Hypothetical

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[John Davidson] “Yesterday I opened Premiere Pro CC for the first time on my mac. It took so long to first boot up I forgot I had opened it. When it did open, I went to create a new project. Beachball. Eventually I got Premiere Pro CC to open. Imported a bunch of episodes of a show. For a while they wouldn’t play at all. Eventually they did.
So I made some quick test edits into the timeline. You forget a lot of what used to be habitual when you go back to track editing. The biggest was dropping a clip onto another clip just blows it away. There’s no way I’m going back to that.”

tbf parts of that sound surprisingly weird john. taken it total – it could verge on unlikely.
That’s a quite extreme description. I just spent a first fortnight with that software on a project with a wide variety of codec sources on a two year old machine.
it maybe burped three times. coming off 7 I genuinely found the timeline seriously responsive given I was using it in open codec mode with no pre-transcoding?

are you really sure that the above is an accurate description of your experience of the detestable subscription? again – i was on a pretty poor machine giving it not many favours and I never once saw anything close to what you are describing.

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

[John Davidson]

It was yesterday. The mac was a top speced 2013 iMac. First opening of this program seems to take quite a long time to get it to actually work as it initializes 15000 plugins or something like that. The initial opening of the application was also created on an 8 core new mac pro yesterday as well. I was opening it because I wanted to see if it was something I would like as I hadn’t messed with the CC version of Premiere yet.

I’m not saying that the timeline isn’t snappy or anything like that – it’s just destructive. There’s a fundamental shift in thinking towards working in the x timeline. When you get it, it’s not a big ‘AHA’ moment, it’s more like you just start trusting it to work as it does and forget to be pissed off about it. We are now almost 2 years into using exclusively. We’re fully entrenched – but that’s ok.

I probably shouldn’t mention that we’re mixing spots in Logic Pro X now, huh?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Charlie Austin]

[John Davidson] “I’m not saying that the timeline isn’t snappy or anything like that – it’s just destructive. There’s a fundamental shift in thinking towards working in the x timeline. When you get it, it’s not a big ‘AHA’ moment, it’s more like you just start trusting it to work as it does and forget to be pissed off about it.”

That’s it. I also agree with Simon’s ghost post. 🙂 Pr is very snappy, and X sure can be a dog sometimes. But, like you said, once you get used to working with no tracks, working with tracks is maddening. No matter how snappy it is.

It’s not just the tracks either. Clip skimming, never worrying about saving, the ridiculous ease of soloing and manipulating audio, putting audio or video wherever it’s convenient… SFX on top of the pix they go with? Why not? The index. effects preview, etc etc. It ain’t just skimming and metadata that makes it unique. And the whole argument that X doesn’t work with “complicated” sequences is utter horse poop.

Yes, FCP X can be maddeningly quirky, fickle, and sluggish at times, but a restart (which takes like 15 seconds) cures it. Apple is actively working to make it better, and they do listen. That said, PrCC *is* very snappy. 🙂 It’s got a nice combination of things that are it’s own, and stuff “adapted” from MC and FCP 7. If you love FCP 7, can’t work without tracks, and don’t want to use MC, then Pr CC is the NLE for you.

For me, using any of the latter is like editing with mittens on. I’m cutting in 7 today. It sucks. 😛

EDIT: Kinda funny, I just realize that I’m now cutting in tracks like I cut in X. Stacking clips (like connected clips) to cut a “pod”. It’s quicker for me to move layers, rather than slipping, sliding, rolling edits etc. to fine tune the cut. But I can’t just slam all the clips down to the primary when I’m done. I wish tracks worked like magnetism…

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

[Oliver Peters]

[Scott Witthaus] “Does this have anything to do with the ACA? ;-)”

Not really, but it would certainly be something I would recommend at some point. Part of it is me. I like MC, but prefer skimming in the Event Browser. X is very fast for reviewing clips and moving up and down through the list with visual confirmation. I like that and it’s one of the things that keeps me coming back to X for editing. Especially as more and more of the things I cut come to me without any organization from the client side of things.

BTW – Smoke 2013 also does some nice things in this department. In Smoke, there are always two sequence tabs in the timeline window – source and sequence. That’s like MC, but without the toggle. When you arrow up or down through the list of clips, each selection is immediately loaded into the source viewer and timeline tab as you select it. That’s nice, too.

But I largely detest the magnetic timeline once I get past the point of slapping a series of clips together. Less the magnetism itself, but more the stupid bouncing connected clips as they re-arrange themselves vertically, often for reasons unrelated to an edit. For instance, zooming in/out the the timeline often causes this.

So I’d like someone to explore some of these features in a track-style NLE. Just seeing what others’ thoughts are on this. That’s all.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Darren Roark]

[Bret Williams] “Which brings me to an idea I haven’t heard. How about if X had a simple audio mix mode, where it brings up a window with a single video track, with the audio all separated onto tracks, where you can clean up and organize for ProTools? Seems doable. “

That is a great idea, and something does need to be done in the sound department. I hope you send a feature request for that.

As far as not being able to go to Protools well, XtoPro had my sound person think I had suddenly developed OCD with how well the tracks were laid out on his end.

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] ” but more the stupid bouncing connected clips as they re-arrange themselves vertically, often for reasons unrelated to an edit. For instance, zooming in/out the the timeline often causes this.”

I’m with you there, it’s disconcerting. I’m always bitching about things like that to anyone who listens, also the timeline arbitrarily trying to re-center itself for no reason etc. I don’t want the timeline to move unless I move it. I guess that’s why I can’t fathom why anyone would want a scrolling timeline. But ultimately none of that changes the cut. Personally I can put up with the quirks because of the benefits I perceive.

I literally just quit out of the trailer I’m cutting in 7, and switched to X to change a spot for another job. I guess I have the polar opposite retain to this than others here… it’s a pleasure. 🙂

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

[Richard Herd]

[Bret Williams] “See, I don’t see a role mixer happening”

I’ve written this response about three times now. Finally, it’s concise.

1. The important part of a mixer is the bussing and auxiliary sends (PP has submixes which are cool, but Legacy never did).

2. Roles need to be de-facto busses/auxiliary sends, yet compound clips (aka the Jim Giberti technique) cannot be assigned Roles.

3. Apple please code a Role Inspector. It would be easy and trackless. Click the Roles Inspector Icon (that does not yet exist), where we see a column on the left labeled Roles, under which all of the roles in the particular timeline are listed in alphabetical order. On the right are five simple areas: volume, pan, FX, bus, auxiliary. At this level, we are not messing with time, we can do that below, and when we change those times, it doesn’t matter because the assigned role is still bussed up here, in the role inspector. We are not messing with individual media levels, we can do that below (as a de facto trim knob in the media itself — like adding an expander or compressor, or just dialing the trim). However, we do want to mess with an overall mix, like (you guessed it) Side-chain compression, so when my Actor talks, everything else ducks. There are of course many other techniques.

Thanks!

[Mitch Ives]

[Steve Connor] “[Bret Williams] “If you did a role mixer, how would that work?”

Exactly the same as a tracked mixer, it would adjust the level of the Role rather than the track, then it doesn’t matter where the clips are.”

I like that idea…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[John Davidson]

Cool cool. It ended up just being more cost effective to buy the plugin to take care of all future MXF conversions from that network by grabbing the Calibrated Software MXF plugin. Luckily/hopefully I won’t ever have to attempt that process you described :).

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I think I would still prefer FCPX, although Adobe has a strong suite (especially when considering features, they aren’t big masters of user experience when USING those features)

First, I like the timeline. It really allows you to work faster in 90 percent of the cases. The moments you don’t want magnetism, you can work around it (although it’s not completely gone) by working with connected clips.

Like a couple of others here, I think tracks are a workaround for not having a magnetic timeline. Or at least I think that is as much a viable opinion as the opposite.

Yes, I do think Roles, and visual organization in the timeline can be better. Yes, FCPX is a young NLE, and you notice it every day in some bugs (which every NLE has), in some big foundational changes still happening (the Library model in 10.1) and in missing features.

But, although I had my moments of doubting Apple when FCPX just launched, and the Mac Pro was not being updates, I don’t doubt them anymore. I would doubt the other NLE’s much more. In the end Apple rewrote FCP completely from the ground up, WHEN NOBODY WAS PUSHING THEM. Adobe only really pushed with Premiere development when the FCPX debacle broke out. Avid has – from what I’ve heard, I haven’t got personal experience – a very stable working solution that caters to certain demanding workflows, but they haven’t really innovated a lot in years or are behind in new code and/or features.
It must have cost Apple millions of dollars rewriting FCP and re-inventing a new Mac Pro, but they did it. They innovated, with both good and bad consequences (a botched launch of FCPX due to missing features, the PCI to Thunderbolt transition on the Mac Pro) but they INNOVATED.

I do respect them for that. And since FCPX, although it’s been an admittedly bumpy ride (we all have our grieves ;-)), it’s fun and exciting development. It has us the users, thinking about concepts of editing again, re-evaluating them. See what and how it can be better, with some faults along the line.
At this point, I follow the FCPX path, because it does what it needs to do for me at this point, and I can’t wait to see how they develop these new concepts of a magnetic timeline and roles and keywords. The thing that needs the most development is Roles (and mixing) in my opinion but I already like it a lot more than tracks.
It’s a meta-tag based on content, and not on a random number-system.

I have a wish list of about 50 bullet points for FCPX. You could see that as a negative, but at the same time, FCPX forced me to open up thinking in what I want from a modern editing system, much more then older systems did. Older systems didn’t challenge me to think about making big wish-lists because I mostly accepted the things like they are. With FCPX changing a lot of editing paradigms, suddenly you start thinking about all the things that could be better.