Fascinating Premiere 6K workflow story from Vashi Nedomansky

[Michael Hancock]

[Bret Williams] “Call it browser pancaking or something but it’s pretty functionally the same.”

I would say pancake timelines and FCPX collections really aren’t the same, and the video doesn’t address what I consider some rather substantial differences. My thoughts on why they’re substantially different:

In the video example, the editor had 4 timelines open to pull from, where each timeline could hold a few or a lot of clips but still be zoomed to show every single clip in the timeline (or zoomed to show only a few at a time – editor’s choice), and they are presented in relation to each other based on how the editor built the sequence. In FCPX, you can’t do that. You can select a keyword collection, or several of them, and zoom out so the icons represent only a thumbnail of each clip, but if you have a lot of clips you will still spend a lot of time scrolling up and down to see them all. There is no way to get a top down view of every clip you’ve pulled for each keyword collection, in the order you added them to the collection, like you can with a selects sequence, unless there are only a few clips in each collection. I have a project open right now where I selected three keyword collections I built of selects. I’m in filmstrip mode, completely zoomed out, with the icon as small as possible. it’s 340 clips total, and I have to scroll up and down to see them all. A lot. If these were three timelines stacked I would have a view of every clip and could scrub left to right to go through them all. In FCPX I have to scrub left to right, and up and down.

In addition, the clips in a selects sequence are stuck in relation to each other in time, which won’t change unless you delete a clip or insert one somewhere in the middle. You can always add more clips, but append them to the end so the rest of the timeline is unaffected. I think this becomes a very important difference as you work with the material.

In a Keyword collection, every time you add a clip to the collection the order might shuffle depending on the name of the new clip, or how you’re sorting them. It’s not easy to control the order they are presented as concretely as you can in a sequence. This is an important distinction, because any spatial memory you might develop in regards to “I remember a great lens flare shot near the beach scenes, which are in middle section of my ‘beauty shots’ selects reels. I’ll go straight there to find it in this selects sequence” doesn’t exist with a keyword collection. You have to remember both the horizontal and vertical relationship of the clips, and the vertical relationship changes every time you zoom in or out. You could easily tag the clip as “lens flare” and find it with keywords and metadata in FCPX, but that’s a different approach than a selects reel or pancake editing. I remember where things are in relation to other clips when they’re in a sequence much easier than I do where they are in bin/event/keyword. Your mileage may vary.

I like to relate selects reels and pancake editing to my desk. If I were at home sick and someone needed to find something on my desk, I could tell them a where it to look without having to be there. My pen is always under the right monitor behind the pad of sticky notes. My coffee mug is always on the left under the monitor riser, next to the cable to charge my phone. I’ve built up a memory of where everything is, like I do in a selects reel. With FCPX, I haven’t been able to replicate that, even with smart collections and keywords. Instead, I rely on lots of tagging and metadata and doing searches, which works, but has a very different feel and rhythm to pancake editing and selects reels.

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Michael Hancock
Editor

[Bret Williams]

All very good points. So what do you think of the second video on the page addressing actually doing it the same way by making compounds?

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https://BretFX.com FCP X Plugins & Templates for Editors & Motion Graphics Artists

[Steve Connor]

[Bret Williams] “All very good points. So what do you think of the second video on the page addressing actually doing it the same way by making compounds?
“

It would be nice if you could just “skim” and edit projects in the browser instead of making compounds, not a big time saving but it would be a slightly more elegant solution. I sent that as a feature request a while ago

[Michael Hancock]

Just watched the second video – it’s a little dishonest, in my opinion. A compound clip is similar to using a sequence as a source, but it’s not the same thing. You don’t have reference to the individual clips until you break it apart, you have to take every clip in the compound clip and can’t choose which audio tracks you want. Does it roughly achieve the same result? Sure. But is it the same thing? No. It’s less flexible and doesn’t give you nearly as much control as actually cutting directly from one sequence to another. That might be okay in some circumstances, but for how I work I prefer how Premiere or Avid do it.

And I agree with Steve’s reply – I’d prefer the ability to skim sequences (projects), and edit from that project directly into another one as either individual clips, or edit in the range as a compound clip (like Premiere). 99.99% of the time I would want to edit in individual clips, but I’m also a big fan of having options!

So yes, compound clips are a decent workaround, but you lose the ability to see the individual edit points of each clip, which I really like. Especially if you have an NLE that allows you to color code your clips. At a glance you can see all of your red clips, which are beauty shots, green clips are sports, blue are good emotional moments, etc… I do all of this in FCPX using favorites and keywords and smart collections, but being able to color code and string things out would be very welcome and useful. And being able to skim/edit from one project directly into another would be a big improvement.

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Michael Hancock
Editor

[Nick Ring]

“It would be nice if you could just “skim” and edit projects in the browser instead of making compounds, not a big time saving but it would be a slightly more elegant solution. I sent that as a feature request a while ago”

Definitely a feature I miss from the “olden days” of FCPX before they combined projects and events into libraries. You could skim through the projects without opening them. Would love to see this come back in the current structure.

-nick

[Steve Connor]

[nick ring] “Definitely a feature I miss from the “olden days” of FCPX before they combined projects and events into libraries. You could skim through the projects without opening them. Would love to see this come back in the current structure.”

I forgot that you could do that in older versions of FCPX

[Tony West]

[Michael Hancock] “Especially if you have an NLE that allows you to color code your clips. At a glance you can see all of your red clips, which are beauty shots, green clips are sports, blue are good emotional moments, etc… I do all of this in FCPX using favorites and keywords and smart collections, but being able to color code and string things out would be very welcome and useful. “

I find the X timeline much easier to see what’s what after the 10.3 update and the list of color codes for the clips and the addition of lanes. (added even more in 3.3 update)

Vashi had one timeline with a lot of tracks and two with not very many tracks. If you were working from 3 or more timelines that had say, 20 tracks each the ccs would be way easier for me to deal with, without a bunch of scrolling up and down(which of course was the whole point of ccs). Breaking the clips apart in the timeline would be one click for me after remapping my keyboard.

It’s an interesting way to work but I wouldn’t give up my 10.3 timeline for it. I would use my browser like he did in that second video.

Being able to make a DCP file is something I would like to see Apple add to X.

I also agree with Steve, bring back the skimming of projects as soon as possible grrrrrrrr