyword only one favorited range, that keyword will show up when you sort by “all clips” as a range on the “master” clip. So if you marked an i/o range on multiple favorites of the same clip and FCPX could hold on to it, this means that multiple in/out ranges will show up on one clip.”

Right, I do understand how FCPX works here. Forget I mentioned subclips. That was just an attempt to show that there’s a precedent for PIOP associations being linked to virtualized clips instead of being linked to master clips or media by reel/timecode.

In terms of how PIOPs might work in FCPX, I’m suggesting they should follow the clip or virtual clip they’re assigned to. As in traditional NLEs, the PIOPs would be recalled when the object to which they belong (either a clip or

When a favorite is acting like a clip (in favorites view), it should get a PIOP as if it were a clip. In regular clip view, any PIOPs in the favorited ranges shouldn’t be seen. The main clip should have it’s own PIOP, independent of any PIOPs assigned in the favorites. This would follow the physical feel of the clips and favorites in the browser.

This complexity, necessary to retain the feel of traditional PIOPery, is a side effect of the FCPX “favorites are really ranges, but they can also feel like regular clips” design decision, but I think is still fully consistent with how PIOPs work in traditional NLEs.

That, or Apple can allow overlapping favorites, and allow you to sort favorites by creation time, and then we could all just press the F key…

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “When a favorite is acting like a clip (in favorites view), it should get a PIOP as if it were a clip. In regular clip view, any PIOPs in the favorited ranges shouldn’t be seen. The main clip should have it’s own PIOP, independent of any PIOPs assigned in the favorites. This would follow the physical feel of the clips and favorites in the browser.”

So by these standards, of I set a marker or keyword range on a favorite, you propose that that information doesn’t show up in the master?

Let’s say I have a range selected within a favorite in list view, I switch to filmstrip and favorites, you’re saying that range I just selected shouldn’t show up in favorite view?

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “So by these standards, of I set a marker or keyword range on a favorite, you propose that that information doesn’t show up in the master?”

Maybe the same standards shouldn’t apply?

IOPs could be associated with a clip; markers and keywords could be associated with media (the content).

Is there a difference?

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