hidden gems

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Carsten,
Thats nothing hidden.
Is notorious that FCPX was designed so any ignorant can edit and even export a movie.

[Carsten Orlt] “I know there is a bit more to it like loosing quality when upscaling etc but this is peanuts against the problem which format your source should be converted too and what your seq should be set too and what if you need to change it after you edit the program. “

Good news for the “good enough’ people. For those who can’t see the difference between good and better.
The ‘hidden gem” will keep reserved for those who will care about those “peanuts” and people who was able to do a good job with FCP will always get something better from FCPX than those that never fully understood how FCP worked.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Carsten Orlt]

[Rafael Amador] “Is notorious that FCPX was designed so any ignorant can edit and even export a movie”

So any editor who is not a technician is ignorant?

[Rafael Amador]

[Carsten Orlt] “So any editor who is not a technician is ignorant?”
That a people is able to drive doesn’t means is a driver.
That a people is able to edit doesn’t means is an editor.
To edit you can be be technically an ignorant, to be an editor you can’t.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[David Roth weiss]

[Carsten Orlt] “So any editor who is not a technician is ignorant?”

Absolutely!

That doesn’t mean that person is “stupid,” or that he or she is an inferior artist. However, any editor without a technical knowledge of video would rightfully be considered to be ignorant on that subject.

And, if my career depended on it, as most careers do, I certainly would not want someone who is technically ignorant to be the finishing the master of my important video project. Would you?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

Don’t miss my new Creative Cow Podcast: Bringing “The Whale” to the Big Screen:
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/Podcast-Series-2-MikeParfitandSuzanneChisholm/1

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.

[Lance Bachelder]

Simply not true! I know plenty of VERY high end feature film Editors who make HUGE money and are completely technically ignorant! And they want to stay that way! The moment a computer locks up, crashes whatever, they step away and let the techs fix it – they don’t get paid to be a technician or because they know all the in and outs of every NLE, they get paid because they are creative storytellers.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California

[Carsten Orlt]

But neither do I want to clean up the mess afterwards because even though the program is brilliantly edited it is technically not optimised and the editor is asking me for advice.

If a software makes this process easier or even plain simple than I love this software. And you know what. Because it’s easy even on our own projects I can spent more time editing and less time dealing with boring technical stuff.

I always did find it curious that many mediocre editors got the edge only because they were wiz (is that spelled correctly?) kids on the computer. You could even include myself, which I of course would deny. In the times of a simple scissor to make a cut you were judged by your edit not how smart you were doing everything but editing.

[Carsten Orlt]

[Rafael Amador] “To edit you can be be technically an ignorant, to be an editor you can’t.”

That’s my point. The editor who is not technician and suffers because of he/she being forced to work with convoluted software that is made for technician is not ignorant. The editor is very much aware of the problem. So one solution is to make the technical part easier or go away and editor is happy and can deliver beautiful edits. Of course the other solution would be to try to train the editor all the technical bits to get by. I kind of like solution one better. You might not.

[Rafael Amador]

[Lance Bachelder] “Simply not true! I know plenty of VERY high end feature film Editors who make HUGE money and are completely technically ignorant! And they want to stay that way! The moment a computer locks up, crashes whatever, they step away and let the techs fix it – they don’t get paid to be a technician or because they know all the in and outs of every NLE, they get paid because they are creative storytellers.”
You right, but I don’t call those people editors.
An editor must be able to do his job when the is technician is at home sick.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[T. Payton]

I hear what you guys are saying (at least I think). However, I think we are in the middle of a rather significant transition in video: where being ignorant of certain technology and terminology is not going to make a person ineffective or create a lesser quality product.

Think about the entire concept of interlaced SD video: in a few years there will be no such thing. And frame rates? What will it matter in a world where all video playback or broadcast is in effect a QuickTime movie playing back on a computer screen? You wanna make a 48 fps 3D movie? Knock yourself out. 😉

I’m not saying that knowledge is unnecessary, I think that anyone who really wants to know their craft should study it so well that they are familiar with the history, the technology and how the craft has evolved. But knowing those skills doesn’t make someone a great editor, and they can’t be a requirement either. With the converging digital technology what was once only the realm of the technician is quickly becoming the world of the not-so-technical artist also.

Here is a not so brief story to illustration my point:

I have worked in advertising for 20 years in many different mediums, and frankly video is the last to make this digital delivery transition, (and let me tell you it has been a slow process. ) At our shop we basically have two “ranks” of people. Designers ( actually Art Directors & Creative Directors) and Production Artists. (This is an over simplification, as there are many more positions, but this is just a simple way to explain it.) To make an ad 25 years ago an Art Director would scribble something on a paper, hand it to the Production Artists to execute that scribble. A production artists knew not only how to execute that scribble in a given medium, but the right way to do paste up and the mechanical requirements for delivering that scribble to a newspaper, or magazine or whatever.

Then the Mac came along (early 1990’s), and there were great tools made for the Production Artists (Quark XPress, Photoshop, Illustrator). They were geeky and precise. Two things production artists love. We production artists knew how to get just the right ratio of CMYK ink to produce a proper flesh tone, a specular highlight on a white dress, and how to trap a spot color job so that it would make any pressman look good. We knew that a 85% dot in newsprint was effectively a 100% dot. But likes like before, the Art Directors still scribbled down ideas and we the production artists would execute it and make it deliverable. (We were still doing paste up more or less.)

Then the Art Directors realized they could “scribble” on the Mac (mid 1990’s), and could get play with photo placement, cropping, fonts, mix colors, etc. So then the Art Directors would give these files to a Production Artist and say “can you get this finalized and out for proofs.” Only problem was the Art Directors didn’t know the nuance of what the publications needed. So we Production Artists stepped in and had to often times rebuild what the Art Directors built in ignorance. Making sure the photos were the correct resolution, color correcting (in CMYK of course) and building a technically correct and printable file that would product good film (yes we output film negatives, a huge advance over mechanical paste-up). Production became “pre-press”, everything was dandy, and production and pre-press work was abundant. There was even an entire industry of service bureaus that could do the work if someone didn’t have in house production folks.

Then Apple and Adobe stepped into the picture and changed everything (early 2000’s). Apple popularized ICC color profiles and Adobe implemented them. No more having to work in CMYK. And beyond just type and fonts being WYSIWYG, color was now WYSIWYG too. Adobe then released InDesign which had built in pre-press checking, which could tell Art Directors they needed a higher res photo, or to the ink color they picked can’t be reproduced. And no longer did you supply film and a hard copy proof to a publication, Adobe PDF files (specifically PDF-X) became the standard worldwide. So at our shop, the “pre-press” stage went from hours per project to minutes, and sometimes it wasn’t needed at all. Art Directors were now sending out projects, not because they became geeky, but the software became smarter and the industry changed to make things more efficient and less prone to error. CMYK photos? I haven’t touched one in years, the conversion happens automatically when creating a PDF. Trapping? I never think about it, it happens automatically when the PDF is made into a plate.

Now from my perspective, what happened in our print advertising world is happening to video.

The video evolution parallels print very closely, but at a much slower pace. We went from tape-to-tape editing to digital editing in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but still ended up with a tape for delivery. (akin to paste-up and film for print). However, the empowering of the Art Directors/Designers has not happened in until now. Both in the realm of high quality accessible capture (DSLR) and most recently editing.

Take for example my fellow Art Director at my shop. She is not only an excellent designer, but her eye for video cuts, and motion, and emotion is much better than mine. So I would be working on a project and would finish a draft edit and call her into my office. She would have excellent feedback and perhaps a few changes or two and the final result would be much better that my draft edit. So this went on for several years and then last summer we got slammed with a ton of material to edit on a tight deadline. All our freelance editors were unavailable and I was in a bind. So I realized she had to edit herself, and not just over my shoulder. So after a good hour or so trying to training her in FCP 7 she concluded that all of this was way too complicated. Setting in and out points in the viewer. Performing insert or overwrite edits, and paying attention to the canvas. Finding the ripple tool. And how many times to I hit “R”? Making sure the audio was connected to the clips, etc. I went home that day realizing that there was no way she was going to be up to speed enough to really help with editing.

And then I remembered iMovie and that it could export XML for FCP. So I watched the Lynda.com training that night and in the morning taught her iMovie in less than 30 minutes. I transcoded the footage to quarter res h264, and gave her the interviews and transcripts. Early that afternoon she came in my office and announced happily she was done. She had cut down 5 long interviews into a cohesive story in just a couple of hours. (!) This would have taken me all day. We reviewed the shots together in iMovie, reordered shots around effortlessly, created markers, etc, and frankly faster and telling a better story that I could have dreamed of doing in FCP. Then we published the rough cut to youtube in moments. Yeah right out of iMovie. It was almost too easy. The client loved it, I then finished the online edit in FCP and delivered the finished product.

So I am technical guy, who knows all the ins and outs of video formats, frame rates, codecs, etc, but you know who I want to give the power to edit, my fellow creator director. She is a fantastic editor, better than me, but she doesn’t have the technical skills, but with FCP X she doesn’t have to have the technical skills to get a project 90% of the way done. There will always be the last 10% that a “finishing technician” needs to do, but our goal is to tell a great story, and that is what “easier to use apps” like Final Cut Pro X, InDesign, ICC Profiles, and frankly iMovie have done. The “previous generation of” NLEs are fantastic production tools—but frankly they were and are often out of reach of a person unless they were willing to tackle the technical learning curve to use them.

I’m not saying the current FCP X is perfect, far be it. But I see video editing following the same progression that our shop has seen with radio, web and print before that. The tools moved from being strictly in the hands of production artists, to be in the hands of the directors, and the directors didn’t need to become geeky production artists. I attribute this to the fact that the tools are doing more for us, as the knowledge of the technicians is now a function of the software. And as we have seen in the other mediums, these better tools have made mediums that much more accessible and therefore the artistry of the person using them becomes all the more apparent — and those who would never have had the opportunity before now get a chance to share their gift with the world.

And they still need us geeky technicians to finish off that last 10%. 😉

(P.S. the biggest hurdle I see FCP X needing to make, besides fixing all the problems I have mentioned here on the Cow, is that it needs to become more “tinkerable”. We finishing technicians need to be able to get our hands dirty and refine everything with great control. The current lack of an anamorphic setting for video clips is just one illustration of that missing capability in FCP X. It swung too far toward and artists tool, without keeping enough of the production capabilities.)

(P.P.S. My little story is primarily about editing and not shooting. Shooting is frankly hard and takes huge amounts of geeky technical knowledge and skill. )

(P.P.P.S No offense was intended in calling those of us who love “legacy” NLEs as geeky. I mean it in the best sense of the word.)

——
T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

[Gary Hazen]

[Timothy Payton] “And they still need us geeky technicians to finish off that last 10%. ;)”

How long does it take for the geeky editor to fix that last 10%? How much does it cost?

It depends on how screwed up the edit is by the time it lands in the hands of the geek.

I think telling a kid coming out of college not to bother with such trivial things as technical details is bad advice. The market is saturated with editors right now. The ability to tell a story and solve the technical problems is what sets an editor apart from the other 100 “artists” applying for he same job.