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FCP 10.1.2 Where are you?
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Yeah, I didn’t specify that Roles were “segregated” in my example. In fact, I think separation could be more important than colour coding.
Here’s another image for someone who asked me how all this would work with Audio Components.
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You can publish any of the color effects from motion and get some great color tools and keyframing that way.
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OutOfFocus.TV – Original series, music videos, mini-docs. -
“Why are the editors dead set against tracks so enthusiastic about Roles? There wouldn’t be a need for roles if Apple hadn’t eliminated tracks. Roles are just adding another step to do what you can already do without them in every other NLE.”
A couple of reasons:
1. Tracks are a random system. Some editors have the first 4 tracks as camera-audio, other ones only have the first 2 for dialogue, etcetera etcetera. You just have to ‘know’.
Roles are based on content. It’s a kind of combination of artistry (content) and technical (organization).
It’s Dialogue. Music. Titles. Sound Effects. And you can make your own. But again, these will be very recognizable immediately.2. Tracks get in your way while editing. Clip collisions, patching, we all know the drill. You cannot just put stuff on the timeline, just like you want.
Roles and the magnetic timeline is a system, where you put metadata on clips. You can do it in your Event Browser, and you can immediately click for instance 100 clips, and give them the same role in one click. Once you do that, you are done. You can still change it in the timeline, or you can only start putting Roles-metadata on clips once you’ve finished the edit. But at no point you will need to patch, look out when extending stuff, look out when you change stuff around, …3. It makes the whole exporting a lot faster. Because Roles help for audio, but you can also use it for titles, subtitles, etc. …
Don’t forget FCPX already does this automatically on import, and has a pretty transparant system in doing this.
That’s what people mean by wanting FCPX to be a better FCPX, and not to have tracks (Jeremy). Yes, we want color coded Roles. Yes, we want an audio mixer based on Roles, available in the timeline. Yes, we want horizontal grouping by Roles.
But once we have these things, I don’t see why you would prefer tracks.In fact, I showed a demo of FCPX to a whole room of skeptics. When I showed them the power of Roles, and said how I would do stuff in FCPX, and said “in 7 you would have to do all this and this and this…” and all of them laughed. In a good way of ‘yeah, we know the pain’. When we showed them the power of FCPX, together with something like Sync ‘N Link, we *really* could hear some people gasp in the room, like “wow, can we make it all so fast?”
Someone here once said, and I think it was Bill Davis, but I could be wrong: Tracks are a work-around for not having a magnetic timeline and Roles. I’m inclined to believe that, after my experience.
It’s a different way of looking at things, but once people started using graphical interfaces, started using touch screens on an iPhone instead of Blackberry’s, etc. etc. it all needed that kind of ‘click’ because it was something completely new. -
[Walter Soyka] “… would so many still clamor for tracks with better (more) use of roles in the timeline?”
Walter,
Those who think that a mixer and real-time mixing are important are probably not “so many” in the target demographic.
Franz.
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[Marcus Moore] “When they do that, I don’t see any advantages to the track system …”
Marcus,
… a mixer and real-time mixing.
Franz.
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[Marcus Moore] “Apple’s released statement of 1million+ installs isn’t “bad” by any measure, and is in fact much faster adoption than Legacy FCP.”
Marcus,
One million in just under three years is pretty weak by some measures – particularly when you consider the number of users of FCP 6-7 that they haven’t been able to “upgrade” or “convert”.
It also suggests that they’re (still) competing with developers like Avid and Adobe (and now Blackmagic etc.) where there was some initial speculation that they were attempting to expand and appeal to other types of users.
Franz.
Edit:
[Marcus Moore] “… and is in fact much faster adoption than Legacy FCP.”
I’m not sure that’s true, but you should also consider these figures in the context of overall Mac sales – I think Apple now sells about 4 or 5 times as many Macs in any given period compared to when FCP was released.
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I don’t think either of those things are out of the realm of possibility with Roles-based organization.
A Role group CAN be several lanes high, if you just have one DIALOGUE Role for instance. In mixing that would suppose that any volume adjustment or effect you want to apply would be done so to all clips within that DIALOGUE Role. Essentially sub-mix.
However, if you need more granularity, a sub-Role for each character is easily created.
If you create enough sub-Roles, the difference between a Role “lane” and a track become pretty semantic.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Those who think that a mixer and real-time mixing are important are probably not “so many” in the target demographic. “
But why would these require tracks and not roles?
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 don’t think either of those things are out of the realm of possibility with Roles-based organization”
Marcus,
Perhaps. But really I’d have to see the implementation.
But I can imagine moving from a stretch where there are 3 sound clips, to one where there are 11 – and suddenly your mixer controls switch. I think it is just fundamentally difficult to implement in a way that maintains the simple, direct, intuitive interface that the current mixer UI offers.
That Apple kept “tracks” for Logic suggest that they see their fundamental value and use in time-based A/V editing applications.
Franz.
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[Walter Soyka] “But why would these require tracks and not roles?”
Walter,
I’m open to seeing a role-based mixer, but as I outlined above I think it presents many problems for designing a UI.
If I have 3 clips of sound and then suddenly 1 finishes and then 9 more begin, what is happening to the UI of the mixer?
A role may have several simultaneous clips – would there be a simple “expand” function – how will this affect other clips being currently mixed. How will they implement multi-track clips (a similar problem)?
When you imagine the hardware and software control surfaces – often designed around groups of 8 faders – you start to realize the problem.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m interested to see it. But I’m skeptical.
Franz.
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