FCP 10.1.2 Where are you?

[Marcus Moore]

Right now there’s a flexibility to the way the timeline works; I’m not concerned about how to pull apart the middle of a complex edit. Elements move where they need to so that I can work on the primary focus of my story without audio or video track conflicts getting in my way.

Roles provides and organization element which isn’t dependant to a strict horizontally stacked order. Yes you have to assign Roles (those which FCPX doesn’t auto-assign, which is most), but that up-front work pays off in not having to manage those elements all the way thru the edit.

Roles provide the same benefit in the Project that Keyword and Smart collections provide in the Event Browser.

My big request is for Roles tagging to be used to visually organize audio and video elements in the timeline, and for mixing purposes. When they do that, I don’t see any advantages to the track system, and all the benefit the fluidity of the FCPX timeline provides.

[Marcus Moore]

Logic X integration is bad because FCPXML isn’t well supported in Logic yet.

[Marcus Moore]

That’s weird. I just purchased X2Pro for a specific job and didn’t hear boo from the audio guys. You should try sending your XML to the developer.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “Support for multiple primaries would essentially be support for tracks.

But then the toolset would need to be modified for primary patching.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWaLxFIVX1s

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[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy & Darth Vader] “NOOOOOO!”

I find your lack of faith disturbing. They’d clearly also add a super-primary, to which other primaries could be connected and magnetically manipulated, thus eliminating destructive clip collisions and negating primary patching…

In all seriousness, would so many still clamor for tracks with better (more) use of roles in the timeline?

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] “would so many still clamor for tracks with better (more) use of roles in the timeline?”

That’s an easy answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWaLxFIVX1s

I have always said, I just want FCPX to be more like FCPX.

If we had layered secondary containers, that would be amazing. Also, a way to navigate layers with keyboard. I think the current FCPX bouncing ball, a la Smoke, is a working technology preview of that.

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[Marcus Moore]

Here’s an image I mocked up a while ago of a current version of a Project, with a version that has colour-coded Role organization.

[Walter Soyka]

Marcus, I’m one of the non-believers who doesn’t think color-coding is enough. Interestingly, in your mockup, you’ve done both color-coding AND vertical organization at the same time. I think this is important. Check out what can happen with color-coding only:

Now of course the top and bottom in my modification of your mockup don’t show the same data — this is just meant to illustrate how “wasting” vertical space makes an edit much more readable at a glance.

I’m not saying that color-coding isn’t valuable — just that a “tracked” view based on roles reads faster. If the FCP X timeline could show different views of the same underlying editing, I think that’d be valuable.

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

[Marcus Moore]

I agree with you completely- hence my mockup being the way it is. Besides colour, there needs to be visual separation of Role elements so they don’t “intermix” the way they do now.

The concept I keep leaning on is that Roles are like Keywords for the Project. Right now we can assign Roles, but there’s no visual container like Keyword Collections organizing them in the Project window.

I could also see great benefit to being able to collapse and expand Roles into “single lanes”- horizontal space is always at a premium in a timeline. There’s something like this is LogicX.

[Walter Soyka]

Updated the image to reflect the actual edit from your initial example:

And also I wanted to clarify that I think we are asking for the same thing — that didn’t come through in my first post.

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