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How many here really dislike audio tracks and the viewer?
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I think some of the anti track sentiment is totally justified by the way FCP and many NLEs display tracks and the clumsy way of viewing & selecting that most NLEs have compared to DAWs. But the answer is not to throw away the methodology because implementation has been poor in the past.
If I swap between Fairlight and FCP I find editing so primitive on FCP. I can see why FCPX has sought an alternative but without ever using a system where track based editing is done well, I think it is hard for many editors to understand the power of it.
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[Craig Seeman] “And to some of us it’s waisted space and on bigger monitors it looks even more vacuous.”
Sorry Craig, but as I’ve been saying all along, this really is the classic example of a solution looking for a problem. It’s is one step forward, ten back, and the kind of thinking that’s driven boat loads of committed FCP editors to AVID and Premiere.
It certainly seems to me that changing the entire editing paradigm, and forcing two million editors to either retrain or die, isn’t really worth it.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’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/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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[David Lawrence] “Well-organized tracks usually have enough going on in them that I find any space is useful to understanding the whole”
I find that with X I have to do a whole lot more UI management than I ever have in 7. I’m constantly adjusting window layout height and clip view style and height to see what I need to. A set of saved user layout configurations that could be tied to hot keys would really be welcome. Plus with the magnetic timeline I also find the need now to management clip connection points so I don’t delete a primary clip and inadvertently take the attached connected clips out with the same deletion.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
They may lose half the current base but I suspect they’re going to pick up a new one as time goes on.
I have heard from a few professional (even Broadcast) who are moving some things over to FCPX and basically don’t participate in forums and don’t want to given the environment. -
[Craig Seeman] “They may lose half the current base but I suspect they’re going to pick up a new one as time goes on.
“Understood! But, this doesn’t address the underlying questions I posed and have been posing all along, specifically about the magnetic timeline.
Is the magnetic timeline really necessary?
Is it really more efficient?
In the overall scheme of things, is the cost in dollars and in man-hours spent retraining millions of editors really worth it?
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I’m frequently looking at both simultaneously. Here’s an example of the sort of problems I come up against:
I had to edit a long, two handed dialogue scene. There were no individual close ups of this scene. The director had shot a medium of both characters from one angle and a wide from another angle. Large portions of both actors bodies were visible in both shots. Both actors were reasonably inexperienced and didn’t really understand the importance of matching their body position between takes. I had to cut between these two angles six or seven times during the 1 minute 30 scene and any differences in actor positions between shots was glaring and jolting. Nightmare.
It took me about 8 hours to get the scene cut satisfactorily in the end. I can’t imagine how I would done it at all if I was not able to constantly see the first frame of the incoming clip and the last frame of the previous clip at the same time. It would take days.
There’s plenty of work where a source monitor is not crucial but I think it’s giving yourself unnecessary difficulties to try to do narrative work with a unified viewer.
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[David Roth Weiss] “In the overall scheme of things, is the cost in dollars and in man-hours spent retraining millions of editors really worth it?”
But it won’t be a retraining for new people. There’s going to be a generation that started on iMovie, move to FCPX and into the professional market place. It’s not going to be immediate. I think Apple is gambling on this.
I’m certainly not having issues retraining. I’ve done it a number of times in my life. I know others are too even if it’s only a subset of their former market share for the time being.
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[Craig Seeman] “There’s going to be a generation that started on iMovie, move to FCPX and into the professional market place. It’s not going to be immediate. I think Apple is gambling on this.”
Aren’t you making a huge assumption that high school and college kids, who are also at under 10% Mac OS will only be exposed to iMovie as their entry-level editor? Remember the market at large is NOT Mac-dominant.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Aren’t you making a huge assumption that high school and college kids, who are also at under 10% Mac OS will only be exposed to iMovie as their entry-level editor? Remember the market at large is NOT Mac-dominant.”
Halo effect from the iPad taking over the Textbook market with iBook Author.
I know, just a coincidence that Avid jumps to iPad at this point (I know it’s a stretch but I’m having fun with it) -
[Dominic Deacon] “There’s plenty of work where a source monitor is not crucial but I think it’s giving yourself unnecessary difficulties to try to do narrative work with a unified viewer.”
I don’t think there are many editors who would disagree. And, that’s the point of my straw pole. I’d really like to know how many people ever really disliked the viewer in the first place, how many think abandoning the source monitor is really an improvement, and who’d object if it reappeared, even if it’s only optional or contextual.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’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/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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