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FCP X as a database
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Given the lack of in anger usage, I’m not qualified to speak to this”
Well said!
Steve Connor
‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure” -
[Oliver Peters] “there is ZERO database functionality outside of the Events currently visible inside FCP X”
[Jeremy Garchow] “The event and project structure is real close to what you find in the Finder and its all in one place. “
[Aindreas Gallagher] “in essence an event is neither, and can be neither, a classical bin within a project super structure, or a classical project containing footage and sequences.”
Hi
For historical reasons I am stuck in FCP 5-7 with an extended (2005-2012) project cluster derived from an archive of 3000+ digibeta tapes. In FCP 7 media managing the hundreds of mini-projects using and reusing this footage is really problematic.Identification (= correcting misidentification in the original digibeta tape logs) has created a huge metadata pool. Ditto fragmentation – putting original footage back into one metadata bin. Archiving each individual mini-project’s media (with shortened handles) creates further fragmentation. The magnitude of all these data stores isn’t manageable within FCP 7, nor easily in the Finder. CatDV helps, also the dozens of notebooks I keep.
How would I want to go forward with this? And how would Apple’s reincarnation of FCP X help? What sort of data-management/database do I need?
One thing I don’t need is each assembly of related shots which comprised one mini-project in FCP 7 to continue to exist as a ‘project’. All I need is a ‘movie file’ in a container (at Finder level) that would allow me to break it open to see the individual component clips and read the clip’s source metadata. Isn’t that what FCP X’s Combined Clips are?
In my utopian view the Finder (tablet stylee) is hidden – except to ‘developers’ ;-), and the OS has a movie container format viewer (son of QuickTime) that directly opens Compound Clip movies in read-only mode.
But for an editor like me these CC’s are editable in an application (FCP X)…So in FCP X I would need a ‘Finder-view’ to show appropriate files on hard drives etc, which would include CC-like clips. Isn’t this what the Event library is?
BUT. When I’m writing I don’t want my books defaced with my metadata scribbling and with pages torn out and pasted into a work-in-progress scrapbook – the books get ruined in the process…
What I need for writing is a (digital) COPY of the original books etc. So in FCP X the Event is my view of the source assets, but I don’t want my scribbling and page tearing (PIOPs) to apply to Event assets directly, but to Clip Collections created for my specific edit project.
I’ve been writing in a program called Scrivener which allows every sentence that I write to be annotated on associated metadata pages – its a five+ window application, file browser, text entry page, summary outliner, Inspector with added metadata fields like origination date and URL etc. and a separate document viewer window. This workflow is really productive.
So I’m looking at FCP X’s workflows in the same way: It seems right to me that any editing metadata (PIOPs) I want to add to the project has to be achieved by a deliberate action – creation of a Favorite or metadata range etc.
As the Event is a ‘global’ creation (like books on a shelf) the core assets need to be kept intact and unaltered. But the Event can be added to by metadata creations – Collections and CCs etc which are added to the (virtual) shelf of my library.
The Projects are a separate entity – my thesis created from my reading of my library. The timeline, which can be turned into a CC and put in the Event library for future use.
In my utopian view I hope the puck is headed towards a YouTube/Google-like future where video assets are compound clips that can be broken down to be recycled, and documents, like web pages, have inbuilt metadata linkages that lead to all relevant source assets – text, pix etc.
I don’t know enough about database structures to know how all the metadata associations inherent in this utopia ‘relate’. 😉
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[Walter Soyka] “I’d be very curious about your opinion on SQLite performance at scale. As others in this thread talk about larger numbers of events and projects (with unknown amounts of footage, ranges, and edits), does scalability come into play with SQLite versus other database solutions? How big does the data set have to get before SQLite struggles?”
SQLite would not scale well in terms of multiple user access, but then it isn’t meant to serve more than a single-user local data store. Core Data has an obscure function called NSIncrementalStore that permits the use of data stores beyond the persistent stores native to Core Data (XML, Atomic, SQLite).
As soon as I noticed FCPX using CoreData and SQLite for Project and Event databases, I immediately began wishing for a successor to Final Cut Server that would essentially be live shared Events that FCPX would hook into as a native client. The hooks are there in Core Data, and one of the senior product managers for FCPX/Motion/Compressor came to Apple with the Proximity acquisition that begat Final Cut Server in the first place.
So what I’m wishing for isn’t completely improbable. Highly improbable maybe, but not completely improbable. But to your main point, yes, most of the bluster about databases is misguided, and even my brand of it amounts only to fringe speculation about functionality only a tiny niche would be interested in. There is no inherent superiority in FCPX due to is use of Core Data, and indeed I think it contributes to a lot of the sluggishness observed when a project gets complex and necessarily performs a lot more I/O on its SQLite database for each new timeline input.
Best,
Andy -
[Andrew Richards] “There is no inherent superiority in FCPX due to is use of Core Data, and indeed I think it contributes to a lot of the sluggishness observed when a project gets complex and necessarily performs a lot more I/O on its SQLite database for each new timeline input.”
Agreed. This is what I meant when I referred to bloat earlier.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
Wow, uh no. One of the most idiotic things about FCP 1-7 was that in order to access media from another project, was that you had to access THAT project. Then potentially capturing to that project, or screwing up that project, or having just to OPEN that huge project. Media should be separate from projects. And one could argue that Avid has a slight edge in the way they do it in that bins are grouped and stored in general with a particular project, but can be opened within any project. Avid makes sure you can only have one project open, so the nature to screw up another project by opening one of it’s bins doesn’t exist.
But X takes it one step better I think by separating the two (you could of course archive an event and a proejct together on a drive assuming you have some basic understanding of the finder) so that footage can be grouped by project (just name the event the same as the project, duh) or can be more like the photography motif you’re getting at. Kinda depends on what you’re doing.
For example, when I worked at Georgia Tech some 19 years ago, we shot and logged sports footage 3-4 days a week. No clue what or when or where or how it was going to be used. We used the videocube FYI. We created bins for the sports and sorted clips by game and date, etc. There were no projects at all on the videocube. Just sequences and bins. You had to do your own organization at the finder. So what we were doing was exactly like the event structure, just not as searchable.
It all seems pretty basic, simple, powerful and extensible. The only thing I might ask for is some sort of an event and project manager built in so that they can be mounted and unmounted without an add-on app. And Oliver makes a good point in that it would be extremely useful to have events be grouped into at least “virtual” folders for obvious organizational reasons and benefits.
I’m completley utterly right, no? 🙂
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This thread is awesome. You rock. Someone wants to change the name of this away from “the debate” to just FCP X. Have they lost their mind?
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yes you are. there.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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It’s interesting to note that over the years, I’ve come to make my finder folder match my bins exactly. I don’t do subclips. Not never, but hardly ever. But if I did I’d make a folder in legacy that says sub clips, and then have sub folders under that so they stand out as something different.
Drives me a little batty when someone gives me a project with everything organized by scenes, but there’s no master folders matching up with the folders on the hard drive. Makes it a little difficult to ascertain if everything has been imported.
Now in X, now matter what you drag in and where, it only allows one instance of the clip. Yes it can appear in multiple keyword collections, but there is only one instance. Drag it again it just replaces.
Jeremy pointed out recently that if a clip is offline, you can just drag it in again (with option?) and it relinks. None of the crazy relinking dialog necessary. About time!
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[Oliver Peters] “But veering back on-topic, the idea that FCP X Events = FCP 7 Projects = MC Bins supports the original notion that I started with. Namely… How is the database structure of X really all that different than what’s come before it? I contend it’s not. Merely that the databasing method is different in the programming sense, but hardly different in any practical way that the user cares about.”
I thought the topic was really how you felt in some way that FCP X’s use of events and projects was in some way inferior to FCP 7 or MC. What we’re trying to do is demonstrate that not only is it just different, it is far superior, especially to FCP 7, which I thought everyone agreed with back in 2001, was complete crap the way bins were integrated into a project. Most of us were coming from Avid back then and realized immediately how silly that was. Then upon realizing how silly it was that scratch disk settings were saved with the application, not the user (remember user settings? that’s something Avid has over us) that being able to open multiple projects at once was actually more of a liability than helpful, especially if it was an intern or a producer or your boss in there mucking about with no knowledge of where the assets should go.
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look -I’ll go with some of this, with massive caveats:
Oliver Peters is making, to my reading, some pretty heavy points above, about the load issue with FCPX in complex projects where the component parts are distributed between projects and events – but. Charlie –
You cannot deny that you are in a different house now
[Charlie Austin] “Can’t be? The Event is the project.”
so thats wrong.
the event is a declared point of footage call (or is it?). Given that multiple event calls may occur over even say a ten day commercial project, are you willing to flow them into a single event, or do you begin to produce multiple events to delineate significantly different material? Is it event worthy? or do you try to hive it into tags?Follow me here: Events are a little too important, and they don’t do quite enough. And yet there is nothing beyond or above them.
forget that we can make disk images externally to cobble the parts of a given piece together (which is a hack)the problem here is that there is nothing to intellectually hold those events, that will arise, together within FCPX. they are all just stars on the far right.
FCPX, as an editing system, simply lacks an editing project organisational transparency layer for the editor who might walk into it freelance.
How. In the everliving hell. Does no one see. this?
If I walk in to refine a five month old ad at a facility, and like a photo archive, there are seven or eight odd events open in FCPX from the last guy, what exactly in the hell are my instructions? are they finder instructions? What folders am I moving? Not alone am I being asked to say mount an event and its bits and pieces from a disk image, am I to also deactivate the previous evenings events and projects? Or is that the other guys job? given that the app functions as a bloody photo style archive?
This system as an editing system needs to be able to call and reconfigure its elements (that is to say call and negate all projects and call and negate all events) at the behest of a client specific number coded application call.
because right now its like saying we should all edit in one guy’s copy of itunes. where we deactivate playlists, or photo archives or something.
my point is that – if FCPX cannot assemble an externally identifiable project file – then FCPX needs to be able to completely swop out all of its events and projects instantaneously, at some kind of externally driven command.
or we just accept that its a pretty hilarious/horrible misfire going nowhere – and go about our other business.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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