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FCPX from an Editor who used it on Iditarod 2012
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[Herb Sevush] “C’mon Bill, that’s too easy, you gotta make us work for it.”
OK, Herb, but if you’re gonna ding the “crazy” bell on me -how do you handle that the original link here was to yet another pro user in the field saying the same thing I’ve said over and over and over again.
Paraphasing: “I’ve taken the time to learn it via trial and error – and now that I understand how it operates – it does things in edit workflow that I simply don’t want to give up.”
Isn’t that useful for everyone to discuss?
In fact the ONLY people I can conceive of who wouldn’t want to address that idea are those with an emotional or financial ax to grind.
Criticism is the easiest thing in the world to generate. We all can find countless things to point out in the world that are not to our liking.
But when you ask people to explain why so that everyone might learn the thinking behind the criticism, in my experience, most of the time it comes down to “because I just don’t LIKE it.”
As one small example, people diss X for crashing. Which is fair. It does crash. And if that’s all someone has to say, it’s fair – but it’s also misleading. Cuz, when others note that it largely crashes “losslessly” and an average user seldom gets set back much if any from such a crash – that’s useful for someone trying to decide whether to use it.
I think it was Mark who even had it crash spectacularly and destructively. For a few days he was angry and pissed. Which we all get. And we all took it as a cautionary tale and re-doubled our guard and re-thought our workflow. But it also looks like Mark’s natural anger is abating and he’s STILL working with X.
Why, for heaven’s sake? Shouldn’t he just dump it and move on? If that “can” happen (and clearly it can) what’s the balancing positive that makes him still want to use it?
Isn’t that worth examining?
I push back a lot because it works for me. Not always, not in every case. But it presents new and exciting tools for me that have changed how I work – for the better.
I can edit faster with X than I could with Legacy – and now I understand that with every project I successfully create and archive, I am building a global database for each client that I can use in the future that will potentially improve my efficiency further.
I just got an order for new commercials for a west coast client just yesterday, and was able to save hours if not days by instantly calling up the relevant selects via keywords off the old project.
I went from idea to rough cut in 30 minutes , rather than a full day of dis-archiving their project from a year ago and re-capturing the digital tapes which would have been the process a year ago.
That’s what X has the potential to do. Uniquely in my estimation. It’s built for persistent on-line asset storage and retrieval. Not editing in a bubble cut off from sources and exports as the Legacy interface largely was for small facility editors like me.
I’ve already used features like the Share capabilities to turn client approval dubs into something that take literally seconds to generate and email, rather than the hours it took to burn DVDs and FedEx them off in the past.
The “timeline operations” module in the middle of FCP-X is all that most traditional “editors” are stuck arguing about.
(Analogy alert: look away so as not to burn your brain!)
To me that’s like arguing exclusively about the engines at a car show. Should it be part of the discussion? Absolutely. But it’s not the only discussion worth having. And the engine doesn’t adequately describe the entire car experience, does it?Some here can’t or simply don’t want to edit with X. Fine. I can and enjoy doing so. And I feel like everyday I do it, I’m building a better editing future for myself, because much of the work I do at my edit station today – particularly in the new prep workspace – has great potential to be useful to me tomorrow.
That’s the kind of stuff that those of us who are using it are seeing as transformative. Not whether the timeline is magnetic or not. That turned out to be almost totally trivial in hindsight.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Andy Field] “that’s a big missing feature”
Yes, it is. I’m just making my adjustments in the timeline. (BTW I love those faders that he talked about)
Remember most of the events I’m working on are out of million dollar remote trucks.
Games aside, if we do a multi-cam round table for MLB or heck Oprah was just here,
the client wants all cameras isoed so they can do their own cut later sometimes, but the sound is mixed from the truck and sometimes submixed from the stage to the truck. They might just say give me the straight mix off the x-file or want certain talent mics to go with the camera that his that talent.
In the case where they want talent broke out they STILL take the main mix from the board on one ch (or two if it’s stereo) because they just don’t want to re-mix the whole show. They want to cover themselves and that’s cool but no matter how big their show is, and I don’t know many people bigger than Oprah, at the end of the day they are leaving that truck with 4 tracks of audio. No matter how much wire gets hung out on set day.
My point is, the bigger these shows are, and the more complicated the audio is, the more mixed they are, before it ever gets to whoever will re-cut it. At that point the hard work in audio is already done.
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[Craig Seeman] ”
Unlike those FCPX probably has deeper ties to AVFoundation and things being developed in the OS as well so it may well be more limited by parallel development of things it needs.
“so the logic is that overall control of the operating system is impeding stable development of the application?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “so the logic is that overall control of the operating system is impeding stable development of the application?”
Just my guess but I think it’s part of the place Apple has put themselves in. Given how I think Apple works as a company things are probably fairly tightly tied in some aspects. I wouldn’t be surprised if Snow Leopard support were dropped fairly quickly. That might help things. Given that they’ve already announced Mountain Lion it seems they’re trying to move a lot forward very quickly for them to get where they want to be. That’s part of the reason why I think this year will be a bit tumultuous.
Keep in mind one of the things that many feel hampered FCP legacy was its close ties to Quicktime whereas as Avid and Premiere aren’t.
I also think once they work out things in the OS some badly needed features like an auto save history (versions) will be implemented. Broadcast monitoring is also OS related I believe. I suspect there are other things as well.
One way to look at it is that FCP legacy was so badly behind in so many ways that FCPX is not only new but tied much more tightly to OS (and AVFoundation of course) that what we’re seeing is the “rebuilding” period. I suspect it will all be tied together in a much prettier knot the end of this year or early next.
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[Craig Seeman] “”so the logic is that overall control of the operating system is impeding stable development of the application?”
“to be fair to you mate, I suppose I did put the sentence up with a question mark at the end.
The point, as it were, is that the question mark implies incredulity.
I do not believe the statement above is either credible or logical.
I myself tend to subscribe to Ubsdell’s Pant’s Down Theorem.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Bill Davis] I went from idea to rough cut in 30 minutes , rather than a full day of dis-archiving their project from a year ago and re-capturing the digital tapes which would have been the process a year ago.
That’s what X has the potential to do. Uniquely in my estimation. It’s built for persistent on-line asset storage and retrieval. Not editing in a bubble cut off from sources and exports as the Legacy interface largely was for small facility editors like me.
I’ve already used features like the Share capabilities to turn client approval dubs into something that take literally seconds to generate and email, rather than the hours it took to burn DVDs and FedEx them off in the past.”
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how uploading files for client approval or keeping files online so you don’t have to batch capture from tape are workflows exclusive to FCPX. One place I worked at was emailng MPEG1’s for approval in ’01 and at another they started media managing the FCP projects archival purpose. As you can imagine, it made revisiting old projects significantly easier (especially when many times the changes were just a new logo there and update the date here).The search process is very limited because it is just an Excel document tracking which projects on are archived where, but once the DAM is rolled out everything will be keyword searchable and metadata can be entered by anyone in the office (Mac or PC) and by anyone that’s cleared to access it from offsite as well.
If you are smaller shop that might be overkill, but this place has over three dozen editors and producers that routinely access footage and currently the only way to do that is via one of the workstations directly connected to the Xsan so for people to be able to get what they need from their own desk will be huge.
-Andrew
2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5) -
[Andrew Kimery] “Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how uploading files for client approval or keeping files online so you don’t have to batch capture from tape are workflows exclusive to FCPX.”
I’ve been doing that for years, as well. I don’t get the hullabaloo, either.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I do not believe the statement above is either credible or logical.”
And broadcast monitoring ISN’T tied to the OS?
We don’t know what else they’re working on that may also be tied to OS development. -
[Michael Gissing] “Sorry Herb but my inner pedant is being invoked. None of those NLE’s have written anything so hard to compare to Steinbeck, but Steenbeck is another matter.:)
“That’s pretty funny. I’m reading/listening to “East of Eden” right now, and if it comes down to a choice between FCP X being in the world and “East of Eden” being in the world, I’ll take “East of Eden.” Magnificent book! Much more too it than the movie.
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[Craig Seeman] “I also think once they work out things in the OS some badly needed features like an auto save history (versions) will be implemented. Broadcast monitoring is also OS related I believe. I suspect there are other things as well.”
Does it really matter to us as users if something is being implemented in the OS or in the app, especially when it’s coming from the same developer and they can do whatever they want? AV Foundation is a new feature in Lion, but they used a private version for FCPX on Snow Leopard.
Also, Adobe and Avid implement broadcast monitoring without writing operating systems.
[Craig Seeman] “One way to look at it is that FCP legacy was so badly behind in so many ways that FCPX is not only new but tied much more tightly to OS (and AVFoundation of course) that what we’re seeing is the “rebuilding” period. I suspect it will all be tied together in a much prettier knot the end of this year or early next.”
I agree with your analysis, but Apple is not the only one that has rebuilt. Adobe and Avid have also recently written and/or re-written their own low-level media handlers (comparable to AV Foundation), too.
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
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