Events: Good or Bad?

[Keith Koby]

Events Metadata vs MAM Metadata

Take a look at what is possible with the Cantemo Portal I referred to earlier… You can have a full length feed clip that you’ve ingested and catalogued into the MAM. That clip can have multiple (overlapping) ranges that have been and annotated in the MAM. You can then export an xml from the MAM that opens FCPX and imports into your event. The clip will have a drop down with all the annotations as keyword collections.

Now lets say you have a whole bunch of clips – different angles or just different clips all referencing the same person or the same action like a gatorade dunk. Collect them in the mam, export the xml and import all of those into an event. Inside the event you not only have your individual clip and it’s ranges, but a way to automatically group all of those labeled ranges into keyword collections. Want to see all of a particular type of highlight from the clips you imported? Simple, click on the keyword collection or search.

So you have the centralized repository in the MAM and the fine tuned area in the NLE for what you are using. The beauty of those keyword ranges is that they are basically little subclips all ready to drop in to the timeline and fine tune. It makes for a very, very fast workflow inside the app. FCPX is nice in that it can really use all of the data you throw at it from the MAM.

What is needed is the ability to add role and sub role information to clips in the mam and then have that carried across via xml.

Roles and Sub Roles…

Roles are another set of metadata tagging that you do in the event and they carry in to the timeline. They give you very powerful handles for finding, selecting, soloing, effecting, correcting etc, all the clips in the timeline. But better, they give you handles for exporting what you want to export.

So if you have your lower thirds and graphics roled as such, you can quickly turn those on or off in the timeline or in the export. You can save your export by role setups as presets! You can group those in the share menu so you can for example easily export a texted and textless master from the same timeline… No duping of sequence and cleanup and re-render necessary. And export is super fast on cheaper hardware (iMacs with thunderbolt dongles etc).

So, first you have your Sr. Editor establish the graphics package as clips and compound clips that are “rolled out” or “rolled up” if you like, in a master event. You export an xml of that Graphics Master Event and put it in a central place on the san and even catalogue it in the mam for quick access.

From here, we are creating another san location for each station or each editor where they put all of their graphics builds. They each can import a complete ready for edit graphics set into their personal san location…

From the point of view of sharing it is better than 7 in that metadata tagging that is made and “shared” via xml is more useful. You just go about the sharing in a different way. I don’t see it currently as a huge advantage or disadvantage on the workflow process. Just an advantage inside the app when you are working with the materials. The framework is there for it to be a huge advantage in the future.

[Jeremy Garchow]

I just found something, and I am foolish.

If you dupe any Project that has referenced or aliased media and choose “Duplicate Project and Referenced Event” it will create a new Event with aliased media.

So, this means that you can put one clip from every Event you want to dupe a Project, Dupe it, and move it to either a new Location or hard drive.

Alternatively, you can put only the clips you want to move in to a Project, Dupe it, choose “Used Clips Only” and it keeps the files aliased.

This must be an update with FCP 10.0.6 that I passed over.

Before 10.0.6, when you duped a Project/Event it would copy the media in the entirety to the new Event.

I guess I should read the release notes more carefully. “When duplicating an event or project where media resides on shared storage, only the links will be copied. This speeds up duplicating or moving events and projects to another editing station that is linked to the same shared media.”

Jeremy

[Keith Koby]

Yes. This is important. Before it would duplicate media.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Keith Koby] “Before it would duplicate media.”

…And drive me insane.

🙂

[John Davidson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “…And drive me insane.”

That’s not a far drive…more like a putt!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[John Davidson] “That’s not a far drive…more like a putt!”

Hey, who let you in here?

[John Heagy]

Thanks for the detail response. I wasn’t questioning all the tagging, keywording, and search – couldn’t all that theoretically work without media being squirreled away in an event?

We’ve come to the conclusion that San Location(SL) = project and essentially are using events to support only projects in this SL. This is not Apple’s intent where Events become a long term library for any and all projects. In Apple’s world of single users with local storage, all events are shared with all projects. I understand one can export xmls of events but then they generate new events and unless merged at some point go “out of sync” quickly.

In order to work in a shared media environment we must create isolated events.

I understand my argument against events in a shared environment is somewhat moot as events are required.

I think we’re all in agreement Apple needs to improve shared media workflows. I’m just pointing out what I see as fundamental obstacles.

Not being able to share events is a fundamental obstacle considering events were built to be shared across projects.

So I think Apple needs to figure out a way to share events in a shared environment.
If not they will continue to be something we will have to work around.

John

[Oliver Peters]

I’m not sure that I completely followed the discussion of how some of you are talking about duplicating projects. As I see it, these three options work this way:

Duplicate Project Only

This is simply a copy of a sequence for versioning (or “in progress” editing) purposes. You can include render files and you can also save to a different drive. It’s effectively the “save as” function. The FCP X quirk is the “shared” folder within a Project folder hierarchy. If you have shared (exported) a Project, then this function also copied those media items. For example, .m2v files if you created a DVD using the Share menu.

Duplicate Project and Referenced Events

This is designed to copy a Project to a new drive or location. If you had originally imported with media set to copy into the Event, then this function copies any original media inside the Event copies. You’d use this to make a Project and all Events portable. Obviously if the media is linked in the Event, then you’d also have to copy (from the Finder) any original media that is linked.

Duplicate + Used Clips

This is the replacement for the FCP “legacy” Media Manager. It’s the same as Avid’s consolidate function. All media is copied to a designated location with a new, self-contained Event that now contains copies of the original media files (untrimmed) within it. Again, this is another method of portability, as well as back-up. IOW, edit a production from as many Events as you like. When the cut is locked, use Duplicate + Used Clips to put all final camera masters and the final edit into a single location (1 new Event folder with media, 1 new Project folder).

I’m sorry if I’m being pedantic, but it just sounds to me like a lot of the comments seem to be overthinking how these choices work. What am I missing?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Oliver Peters] “I’m not sure that I completely followed the discussion of how some of you are talking about duplicating projects. As I see it, these three options work this way:”

I don’t know if “some of you” means me, but what you have outlined is exactly the way it works.

If you did this before 10.0.6 and had media in the Event and duped a Project using anything but “Project Only” to a new drive/SAN Location that media would be physically copied to the new Events, now it just remains aliased.

Same with Events only.

If you are talking about me, did I misrepresent something?

[Keith Koby]

I was referring to copying or moving media from one event to another. It used to dupe. Now it just copies the alias.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D