FCPX in action

[Gary Huff]

[Bill Davis] “If all you’ve done is “played with it” then sorry, but I believe you simply don’t understand it well enough to make an informed decision.”

I’m sorry, how long is required for me to work on it to make an informed decision? I don’t feel like spending time wrangling with it to make an edit, only to decide I need to do it in some other NLE and have to recreate the project from scratch (I don’t feel like spending extra money just to get it to export properly where I can open it back up in a new NLE).

It’s a combination of playing with it and reading people tout what it does for them here. None of it is impressive to me.

I did this project (possibly NSFW depending on how uptight your place of employment is) all in Premiere CS6 with color correction, including masks and secondaries, with Colorista II. For the infinite white I had to mask out the sides and color correct the background, then did an overall pass in AE. I was able to import the comps and then setup a nest sequence so I could turn the AE import on and off with the original footage (two camera angles, all synced up via PluralEyes) so I could render out non-correct versions for edit approval without having to spend render time when it wasn’t needed.

I originally started this project in FCP7, but ported it back over to Premiere CS6 so I could save space on using the original camera files (no ProRes encodes). I’m sure FCPX could have edited this, but I don’t believe I could have fixed the infinite white shots in FCPX (plus there were some tracking mask shots as well), but I could be wrong. Have no idea how easy it would have been to toggle between the two camera angles, both corrected and original footage.

But Premiere worked just fine for me, and the integration with AE is hard to ignore.

[Gary Huff]

[Bill Davis] “If, on the other hand, people increasingly come to understand that we’re rapidly moving toward a world where content is increasingly ephemeral and demand for it is increasingly short lived – and therefore the ability to create, keyword for search, deploy and revise dynamically – becomes a superior strategy to the “plop out and cut off a master and move on” process of the past forty years – then X will likely continue to evolve and succeed.”

A lot of my projects, in this new world you keep speaking of (which I am right in the middle of) are self contained. For your point to make sense to me, I would have to keep every project ever listed in FCPX and on a permanently attached, massive storage RAID system. Not only is this expensive, but having all my projects forever contained in the single interface of FCPX will undoubtedly slow it wayyyyyyyy down to the point where it’s unusable.

[John Davidson]

I started on PC’s and was a massive detractor of macs until our first Tiger G5 in 2005. A big issue for me was losing the F9 key for easy ease, which is stupid I know, but it was. I still don’t think there’s a way to get it back without wrecking my itunes control. It’s been seven years and we still have to right click on keyframes to easy ease.

When you say CS6 is the same on Mac and PC, I agree, mostly. This consistency of UI takes away from the overall mac experience, i.e. itunes controls, no full screen apps, and the comment above that usb mics worked easily on a pc when on a mac it involved a price in blood to get working. I think in the last 3 years Adobe has taken great pains to code apps better for mac, but the core of all Adobe programs start on PC and then go to mac. If it didn’t, we’d see Adobe take more advantage of mac specific abilities like mac consistent keystrokes (CMD + ,) for prefs, full screen apps, and acknowledging the Apple keyboard control layout, for example. We don’t even get a mac shortcut layout preference option.

That’s part of why I stuck with Apple’s solutions. Their programs feel like they were built for the system you’re using and take advantage of it. If Adobe made CS6 specifically for mac, they would use Grand Central Dispatch instead of CUDA. Know what I mean?

There’s a lot Adobe skips over that OSX makes available to them for whatever reason – I guess multi-platform UI consistency. I think that at it’s root Adobe starts in PC land and clones that to mac. It’s the under-the-hood things that can get you. There not programs built FOR macs, they’re programs built to work ON macs.

[Craig Slattery]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “In the UK it never ever appears on production base, it is not on mandy worldwide where I have a google alert, none of the post houses are running it.”

This maybe true, however there was a lot of interest in my edit. I had a bunch of colleagues popping in to check it out and I think a few myths were addressed. I was so impressed with the experience that we will have a dedicated FCPX suite cutting items throughout the next season. For now we have to stay with FCP7 for online but we are planning to replace the color grading suite with Da Vinci resolve so we can stay with FCPX all the way to TX. We have also told the small group of editors that cut for our show to get up to speed with FCPX. So there you have it.

[Tony West]

Thanks for the post Craig,

Here it is in our remote truck for Major League Baseball

[Gary Huff]

[Jeremy Garchow] “What I find funny is that we have a story of FCPX being used in broadcast for a program airing on the BBC, yet Craig is being told how it won’t work for him because of what you read about how FCPX works, Gary.”

I never said it wouldn’t work for him (I actually never said anything about his post, I simply responded to Robin’s comments about: ‘its faster, more fun and just feels better than all the other NLE.’). Anyone who wants to make it work for them can do so. No skin off my back. My point was that for me personally, it seems like people who are enjoying using it, and posting their workflow methods, are going to great lengths to trick the program or make it conform to what they need, and, frankly, I’d rather wrangle with the content and the edit itself than fight the NLE to make it do what I want.

I don’t have anything against FCPX, on the contrary, I recommended it as a solution just a few months ago. But the fact remains that I find its touted “advantages” as dubious in nature, mixed in every now and then with something that comes across as a determined attitude to make it work in order to seemingly “vindicate” Apple in this new version.

Nor will I argue that Premiere is perfect, because no NLE is (just like there’s no one camera that can do it all). But that it works cross-platform is a big plus, that it works with Dynamic Linkage to AE is a big plus (and, frankly, if FCPX/Motion worked in similar fashion, that would be worth a more detailed look), and I love the fact that it works with native media (which FCPX does too, but I’m not sure if it has the same support for everything that Premiere does). I don’t have a massive RAID for all my projects, so I prefer the Premiere method of having self-contained projects that I can work with, instead of the database system that I have to use a 3rd party app to turn projects off and on in the list (thus making FCPX’s keyword organization system of no value). I think most of those who are blown away by FCPX are going from FCP7 to FCPX, not from Media Composer 6 or Premiere CS5 and up over to FCPX, though if someone is, I’d be interested in hearing their reasoning.

Finally, I don’t want Apple to muck it up with FCPX. I want them to make it useful, and as much of a viable alternative as the other NLEs. Competition is good, and I’ve always said that.

[Craig Slattery]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “do you want to give an indication to the manner in which you handle the programme segments in ingest, organisation and timeline versus your previous editor? genuinely curious – figure that would probably be pretty broadly interesting read as it were. “

The injest team at the BBC Production Village have 1000s of hours of footage to injest across many programs. They have a naming protocol that frankly only they can understand. Each item on our show would normally be a 2 day edit. In legacy FCP we import two folders, RUSHES and ARCHIVE. The clips within the folders have names that mean nothing to the end user. I never rename clips or create bins, the edits are quick turnaround so I just get stuck right in. Right from the get go FCPX has advantages. Scanning the footage I can see PTC’s, so I select each clip and simply tag it with a keyword PTC that creates a smart folder called PTC, Wow that was easy! So I selected all the shots of Tom walking around, tagged them, ‘Tom Walking’, I could see the clips for the interviews so I tagged them Multicam media. That took all of 2 minutes. We had two interviews both about 30 mins long, creating the multicam clips took like 4 mins each. (that was incredible, for that reason alone I was having a GREAT day).
So the item was this years RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture, 6 buildings on the short list, Presenter Tom Dyckhoff, two interviews, self shot (All the directors that self shoot on our show have had camera training, but they are not clearly as good as the professionals, so you really have to mine the footage, plus they tend to over shoot. We also have a guy on the production team that shoots most of our second camera)
I began by recording the guide commentary (COM) then we blocked the structure.
I put gap clips on the primary story line to connect the COM, PTC’s I put on the primary story line and also the full length interview multicam clips. So that process was to create the structure, commentary would change and things may get moved around but we had the basis of the story, and it took 15 – 20 mins.

At this point I had a story that was about 50 mins long. In legacy FCP having two multiclips 20 mins long on the time line, the system would be shitting itself. X didn’t miss a beat. It was incredible. The hardest part of the edit was finding the story in the main interview. Rem Koolhass may be a ‘starchitect’ but he’s also a typical dry, slightly humorless Dutchman. Ideally we would have liked him to say something brilliant about his two buildings on this years short list but he didn’t. He did however have a grin on his face when he said ‘sublty’ and ‘Iconoclasm’ was a hard sell, especially to clients expecting an icon on the London skyline. So we ran with an argument that all the buildings on this years short list are perhaps not as showy as they have been in the past, and is this reflective of our straightened economic times.

Now that we had the interviews cut down and new com written, we just had to paint the item up. BTW to record the new VO I would alt-w (create gap clip) in the spot required, use the trim tool to expand it out, bit like using the select track tool in FCP 7 only super fast.

At this point our Executive Producer was asking to see the rough cut. This at 3pm on day two, she was out of the building so we had to email her a version. (straight from X nice feature) She came back with comments, she wanted to see more in the second interview and we had to loose one of the PTC’s she didn’t like. So a little more re writing and scanning the second interview. (I had duplicated the project from day one, so we revisited that to find a juicy bit to put back into the cut.)

This is how I painted the item. One building on the list was the 2012 Olympic stadium. We had loads of archive of the stadium. The COM was already recorded and connected to a gap clip. I scanned the footage in the event library made rough selects and edited the clips directly to the primary storyline in front of the gap clip containing COM. I then slid the COM under the selected shots, deleted the gap clip and connected the music track. I then trimmed, slipped, rearranged, lengthened to my hearts content and didn’t give a hoot about what was happening further down the time line. So Ok, the COM moves around when you move clips. On occasions we might have 2 or 3 com clips, they may get out of order as you move the clip it’s connected to. But when you get in the groove its so simple to slide it back or move it forward. Plus it looks cool when the clips bounce out of the way of each other to make room.

So that’s it, just before we finished the edit, we got a call from Scotland and they wanted us to add 40sec to our cut because one of their items had issues, so we did.
Fine trimming is the one downside. But only because its so easy, you just don’t know when to stop!! I must have exported 4 or 5 QT’s because each time I’d play the item back I’d make another little tweak, or I’d rearrange a shot. Because nothing really stops FCPX from playing, you can move shots, extend, delete and it just keeps playing.
As I said before we exported the ProRes 422 QT down the line, used X2Pro for audio and it was completely seamless.

[Steve Connor]

[craig slattery] “So that’s it, just before we finished the edit, we got a call from Scotland and they wanted us to add 40sec to our cut because one of their items had issues, so we did.
Fine trimming is the one downside. But only because its so easy, you just don’t know when to stop!! I must have exported 4 or 5 QT’s because each time I’d play the item back I’d make another little tweak, or I’d rearrange a shot. Because nothing really stops FCPX from playing, you can move shots, extend, delete and it just keeps playing.
As I said before we exported the ProRes 422 QT down the line, used X2Pro for audio and it was completely seamless. “

Excellent post Craig, it doesn’t sound like you’re “going to great lengths to trick the program or make it conform to what you need”

Steve Connor
‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure”

[Walter Soyka]

[John Davidson] “If Adobe made CS6 specifically for mac, they would use Grand Central Dispatch instead of CUDA. Know what I mean? “

GCD is about threading on symmetrical multiprocessing systems, whereas CUDA exploits GPGPU, so OpenCL (also an Apple technology) is probably a better comparison with CUDA. While CUDA predates OpenCL by a few years and has more mature development tools, I think it’s worth noting that Adobe has begun supporting OpenCL as well.

But yes, I do get your point that as a cross-platform developer, Adobe doesn’t integrate platform-specific features deeply into their applications. Instead, they develop their own core cross-platform technologies (like MediaCore, Mercury Playback Engine, Mercury Graphics Engine, or Mercury Transmit) or leverage cross-platform technologies from third parties (CUDA, OptiX) and adapt them for both Windows and Mac.

Personally, I think that’s a good thing. It would be a nightmare to have a version of Creative Suite for Windows that was completely different than a version of Creative Suite for Mac. Native look and feel, depending on host OS? Separate release schedules that were influenced by Microsoft’s and Apple’s OS schedules? Diverging feature sets according to host platform development roadmaps and offerings? Fragmented user communities?

I use Adobe apps on Macs and PCs alike nearly every day, and I appreciate the common interface and feature parity. I don’t feel that the Adobe apps on the Mac side are under-performing given the hardware they’re on. In fact, I’ve noticed a couple things that are smoother or better on the Mac — like scrolling massive comp timelines in Ae or screen refreshes while loading the effects preset list. In fairness, I use Premiere predominantly on my PCs, so I can’t really speak to a platform-based performance difference there.

Some thoughts on the issues of cross-platform design from John Nack:
Some thoughts about platform consistency [link]
Future Photoshop UI changes [link]

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

[Oliver Peters]

Would one of you BBC guys please explain the BBC Production Village in a bit more detail? If this part of the Factual and Learning unit that was the poster boy for FCP 7 a few years ago? I realize the BBC actually uses a lot of difference NLE brands in its different units (news, sports, docs, dramas, etc.), but I was curious about the implementation of Premiere Pro versus FCP X. I know that announcement was made out to be a big deal, but I later heard it was really just in-house folks dealing with internet content and not broadcast content. Plus these were actually CS upgrade seats. So looking at it from the outside, I’d love one you to clear this all up a bit. Thanks.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com