FCPX Speed and workflow increases ? Real World examples?

[Nikolas Bäurle]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “You just cannot get paid to cut in X. not corpo, not broadcast, not anything here. Ronny Courtens can speak differently to parts of the EU tho. there are pockets.
Established shop owning editors, of which there are many here, can make their own choices entirely.”

X establishing itself in big production houses will be a while, and might never happen. In Berlin more and more people are using it though. Most of these jobs happen through connections and so far I’ve only met shop owning editors, and then you do have a few cases i’ve heard of postproduction facilities needing to deal with producers X projects.

I just trained a FCP7/Premiere/AFX editor who never thought about looking at X until I offered him a job, it took him about a day of watching me and half a day of me breathing down his neck for him to be completely proficient. it took him half an hour to realise that he had underestimated the software.

I believe the problem its about the nature of big houses. There’s not as much room for experimentation, things need to work almost immediately. Then there is the pc vs mac deal. DW-TV for example, uses PC and NewsCutter, I doubt they will ever use macs, other than the few they have standing around to accommodate some VJs. But plenty of producers, editors and even some speakers have X at home.

I believe at some point, even if it takes a few years, X will be ahead of the game. There more things like video on demand, eBooks and cloud storage improve the more big companies will have to adapt.

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python

[Charlie Austin]

[Nikolas Bäurle] “I believe the problem its about the nature of big houses. There’s not as much room for experimentation, things need to work almost immediately.”

Exactly. I think that’s why people are looking at PPro over X. It’s a fine program, but mostly it behaves pretty similarly to FCP 7. There’s a learning curve, but it’s generally figuring out which button does what. Other than that it’s the same old workfolw… Most larger places don’t have a lot of down time to experiment.

Once you can just drop X into a large workflow, (which you kinda can do now but a few more pieces need to come together), I think more folks will give it a look.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Jacob Brown]

hey bill — looking forward to getting schooled on keyboard shortcuts

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[Charlie Austin] “I’m tellin ya man, once it clicks, it’s pretty sweet.”

I get you – I am the only person I know who actually paid for it, and has executed spots in it. This is only one town mind you.

[Charlie Austin] “I’ll agree it’s hard to get used to coming from decades of doing it pretty much the same in all NLE’s.”

I think you’re missing the point. FCP was one of the more forcefully democratising things I’ve ever seen in pro software?
An incredibly broad range of people grew to understand it? – artists, mo-graph, journos, just an incredible host of people.

But apple really did ditch that -and so, as we all feel FCP classic finally close down across the industry –
feel every site go cold – have apple served these artists well?

Or were apple, possibly stupid gits who got high on their own supply?
And in the process destroyed a nascent democratisation of editing because they were egotistical morons who couldn’t see the sunshine in front of their face?

Charlie – it’s avid as far as the eye can see now. That is the end result, and I am practising nesting effects for god’s sake.
we are left with avid, because the clients are left hearing about avid. the horror.

I’m not joking – on one level – X is just the stupidest, most destructive software ever put to market. forget the merits – its a bombsite.

[Charlie Austin] “Anyone who knows X could sit down in front of it, and in 10 seconds figure out what everything in that timeline is. “

well, yes charlie.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Carsten Orlt]

Speed is relative 🙂 As Michael said: I find the process of building the edit to take roughly same amount of time. That process tends to work at the speed of my brain making mental connections to what I need to place in the timeline.

BUT to organise my footage and finding things is lightyears ahead of Avid’s and FCP7 I worked with.

I edit mainly natural history. Unscripted hours of footage. Before FCPx my only way to bring sense into the madness was to describe every single camera start stop with words using the ‘notes’ field. Therefor I had to come up with sensible description of what the action is within a clip. Not easy specially when a clip could hold stuff usable in many different context. After that I had to make select sequences to cut down the amount of possibilities and start to see some structure. If I needed some other bit to make it work back from my browser I had the sift through a lot of descriptions and double clicking clips to look at them.

You have no idea idea how much easier this is now. First I do a rough pass just creating keyword selection based on logical differences. I approach this as if I would create keywords for a stock footage search. I have location keywords, animal keywords, technical keywords, people keywords, activities keywords etc. as much as I think. Once I have done this I go through every clip and make favourites and rejects. favourite sections I like and reject stuff which is unusable.

After that Michael’s quote comes into play. BUT if I ever need to find something I have multiple ways my brain can reach it. I might think of the location, or the animal or the person I’m looking for, or I even remember that is was a GoPro shot. Skimming through the result is quick and easy and aided by using ‘hide rejected’ show favourites etc.
If I find that I keep coming back to a combination of keywords I make a smart selection for it.

I as an editor couldn’t be happier and the tiny little quirks FCPx have are like the quirks of my best friends: I do love them too because they make the whole person so much interesting!

Happy editing

[Charlie Austin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m not joking – on one level – X is just the stupidest, most destructive software ever put to market. forget the merits – its a bombsite.”

Well, sure, on one level. The dinosaur houses. And i say this as a card carrying member of this group. And they may all switch to Avid, as they, we, ever so slowly decline into irrelevance. Remember the Music industry? Recording studios? Giant record labels? How’s that working out? It’s happening on the visual side too. And I really think what Apple has done with X is anticipate that. Maybe they were early… maybe not. X is pretty damn democratizing though. I think the people who have the hardest time with it are editors. 🙂

[Aindreas Gallagher] “[Charlie Austin] “Anyone who knows X could sit down in front of it, and in 10 seconds figure out what everything in that timeline is. ”

well, yes charlie.”

I wasn’t saying this to be disingenuous… A lot of complaints about the trackless timeline are based on the “how will my (assistant/collaborator/whatever) know what is what unless I can split everything out to separate tracks and then give them a track sheet or tell them what is on each track?!?!?!” Well, it’s stupidly simple if you’ve assigned Roles to everything. All your “tracks” are in a list in an index and you highlight/select/mute/solo them from there. And yes, it needs to be better and more granular/flexible/bus-able/mix-able etc. Another version of X or so, and Walter Murch could use Roles for his famous FCP Classic timeline. He wouldn’t need such a big screen. 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Tony West]

[Nikolas Bäurle] “I believe the problem its about the nature of big houses. There’s not as much room for experimentation, things need to work almost immediately.”

Nikolas, I know this has already been seconded but I just want to third it.

You nailed this.

Many of these places just don’t have time to be messing around with something as different as X and taking chances with it. Also all they have heard is negative things about it. They might not have tried it even if they heard it was great because of the learning curve. (although I think it’s the easiest NLE to learn)

Anyway, moving chunks around is fast, the skimmer may be one of the most underrated parts of the program.

I can simply fly through footage with it. Whenever I have to work without the skimmer I go crazy : )

Just dragging those audio faders

It’s all these little things in combination that makes the entire process faster for me.

My prediction is that big houses will end up having X in there with Avid because just too many young people will already be trained on it.

[Neil Goodman]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I forgot about the skimmer, fricken love that, except i turn it off in the timeline and only use it in the event.

Finding footage and searching clips is indeed beyond the competition, and blows Avids “Find” function out of the water.

Unfortuneatly IMO, working in the timeline, the most important aspect of an NLE to me, still has a ways to go, and its nothing to do with the lack of tracks or magnetism. The trim functions are rather simple, and id love to see a proper trim tool implemented, its something at the moment i cant really get past. At the end of the day the timeline is very similiar to Media Composers in the sense of gaps vs filler, the ripple, etc.

Im gonna keep plugging away at it, and hope to find some more Aha moments.

Does anyone know if you can have different Keyboard setups, that you can call up at will? Couldnt find that. I like to customize the layouts based on if im doing Multicam or Audio, etc.

Neil Goodman: Editor of New Media Production – The Esquire Network – NBC/Uni

[Mark Raudonis]

So far, NOBODY here to speak to collaborative, shared storage , work group editing.

Let’s address that, shall we? Faster? Better organized? I’m all ears. Let’s hear some stories.

Mark

[Charlie Austin]

[Mark Raudonis] “So far, NOBODY here to speak to collaborative, shared storage , work group editing.”

You mean like MC collaborative editing? There are some clues that more than one person may be able to work simultaneously on/from the same Project and or Event, but not yet. Sharing sequences etc like FCP Classic? On NAS requires a couple extra steps but totally doable. Even easier on a SAN. Editor A un-mounts location, Editor B opens it up. Shared storage works as it always has. Choose not to copy media to the event folder and it’ll just reference it from a SAN or NAS just like anything else. FWIW, I’m in a shop with FCP X, 7, Pr, AE etc, all using the same shared media.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~