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Hate and Love
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[David Mathis] “Would like to see OFX support in the free version as I wait for Studio version to come out. Just subscribed to a three month plan of Sapphire and would like to use it in Fusion as well. Guess that I will have to be patient on that one.”
Ah, I see. I didn’t know that OFX plugins weren’t supported in the free version.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] ” I didn’t know that OFX plugins weren’t supported in the free version.”
Interesting for the context of this thread, but one of the things BMD holds back from the free version is extensibility: OpenFX, a custom SDK for building your own features, workflow and asset management, Avid integration, network rendering, etc etc, all require the paid version.
I like this idea. It’s not just that you’re paying for specific features. You’re paying for a wider range of possibilities, including custom development and distributed creativity.
[Simon Ubsdell] “Seeing how someone like Walter works with After Effects (simply amazing!) makes me think that there are applications that in a real sense have no actual limits because of the means they offer the user to build out beyond the core in any direction. (NLEs are fundamentally not like this, although I can see that it might happen with Premiere at some point.)”
This raises a cluster of related questions for me.
1) How/why do you feel After Effects is different from NLEs? Extensibility in general gets at some of it, but it feels bigger than that to me.
2) Is the idea of “doing everything” in one application that “does everything” appealing to you?
That is, Simon, I understand that you were originally speaking about the frustrations of using multiple tools for the SAME task…but since you mention After Effects and Premiere and FCPX/Motion, and Resolve/Fusion comes up too — are there limits to how far you’d like to see an NLE extend?
And Herb, do you find yourself able to live in one environment because of the range of your tasks, or because of how extensible your NLE is (whether with native structures, plug-ins, or whatever)? It’s obviously a mix of both, but what’s the dynamic between tasks and tools for you?
BTW, the title for this thread immediately made me think of the fantastic 1971 single by The Persuaders, “There’s A Thin Line Between Love And Hate.”
And because it’s mid-day Saturday as I write this, I’m thinking of Soul Train (what? It’s mid-day Saturday and you’re NOT thinking of Soul Train?), and in fact the performance of this very song on that very show that I watched on January 22, 1972.
I remember it as clearly as if I’d just now seen the video…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULuHJgCos7A
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Great thread, Simon. Thank you.
[Tim Wilson] “1) How/why do you feel After Effects is different from NLEs? Extensibility in general gets at some of it, but it feels bigger than that to me.”
One of the most painful jobs I ever had to deal with was a recut of a video for a client who wanted what seemed like minor changes, but for some reason was getting pushback from their editor. They said goodbye to their editor and hired me for what I thought was a no-brainer, hour long fix.
When I got the project files, I could see the problem.
Turns out, their previous editor (who was also their motion graphics guy) did everything in AE. He was pushing back because he had followed their script to the letter and the minor tweaks would be a huge amount of work.
After jumping the some hoops to get the AE project into whatever NLE I was using, I was able to do the job, but it was a huge PITA.
AE is not an NLE. I wouldn’t dream of doing editorial cutting in it. And I can’t imagine changing it to make editorial cutting viable.
[Tim Wilson] “BTW, the title for this thread immediately made me think of the fantastic 1971 single by The Persuaders, “There’s A Thin Line Between Love And Hate.” “
Funny, it made me think of this: 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa-oUPTr9LI_______________________
David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence] “Turns out, their previous editor (who was also their motion graphics guy) did everything in AE. He was pushing back because he had followed their script to the letter and the minor tweaks would be a huge amount of work.”
I work some freelance gigs at a local broadcast facility. Almost all of the editors do heavy lifting on spots in AE. The NLE is basically just to edit clips together and do audio. Everything else – graphics, color correction, transitions, style treatments – all in AE. I’ve jumped in on some of the past projects in order to make revisions and it takes quite a while to work backwards through the breadcrumbs.
That’s why Magic Bullet and Automatic Duck exist. It’s because the developers were big on AE and worked out ways to enhance AE based on their own workflows.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[David Lawrence] “AE is not an NLE. I wouldn’t dream of doing editorial cutting in it. And I can’t imagine changing it to make editorial cutting viable.”
Sorry, I said that wrong.
I completely agree with what you’re saying more clearly than I was able to. You and I have been among the folks who’ve spoken here over the years about things like the relatively horizontal nature of editing and the vertical nature of compositing.
With such fundamental differences in purpose, (sometimes, as both you and Oliver note, reflected in different lengths of typical projects), having one application really REALLY do both is inherently going to be a mess. Too much time to develop, too much time to launch, inevitable modal bottlenecks, on and on.
I was trying to dig down a little deeper into Simon’s observation that After Effects feels like it has fewer limits relative to an NLE.
So, rather than asking what makes After Effects feel more extensible (scripting, expressions, robust plug-in architecture, interop with other application environments….??? You tell me), I was thinking more along the lines of, okay Simon, what would it take for your NLE to feel like it had fewer limits?
I really hesitate to use the word “open” in this context — almost as devoid of usable rational content as the word “intuitive” — but I think that may be where I’m heading. As Simon put it,
There are interfaces that are designed with a very specific way of working in mind and it’s great when you stick to the designer’s notion of how you should work, and everything will feel fluid and easy. But the rigidity will quickly lead to frustration as soon as you want work in a way that the designer didn’t envisage
A bit of a Rorschach test, that: is FCPX the first NLE you think he’s thinking of, or Media Composer? Premiere is obviously not exempt from criticism, but I don’t often hear “rigidity” listed as one of its most characteristic shortcomings, when it’s vastly more often than not one of the top two for X and MC.
Simon then asks, “If you can to some extent “rewrite” the application to suit your needs, are you going to hit fewer of those sticking points?”
Spoken like a compositor, I think, no? Other than Alan Bell in my interview with him for Hunger Games, where he spoke about customized project sharing among his team using some Python scripts he wrote, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard an editor outside the Sony Creative Software world talking about scripting their NLE.
In any case, that level of finesse seems rare, but in After Effects, it’s been baked in from the beginning, and in some areas, Fusion and Nuke open their range of possibilities for shaping the application in your workflow’s image even farther.
I’m rambling, but that’s what the direction I’m trying to ramble in. What are the different things that we want from these applications that make different degrees of flexibility more or less acceptable to us for editing relative to compositing/mograph/VFX/whatever the hell it is is that people like you, Walter, Simon, et al are doing in AE/Motion/Nuke/Fusion….
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[Tim Wilson] “1) How/why do you feel After Effects is different from NLEs? Extensibility in general gets at some of it, but it feels bigger than that to me.
2) Is the idea of “doing everything” in one application that “does everything” appealing to you?
That is, Simon, I understand that you were originally speaking about the frustrations of using multiple tools for the SAME task…but since you mention After Effects and Premiere and FCPX/Motion, and Resolve/Fusion comes up too — are there limits to how far you’d like to see an NLE extend?”
To be honest, I wasn’t thinking of being prescriptive here or even necessarily thinking about NLEs specifically and I’m certainly ambivalent as to whether I think extensibility is always desirable.
In the first place, I was in fact wondering whether there aren’t advantages to rigidity.
Back in the day, I used to use Audiovision and like the few who were lucky enough to do so before AVID killed it, I always felt that it had a kind of perfection to it that ProTools still to this day hasn’t achieved, and probably never will. ProTools is undeniably far more flexible, but Audiovision felt like it was designed very specifically to do a very specific job and as such it “just worked”. It was in many ways extremely “rigid” (e.g. fixed track count!!) but therein lay a lot of its strength.
I purposefully didn’t specify a particular NLE in talking about rigidity, though at the front of my mind was Media Composer rather than (say) FCP X. MC is optimised for the traditional source/record editing method and if that is how you are cutting, then its rigidity (the locked interface) feels just right – having your source and record image always the exact same size is in many ways ideal both from a technical and a creative point of view. However that same rigidity can be frustrating if you want to adopt a more flexible “modern” editing strategy, drag and drop, copy and paste, etc. – and obviously while a lot of editors (me included) are perfectly happy with the Smart Tools, for a lot of users they are a clunky and unwanted feature. I’m not sure anyone would say they love the Smart Tools when compared to what other NLEs offer to achieve the same result.
I think I made a bit of a leap in going from talking about rigidity/flexibility to bringing to up the notion of extensibility – which is not the same thing as flexibility necessarily. I certainly don’t think I’d want or need an NLE to be extensible in the way that After Effects or Nuke or (the paid for version of) Fusion is extensible. I’m not even sure how it would work!
I was simply suggesting that these kinds of applications tend to have far happier users generally and I was positing extensibility as the reason. You’re much less likely to be shouting “to hell with this dumb piece of software”, when you have in your hands the means to make it almost infinitely clever …
As to whether NLEs “should” grow extra pieces in order to achieve a slightly different form of extensibility, I’m just not sure. I do have a certain prejudice that says I want my NLE to be the best it can be at cutting and leave the rest out of it – always assuming that it gives me plenty of interchange options to get out to other dedicated applications. That prejudice does of course collide with the reality that it is nowadays very rarely enough to have just one-way traffic out of your NLE.
So do I want the best possible round-tripping, do I want an internal mechanism that lets me access other applications without round-tripping, or do I want an application that does everything under the one roof?
I’m really not sure. I’m pretty certain that any “one roof” über-application has to be built on the concept of rooms – if I’m grading or doing audio post or visual effects or mograph, I want a dedicated interface and I really, really don’t want to have to be poking around in some fiddly sidebar. I hasten to add that this is my prejudice showing again – if, say, I’m doing audio post, I don’t want to compromise on the toolset or the interface in any way whatsoever, but I can appreciate that many won’t feel the same way. This being the case though, I haven’t seen anything yet even remotely approaching the status of the kind of über-application that I would be happy using.
(I really like Nuke Studio, though, so maybe I’m talking nonsense – although I think the strength of Nuke Studio is that it’s built out logically from the core Nuke concept with the single clear aim of bringing realtime editing to Nuke users. This seems to me a bit different to what Resolve is doing – as long as the editing features of Resolve were simply a way of giving colorists some control over editorial finishing, it made sense to me. I’m not convinced that aiming beyond that is a good idea and I doubt there is really anyone (yet?) who is thinking Resolve is the NLE they have always been waiting for. Which leaves me very ambivalent indeed about what may or may not happen with Resolve and Fusion – I’d certainly like to see a Fusion that looked like Nuke Studio but I’m not at all sure I want to see Fusion simply grafted into the existing Resolve set-up. Although that may work brilliantly …)
Sorry – rambling a lot here. Not sure if any of that is germane to the conversation.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[David Lawrence] “AE is not an NLE. I wouldn’t dream of doing editorial cutting in it. And I can’t imagine changing it to make editorial cutting viable.”
I agree with the first part, I more or less entirely agree with the second part, but while I agree with the third part … are we really saying that we can’t think it can’t be done? I’d be fascinated to hear your reasons.
I think I’d say it probably could be done but that retro-fitting NLE functions (especially to an application as mature as this one) would always be a compromise …
But what was your thinking behind saying this?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Tim Wilson] ”
BTW, the title for this thread immediately made me think of the fantastic 1971 single by The Persuaders, “There’s A Thin Line Between Love And Hate.” “I was thinking more Night of the Hunter 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “while I agree with the third part … are we really saying that we can’t think it can’t be done? I’d be fascinated to hear your reasons.”
This will probably come as no surprise to you – for me, it all comes down to fundamental differences in the timeline architecture and interaction model for a NLE vs a layer-based compositor.
Layers and tracks both represent time horizontally, and both (for the most part) composite from top to bottom, but they’re very different in how they represent media.
A single layer can only hold a single instance of a media object. A single track can hold an unlimited number of media objects. This key difference becomes critical depending on the task at hand.
Generally speaking, compositing is shot focused, which is where the debate between nodal and layer-based compositors comes into play. Both have their pluses and minuses deepending on the task.
NLEs on the other hand, are optimized for cutting.
Consider the most basic possible NLE operation – the cut. In any NLE, it’s absolutely trivial to cut, copy, paste and move media clips in time.
Now consider that same operation in the layer-based world of After Effects. Not so trivial anymore, is it? In fact, the most basic editorial timeline would likely become a huge mess in layers very quickly.
Then there’s playback. It’s only been recently that real-time playback in AE is something we might even consider. Compositors by design prioritize calculating the correct value for every pixel of the frame, based on the media and processing pipeline in the composite stack. NLE do this too, but by design, playback seems to be the first priority.
Even if AE could do full, realtime playback of a timeline, I’m not sure that would be enough to make up for the differences in the timeline models as far as editorial uses go.
I think one of the reasons FCP Legend became popular is because at least for me, it was the first NLE to find the sweet spot between editing and compositing. Legend had non-modal editorial tools that were very mac-like and easy to learn compared to Avid. Compositing was also very mac-like and easy to use. Just stack layers of media on tracks and apply the filters or keyframes. At the time, there was nothing like this. Sure, the compositing wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as what you could do in AE, but for things like simple, key-framed animatics, it was wonderful.
I don’t think it would be impossible for a future AE to have the editorial flexibility of a NLE, but in my mind, doing so would require that layers become much more like tracks, with the ability to hold more than one media object. And at that point, wouldn’t they essential become tracks? I’m not sure that’s possible or even desirable.
Anyway that’s my thinking. Curious about yours.
_______________________
David Lawrence
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web: propaganda.com
facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl -
No love for hitfilm round here I guess. I haven’t played with the latest, but isn’t it trying to do everything?
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