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FCP-X and IMAG
In my constant quest not to just discuss how X works on particular types of gigs, but to maintain actual experience doing them – I took a two day gig editing highlights for a huge financial convention that came to town last week. Fascinating experience.
I used to do these years ago when it meant schlepping my MacPro and Cinema display to a hotel room and setting up a complex remote edit suite.
This time, I carried my “edit suite” inside my briefcase. My MacBook Pro and a single 2TB portable Firewire 800 drive. But a good thing, since per usual, the “edit room” wasn’t ready in time – so I was able to start ingesting and rough cutting on a side table in the lobby! I know, nothing special about that. All laptops can edit these days. But still it was nice not to sit drinking coffee while getting further and further behind.
What WAS special was having a continual stream of 32gig P2 cards landing at my elbow – and being able to pop them in and edit immediately as needed. For the first day, I did the sparse bundle dance, but as we got closer and closer to the big overnight edit for the 6am closing session, I was able to take the last afternoon’s footage and integrate it seamlessly with my stored content – making cutting the closing material really, really easy. And the instant re-call of my keyworded stuff meant that if I wanted a shot of people, a specific convention event, B-roll or a particular executive, they were at my fingertips instantly.
Drag and drop magnetism also rocked – particularly the new “fit to fill with speed ramp” replacement edit in 10.1 – that let me rough range select the content I wanted to edit in, then drop the new content on an old clip maintaining the integrity of my entire storyline’s sync. Scene substitution with the client looking over my shoulder was usually done in literally two seconds.
I can only imagine doing this kind of gig with a MacPro Tube! It’s going to be so stupidly fast! And with the 3 stream of 4k real-time output, I truly suspect this is going to become the de-facto standard for large show IMAG playback – IF the industry can find enough X qualified editors out there.As I’ve said here before – editing is FUN again! Even when it’s a long slog overnight…
FWIW.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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12 Replies
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Nice write up Bill.
I’ve done a few of these in my time (quite knackering for me as I usually shoot quite a bit then do the edit overnight). Last time I did one was on FCP X 10.0.1 and it was quite hard work with all the bugs but still definitely faster than FCP7.
Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor -
Thanks, Bill. Would love to see a snapshot of your library! Curious how you organized your b-roll and what system you used for keywording. Congrats on the success of the gig.
Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company
Blog: GARBERSHOP
My Moviola Webinar on Cutting News in FCP X -
Sorry, haven’t worked on that big a gig; can you explain “sparse bundle dance?” Thanks
Doug D
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Sure.
Here’s a partial keyword screen cap from the gig.
Some notes:
If this was a library I was going to work in for weeks or months, I’d start with a much more formal written tagging strategy. I find that REALLY helps for large projects. But this kind of gig is the ultimate one-off. So there’s no keyword strategy – it’s just “make it up as you go.” I try to keep terms super short. Some categories are obvious. Others not so much. For example, the Dine Around and Dine Around Schtick came from a note from the videographer who works for this company a lot and was my working partner on the gig. The CEO hops in a Limo and has to make appearances at three “fine dining” venues around the city where he hob nobs with the top sales performers. At each of those, the videographer sets up some quick silly bit – like the diners doing “the wave” across multiple tables – or doing a silly seat-swap fire drill gag. So that’s the schtick. (thank you Yiddish for the ability to borrow such a great word!)
A bin like Hugs (obviously team members seeing each other at the convention for the first time in a while – provides a “go to” bin when you want to drive a bit of emotion. Some bins come in “auto generated” from my imports – like the For_Bill bin that just took the name of a thumb drive import.
This particular videographer is excellent in shooting visual punctuation like swish pans and explosion zooms, so I have both SWISH and XZoom buckets for those below this list. Another HUGE bucket below this is Signs. Every event like this has lots of graphics, banners, screen shots and printed stuff that “brands” the event. So dipping into that bucket makes it easy to keep the identity of the event front and center in the piece.
That scratches the surface reasonably well.Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Sure Doug.
When I receive any type of file based “card” media, the first thing I do is use Andreas Kiels’ fabulous SCDI utility to create a Sparse Bundle of the resource. That essentially makes a digital clone of the card that, when launched, appears to the computer as if the original card has been re-loaded. Apple has their own version of this built into X as the Create Archive menu on the Import Screen. Both work great. I just like SCDI since I don’t have to actually be running X to make my disk images.Sparse bundles are really useful for individual editor workflows since you can save multiple copies to storage drives, and when launched, they give you a virtual drive mounted in your finder that FCP-X will “see” as a mounted Library source.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Bill,
I meant to ask you when you were telling me this the other day… what did you use to read the P2 cards so you could make the archives on your hard drive?
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill
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The client provided a P2 card reader. One of these: Panasonic AJ-PCD2GPJ Single-Slot P2 Memory Card Drive
Biggest hassle was that it took up BOTH USB ports on my MacBook – so when I needed to get content via USB Stick, I had to unplug the drive. Sigh.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Excellent, Bill. Thanks. Another useful aspect of X that helps you handle professional workflows efficiently!
D
Doug D
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Great stuff, Bill. Thanks for sharing this!
Scott
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
Hi Bill –
at the risk of getting “beaten” by this entire forum (I see that you have only very positive comments in response to your thread), I can only say one thing (which will be negative, and probably offend you and the rest of the group). Do you see the MASSIVE amounts of equipment that is in your photo ? Do you know what that means. It means that the rental facility (a company like LMG or AVI-SPL or others) make a S#$% load more money than you did, with your briefcase editing system. And in the past, when you had to schlep your Mac Pro and Cinema display, and before that, even MORE equipment (possibly cases that required a truck) – you made a HELL of a lot more than you make today. So even though you have this very elegant solution that fits into a briefcase, and allows you to do the same job, you are not able to charge as much as you used to – while this rental facility, that is providing the projectors, the cameras, the staging, the sound reinforcement (PA), etc. is making as much money on this ONE GIG, as you will make in all of 2014.
Is this something to be proud of, because you brought in your laptop with FCP-X, and ingested their capture files, and uploaded everything they wanted to this companies website in record time, at a record low price ? I know that you are a very smart guy, with a lot of experience. Are you making as much money as you made just a few years ago ?Maybe I am wrong. It’s a strange perspective. I have no problem making less money, but when everyone else around me is making more (the rental facility), then I feel like must be doing something very wrong.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com
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