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FCPX proving to be very fast
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Please. trust is not an issue. I’m in London too”
We should catch up, you will only get Smoke and Mirrors down at Smoke and Mirrors.
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[Oliver Peters] “like the inability to zoom into the viewer filmstrip”
Oliver I had the same issue with the inability to zoom into the viewer filmstrip. I couldn’t understand why that feature was not available. But in actual fact you don’t need it. Again because I find trimming in the timeline a dream, I don’t ever do any detailed selection in the viewer, its a waist of time. Im sorry if this may sound patronising, but folks still hankering for features they loved in Legacy or Avid just aren’t there yet.
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no no –
lets try it again Craig: outside of the editing facility you say you are about to open – what changes in London regarding FCPX are people supposed to “trust” you on?
what are you talking about?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[craig slattery] “I had the same issue with the inability to zoom into the viewer filmstrip. I couldn’t understand why that feature was not available. But in actual fact you don’t need it.”
I don’t miss it much, but I sometimes want to get tight on the audio and don’t find the FCP X precision adequate on the source side for audio. The simple fix would be to have the clip “open in timeline”, make your marks and have those “stick” in the clip. They don’t at the moment. I’m simply not the type to toss it rough on the timeline and then constantly trim. Different styles of working.
[craig slattery] “but folks still hankering for features they loved in Legacy or Avid just aren’t there yet.”
I understand what you are saying, but some of these features will come, because they are needed in certain workflows. The argument that there is one and only one way of working (the current X way) is not good enough if an editor wants to adopt X. The beauty of other NLEs is that there’s more than a single way to do any given task. I’m sure that more of that will come over time with X as well. At least I hope so.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Great post, Craig, but I admit to a pang of jealousy. I’m cutting a 60 minute Culture Show special in Glasgow right now on Avid; I never dreamed that doing so on FCPX would be possible. Jealous, but glad the tide (tilde) is turning, as you say.
I did manage to cut four 60 minute music shows for BBC about a year ago (I pounced when multicam and broadcast monitoring appeared), but I was working at a facility where I had a modicum of clout —it was an indie rather than the BBC itself.
Anyway, I cut those to 59 minutes to the frame in FCPX just fine. Like you, I’d never imagined that there could be an issue here.
So, as one who finds FCPX a delight, glad that I might soon get to work with it more often.
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[craig slattery] “We basically listen to the interviews and marked out the various subjects. The Early days, old work, new work etc. I created new projects for each subject and as we go through the interviews we add other contributors talking about the same subject to the existing projects. When we start to edit the material down I would firstly duplicate the project to retain a long cut of each subject.”
Thanks for that Craig.
It’s always really interesting to find out other editors approach their workflows.
A lot of the interview material I use is heavily edited to compress meaning, get rid of hesitation, remove ‘ums and ers’, generally get the best out of people, so the newly designed compound clips come in useful, edited passages become compound clips in the event browser.
I look forward to watching your programmes as they roll out.
Mark
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[Bill Davis] “First, back in the early days, the fact that X has the “work with thumbnails IMMEDIATELY, then transcode Optimized and Proxy as needed” saved me personally WELL over 10 times the amount of time from “start” to “getting stuff done” when I switched from Legacy to X in the beginning. So I personally feel that in the area of “starting line” productivity – a 10x timesaving over Legacy was a vast understatement.”
So a 2 week job could be done in 2 days? That’s a lot of transcoding. Let’s assume that’s true, it’s merely an argument for any of a number of NLE’s over Legacy – PPro, Avid, Edius, FCPX – they are all “edit anything on the timeline editors.” This ability is not what makes FCPX unique although the lack of this ability is what makes FCP Legacy archaic for many people. But not for me. Very little, less than 5%, of anything that hits my timeline is from P2 or DSLR or HDV or anything other than ProRes 422, so like you I start editing the moment media is copied to my hard drives.
[Bill Davis] “Since I’d just put the spots on an X timeline, I asked them to hold a second and used the X Share menu to dump the spots to my Vimeo Pro account, (literally a 1-step process in X directly from the timeline) made a quick password-protected Portfolio while we were continuing our conversation (another 45 seconds) – and emailed the client a link to the portfolio all while I was still on the phone. They forwarded that link to their clients and within literally 3 minutes , the spots from my X timeline were being watched by anyone around the world the agency wanted to send the links and passwords to.Time saved by me being an X user? Judged agains their original request of burning and shipping off a DVD? – days. And even just time saved over transcoding and emailing or using YouSendIt to distribute it would easily fit that 10 to 1 time savings.”
This is an example of “button counting.” Yes, for this one part of a project you probably saved 5 minutes, however workflow inabilities, like the inability to match to the master clip from a multiclip, might make the overall project time much longer than doing a similar project in Legacy. This is why the only time comparisons I find relevant are those for completion of a project end to end. Such and such a project used to take me 20 days, I now find I can do it in X number of days. If the project is defined and I can elate to it, then I can relate to the time savings.
As for the specific example you gave of posting your sample within 3 minutes, I can tell you that exporting and sending out a file by Yousendit takes a heck of a lot less than 30 minutes. Less than 10 would be more like it. Still an advantage for X, but nothing near 10×1.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
FCPX will establish itself as a great software. These discussions remind me of the time back in 2001 when I decided to start using FCP 2.0. At the time I was working for one of Germany’s top commercial directors. He adopted FCP, and we cut everything on miniDV, and exportet EDLs. Das Werk, where he did the finishing hated FCP, but they had to deal with it.
A small postproduction I work for has been using FCPX for over a year now. We had problems at first, of course FCPX was to blame, very slow rendering. But I kept on telling them to check their harddrives. A week later their Raids broke down. After that everything worked fine.
At another somewhat bigger Postproduction I work for, the Chief Editor hates FCPX but she only tried it a couple of hours. She even claimed FCPX would never establish itself. This comes from an editor who only knows FCP Legacy, doesn’t like Premiere and hates Avid, for whatever reason, probably since working fx in Avid is pretty tedious. But she’s a very good editor. However I believe, like in many cases she doesn’t want to have to adapt to something new. A conversation with her (originally in German):
She “Nik, FCP7 won’t die, don’t worry.”
Me “Really…”
She “You can’t edit features length films on X, I tried it out.”
Me “Danni Lowinsky is edited on FCPX and Knut Hake just finished his second feature on it”
She “On X?”
Me “Yeah.”
She “Aha….”
This is what I experience a lot, editors not using it have the biggest opinions, especially if they’ve never used FCP Legacy.
For what I do, I don’t miss anything from Legacy. Magazine, Feature, Experimental, Music Videos, Industry, works great.Craigs experience at BBC is quite refreshing to me. I also work at DW-TV in Berlin. Wish they had the same attitude BBC has. But this year they want to try and get rid of most Soundtechnicians and Editors for news and features and have journalists and translators do everything themselves. Write edit speak. On a really crappy VPMS system, which is actually used to move sequences around. It can only do hard cuts and sound dissolves. And sofar it takes longer and the sound is horrible.
I’m sorry for this long rant… 🙂
Nik
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “lets try it again Craig: outside of the editing facility you say you are about to open – what changes in London regarding FCPX are people supposed to “trust” you on?
what are you talking about?”
4 months ago, as far as I knew, nobody at the BBC was using FCPX. I’d been banging on about how good the software was, so I felt its was time to put my money where my mouth is, ie cut a proper paying job in the software or shut up about it. Now, I’m pretty experienced, I’ve been doing this for a while and frankly people know me and I’m in demand. I knock back work every week and not just at the BBC. I’m pointing this out, because experienced editors like myself can afford to take on a challenge and look a bit stupid if it all goes tits up. Younger freelance guys and girls just starting to build their careers don’t really have that opportunity.
As you are know, I have shared my experience with FCPX here on the Cow. We started with a short item for The Culture Show that went well and I continued to use X for the remainder of last year whenever we had the opportunity to use it. We’ve now taken it a step further for 2013, I’m cutting specials, and items and by March 27 we aim to be stitching and onlining the weekly program in X. That equates to about 8 hrs of proper telly between now and the end of March.
Ive been told there are now 7 other editors at the BBC also cutting in X, In both London and Bristol. The fact is, we are seeing the green shoots, folks that thought I was mad, and people that had said straight out that “this is not professional software” are now taking notice. Producers and directors are very keen, the brilliant guys at the village that were only too happy to set up my suite are delighted with the results. We post our audio at Halo and they have been extremely helpful making the transition, because I imagine they recognize this will continue to grow, I don’t think there is any doubt about that anymore.
For the past two years, It was right and appropriate that legacy users continued to use FCP7 because if ‘it aint broke’ there is no need to fix it. However, FCP7 is on life support and soon, very soon I suspect, Apple will finally flick the switch. Ie if you want to run the latest mac on the latest OS then you will not be able to install or run FCP7. So where are those legacy users going to go? Some folks will head back to AVID, not so much Adobe, because if you were going to go down that road my guess is you would be down there already. That opens the door for FCPX
The general consensus is that Apple botched the launch of FCPX, but I actually think they played a blinder. The early, higher profile figures that jumped ship in the first few days are starting to look a tad silly, and a bit old fashion. We work in an industry that is innovative and cool, I like to kid myself I’m a bit like that. Not someone set in my ways and peeved because my beloved Apple kicked my arse into learning something new. Proper serious television is being created in FCPX . Ok, Aindreas down at Smoke & Mirrors it’s a different story, this is not their thing, although I imagine making money is. For facilities like The Farm, Halo, Clear Cut, and every other shop around London, when the Beeb stop requesting FCP7 dry hires my guess is that more and more requests will be for FCPX. Within this thread, Kenny, whom I didn’t know, is cutting a special for our show in Scotland. He said he would have liked to cut in X had he known he could, hopefully because of a handful of experienced editors now using FCPX, others will feel confident to join in.
So when I say ‘trust me’. Im not saying ‘trust me there are loads of people here in London already using FCPX’, Im saying, Trust me there will be’. -
so you’re talking about yourself. and a handful of other editors you were “told” about. not to be mean Craig, but I cannot imagine there is a reader left on the cow that is not aware that you are a freelancer who works on a magazine programme for the BBC.
I’m glad you like FCPX, I agree its very useful for quick cut magazine shows – but one freelancer swallow does not a spring make. there is only so far you can leverage repeatedly posting about when the show you cut freelance for is going to broadcast its next episode.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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