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FCP X and the Future of Editing
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You style-master!
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[Bill Davis] “You all just can’t have been THAT hurt by the discontinuation of Legacy can you? So much that way more than a year later you’re still pissed? Wow.”
and greetings passive aggressive debater.
for. the. umpteenth time bill: looking to falsely characterise the nature of the debate underway on what is explicitly a debating forum, and mischaracterise and invalidate views opposing your own is very weak sauce.
it is your favourite tipple though.
As you are more than well aware at this point, FCPX forum debate brewed into a pretty intense discussion about what comprises a truly valid editing system.
whether FCPX actually represents a true, broad-scale, all case use, intellectually valid editing system is in question and on the table, not least because, outside of established sole operators, client set one man shops, and a guy who is, to be fair, making a fine case for it to ‘imagine’ on the BBC, and also say three cases on the apple –
the software does not exist. This software, in terms of being paid to edit, which is different to reading (and god how tired am I of that literacy argument), if you are looking to be paid to edit, there is absolutely no sign that you are going to be paid to have learned the completely non-standard practise dreamt up in FCPX.
that is an issue, and getting to 18 months after launch, with a lot bolted on, and absolutely no employer movement, this is an existential question for the software.
In my estimation Bill – you are using canopus or vegas. And you are welcome to it, sincerely. It is simply off the main beam of employer meets broadly accepted tool use. That wil be occupied by FCP7 for an (unbelievably long time I’m beginning to suspect), then its basically Avid and Premiere after 7.0.
at least thats most likely – said nate silver.
(and please do not say I don’t try and engage with the thing FCPX – I’ve been badly mocking up improved keyframing even – the point is FCPX generates interesting debate, but as a central concern of editing in the large sense – no. its too structurally and semantically distorted at its basic level.)
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “whether FCPX actually represents a true, broad-scale, all case use, intellectually valid editing system is in question and on the table, not least because, outside of established sole operators, client set one man shops, and a guy who is, to be fair, making a fine case for it to ‘imagine’ on the BBC, and also say three cases on the apple – “
I think there’s an interesting parallel between RED and FCP X in the TV world. If you look at RED, their cameras have had the most success with the individual owner/operator. The Alexa, OTOH, currently owns the digital camera world in established TV productions. The reason is workflow. It doesn’t matter whether RED’s cameras are or are not superior. They require a non-standard workflow for post. Alexa came along and the ProRes workflow just fit.
The situation is similar with FCP X versus “traditional” NLEs. X simply doesn’t fit the established mold in places where the folks simply don’t have the time or interest to re-invent the wheel. Hence a reticence to adopt.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[David Lawrence] “Walter, I got into this a bit with Jeremy in another thread and was wondering about your opinion. I would argue that selecting ranges and marking In (and/or) Outs are very different editorial intentions. I believe oversimplifying/overloading the range selection UI is the reason so many users clamored for PIOPs in the first place, and why PIOPs are now a mess.”
Let’s talk about IOPs and ranges. IOPs mark the extents of a range; a range is the sequential set of frames between IOPs. IOPs imply ranges, and ranges are defined by IOPs.
So I’m not sure there are any operations in any NLE that work fundamentally on IOPs and not ranges; every operation I can think of conflates the two. When you cut a source clip into a sequence, you are copying that span of frames defined by the extents.
Can you think of an editorial operation where the IOPs matter and the frames between them don’t? Likewise, can you think of an editorial operation you can perform on a range of frames without defining its extents?
This is all a long way of saying that I think the difference between a range and a set of IOPs is insignificant. What I do think is new, different, and very significant in FCPX is that there are some new, non-editorial operations, organizational in nature, that operate on ranges and which never existed before.
In FCP7, IOPs/ranges are pretty much only useful for editorial operations. In FCPX, IOPs/ranges are equally useful for organization and editorial. That may mean that setting IOPs/defining ranges may be overloaded, but I don’t think the solution is to use different commands for defining ranges for organization use or for editorial use — that strikes me as too confusing and/or inflexible. I’d be very interested to hear more about how you think separating ranges and IOPs would work, because I’m having a hard time visualizing it.
To Jeremy’s point, I’m not sure that a global PIOP setting is the right solution; turning it on after an errant click blew away your IOPs won’t get your data back.
I think the problem to solve is retaining useful range data in a way that doesn’t force it back on the user where it was not intended to be used.
That’s why I’ve proposed SIOPs (stored in and out points). Basically, I want FCPX to be able to recall the last defined range on every clip, whether it was favorited or not — but I don’t want that range to have the same standing with any tool, organizational or editorial, as a properly favorited range. I want it to be a ghost range, which will persist until manually cleared or superseded by a newly defined range, but with only one possible operation: promotion to a regular range (selection).
This gives you the memory advantage of PIOPs without the scary organizational side effects in FCPX; it also gently encourages “proper” FCPX range workflow by costing the user a keystroke to recall a non-favorite range but without the steep data loss consequences of pre-10.0.6 behavior.
The more I think about it, the more I’m surprised by the Apple 10.0.6 PIOP implementation. Of all the features to bow to pressure on, why did they pick this? Or did they really think that this implementation is an improvement?
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 -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “not least because, outside of established sole operators, client set one man shops, and a guy who is, to be fair, making a fine case for it to ‘imagine’ on the BBC, and also say three cases on the apple –
the software does not exist. “
Bwahhhaaa! – I LOVE this.
What a wonderfully imaginative argument, sir! You, yourself painstakingly list a class after class that represents at LEAST hundreds of thousands of potential members (a reasonable fraction of the overall body of X paid downloaders to date!) and then opine contrary to the expressed experiences of these same SCORES of users you innumerate – the thing is “sniff – sniff” unworthy its very existence.
Well done. Your anchor at the center of your own universe is officially unassailable!
I hereby bestow upon you the Ironic Post of the Era award, (with beech nut clusters!!) hands down!
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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[Andrew Kimery] “So you’d build an NLE geared for easy adaption by consumers? 😉
“Absolutely. Because “consumers” are a massively wide swath of the overall population. And in satisfying such a broad group – I’d be very likely to see useful concepts that niche groups (even skilled ones such as “professional editors” would not reveal.
At the design stage, EVER narrowing is an elimination. How can you assess whether your core list of “needs” is proper if you’re starting out with the very group for whom “core needs” are the MOST rigidly pre-defined?
How can you expect to find insight when you only talk to people who have been largely doing the same things in the same way for 50 years?
Just a thought.
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 Davis] “I’m just tired of the same hand full of people trying so VERY hard to make the reality of X align with their emotional anger about their personal “loss.””
A very fair point — but I do think this particular thread is very high-signal, low-noise.
[Bill Davis] “Unless somebody pushes back against the tide of the whiners – I’m afraid we’ll have MORE pressure to “fix” what isn’t wrong with it – and we’ll get MORE of the PIOP vs SIOP hassles where to calm down those are constantly struggling with their sense of loss – we get sops to their feelings that aren’t as well thought out as they might be. People (and companies) typically make WORSE decisions under pressure than they do when given time to refine and reflect prior to acting. True of people. True of big companies as well, I suspect.”
I have done my fair share of whining — but I also think the PIOP debate pointed to a real deficiency in FCPX. Selections (non-favorited ranges) were way too fragile. While I think that with the current PIOP implementation, the cure is worse than the disease, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t better alternate implementations.
I say keep the pressure on. Keep pointing out the deficiencies. Squeaky wheels get grease.
Apple had the vision and courage to develop and release FCPX in the first place. You keep reminding me it’s a runaway success. Why on earth would they feel so much pressure on PIOPs of all things to rush through this ill-conceived implementation?
And once they (rightfully) decided that PIOPs solved a real problem, how did this implementation make it out of the lab? David and I both argued vociferously for PIOPs, but we (of all people!) are also both highly critical of this implementation. It’s like Apple didn’t realize the good thing they had going before, so they couldn’t understand how this would break it. Philip Hodgetts and Jeremy Garchow were all over this, literally within hours of release, and they were right on. This PIOP implementation should have been denied, shot down in flames, dismissed with extreme prejudice in the beta program. First, do no harm!
Developers get feature requests all the time, and it’s their job to figure out the best way to implement the best ideas within their application’s philosophy. But a feature request often comes in as a solution; the developers may need to divine the underlying problem, then think about other possible solutions. I didn’t really want PIOPs specifically; I really just wanted FCPX to not nuke selections when I clicked off clips. Back to the drawing board…
It’s Apple’s fault that they released a bad implementation of a popular feature request, not the people who requested the feature. The line between whining and feature request can be pretty blurry.
Bill, I’m curious what you’d think of David Lawrence’s multiple primaries idea. If you didn’t use them, FCPX would work just the way it does now — just the way you like it. If someone like David or me was pining for tracks, we could use them, too — but we could even have local (virtually intratrack) magnetism.
Couldn’t a whiny feature request (give me my tracks back!) lead to a best-of-both-worlds solution (multiple primaries)?
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 -
[Bill Davis] “How can you expect to find insight when you only talk to people who have been largely doing the same things in the same way for 50 years?”
You’re joking, right? FCP X is far closer in approach to all other NLEs than all NLEs are to electronic linear editing. And electronic linear editing is far closer in approach to all NLEs than it is to a Moviola. I would say a whole lot has changed in the last 50 years.
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[Walter Soyka] “Let’s talk about IOPs and ranges. IOPs mark the extents of a range; a range is the sequential set of frames between IOPs. IOPs imply ranges, and ranges are defined by IOPs. “
Yes and no. It’s true that IOPs imply range, and ranges are defined by IOPs. But remember, In and Out marks don’t have to be used together. We’re talking about In and/OR Outs. Editors commonly use In and/or Out marks separately, simply as markers with no intention of setting a range.
[Walter Soyka] “So I’m not sure there are any operations in any NLE that work fundamentally on IOPs and not ranges; every operation I can think of conflates the two. When you cut a source clip into a sequence, you are copying that span of frames defined by the extents. “
Yes, but in a three-point edit, only one side of the edit is a range. The other is marked. The marked side doesn’t care about extents. It’s irrelevant. The editor needs to be able to mark this transition point and shouldn’t be forced to use a range selection tool to do it.
Plus, who says marking an In and/or Out necessarily leads to an edit? It may just be a temporary reminder. It doesn’t rise to the importance of Favorites and it’s not a range.
[Walter Soyka] “this is all a long way of saying that I think the difference between a range and a set of IOPs is insignificant. “
I guess we disagree on this 😉 I think marking a transition point and selecting a range are totally different editorial intentions. Forcing them into the same selection UI was a mistake. The PIOPs mess doesn’t mean that PIOPs are a bad idea, I think it means the current PIOPs implementation is bad design.
[Walter Soyka] “In FCPX, IOPs/ranges are equally useful for organization and editorial. That may mean that setting IOPs/defining ranges may be overloaded, but I don’t think the solution is to use different commands for defining ranges for organization use or for editorial use — that strikes me as too confusing and/or inflexible. I’d be very interested to hear more about how you think separating ranges and IOPs would work, because I’m having a hard time visualizing it.”
[Walter Soyka] “Basically, I want FCPX to be able to recall the last defined range on every clip, whether it was favorited or not — but I don’t want that range to have the same standing with any tool, organizational or editorial, as a properly favorited range. I want it to be a ghost range, which will persist until manually cleared or superseded by a newly defined range, but with only one possible operation: promotion to a regular range (selection).”
What I imagine is a special type of markers, accessible from the keyboard, which would behave much as you describe above. When set by the editor, they persist and take priority over other selections until cleared. They can be used separately or together. If used together to define a range, only one pair is allowed per visible clip instance. They have a different graphic UI so they’re visually distinct. They appear in list view. Their use is totally optional. If you don’t use them, everything works as before 10.0.6. I think making them distinct and separate from the range selection UI is the key to making them work and would be a much simpler to understand solution than the SIOPs concept (which is quite interesting, btw).
[Walter Soyka] “The more I think about it, the more I’m surprised by the Apple 10.0.6 PIOP implementation. Of all the features to bow to pressure on, why did they pick this? Or did they really think that this implementation is an improvement?”
I guess I would ask – why do you think there was so much pressure that Apple felt they had to do this? What does that say about editorial workflow? Hint – it’s not unwillingness to adapt.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
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[David Lawrence] “I believe oversimplifying/overloading the range selection UI is the reason so many users clamored for PIOPs in the first place, and why PIOPs are now a mess.””
[Walter Soyka] “The more I think about it, the more I’m surprised by the Apple 10.0.6 PIOP implementation. Of all the features to bow to pressure on, why did they pick this? Or did they really think that this implementation is an improvement?
“Can someone catch me up on what exactly is the problem with the new PIOP behavior in FCPX? I’ve been reading back in forth in this thread but while both David and Walter agree that it’s bad, no one has elaborated exactly why it’s bad.
I don’t see much use for selecting multiple ranges in a clip myself, but the main feature where it remembers the last selected range on every clip is welcome and works fine to my mind.
I’m just trying to figure out why so many people are irate about the new behavior.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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