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It’s All Connected — Clip Relationships and The Magnetic Timeline Paradigm
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The screen grabs are good.
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[Dave Gage] “Any plans on turning this thread into a movie? It might be easier for me to follow. Maybe something along the lines of “My Dinner With Andre”?”
Inconceivable!
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Could not agree more Oliver. The apology I used at LAFCPUG when asked was, like a printed spreadsheet without the grid turn on, the magnetic timeline represents data in empty space, without the immediate correlation or interrelationships that are iconic and immediately recognizable in a traditionally tracked layout.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I think fixating on the A/B roll analogy sidetracks the discussion a bit. There are various A/B roll concepts. One is to checkerboard clips onto alternate reels to enable film printing with transitions. This concept migrated to linear video editing where you had to copy a reel in order to dissolve between two clips recorded on the same camera tape. Hence the B-Reel in Edit Decision Lists. Both of these methods were strictly for the purpose of transition effects and it’s a concept that some early NLEs copied. Some had A/B/X tracks (where X was a track for transition effects). The key take-away is that clips on an A or B reel or track had the same properties or values.
Generally the A/B-roll comparison in FCP X stems from editing news packages on reversal film with a recorded magnetic sound track on the film. You edited the A-reel first, which was the “radio cut” of all the sync sound clips and bridging reporter reads. Cutaways were edited to the B-reel as MOS clips. In the days of TV news on film, some places actually rolled an A-reel and a B-reel in sync on two projectors and the director switched live between the two film chain signals. That’s the reason today we call shots without on-camera speakers as “B-roll coverage”. This version of the A/B-roll concept is what FCP X mimics. The “radio cut” or A-roll is edited to the Primary Storyline based on the concept that audio drives the other edits. Connected Clips are the B-roll or cutaway shots. Interestingly, Connected Clips can certainly have audio, yet there’s really no “best practices” right now, for dealing with audio on a Connected A/V clip, a Connected audio-only clip or one on the Primary Storyline.
An interesting aside is Walter Murch’s use of the FCP 7 timeline. This was discussed on this forum before around the time of the Boston meeting at which he spoke. He referenced a frame grab in his Keynote slides showing his timeline for “Hemingway & Gellhorn”. Here’s a link to my recent interview with him, which includes a shot of this timeline.
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/hemingway-and-gellhorn/
I challenge anyone here to come up with an FCP X timeline that’s anywhere as dense without resorting to compound clips. 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Naturally, the concept of magnetic timeline and connected clips would work better if the rules made any sense, but they don’t. There are some obvious bad design decisions that have been made. A primary storyline clip and a connected clip do not each have the same properties, yet under some conditions they are equal.
1. You can edit a clip as an A/V clip onto the primary storyline and then overwrite it using a video-only edit. This wipes out the complete clip (including audio) that was there before.
2. You can move an audio-only connected clip onto the primary storyline and it will overwrite any video clip that’s there. This happens when working in the position tool, but when you use the selection tool it shoves the clips downstream. I don’t care about the magnetic behavior, but audio overwriting a video clip is just stupid design.
3. Stacking order of clips sometimes changes how the video combines into a composite, depending on whether these are in or out of a compound clip.
4. Stacking order affects video priorities, but not audio priorities – and you can have audio-only connected clips above the primary storyline.
5. Video properties of a clip are different between storyline and connected clips. Audio properties aren’t.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Of course, talk about your magnetic timeline…..
https://www.businessinsider.com/ios-6-maps-apocalypse-2012-9?op=1
Maybe the ProApps engineers decided to re-imagine geography as their newest endeavor 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Maybe the ProApps engineers decided to re-imagine geography as their newest endeavor ;-)”
I have some responses to your other great posts that I will have to write up later, but here’s a cartographers reaction to Apple Maps.
Be sure to read the cartographer’s linked blog post, too.
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “here’s a cartographers reaction to Apple Maps.
https://venturebeat.com/2012/09/23/apple-maps-disaster-stems-from-lack-of-da...
Be sure to read the cartographer’s linked blog post, too. “
Fascinating read, Jeremy. Thanks for the link.
I found a couple of the cartographer’s points about Apple’s software development and marketing strategies with iOS6 Maps remarkably familiar:
“You cannot read about the errors in Apple Maps without realizing that these maps were being visually examined and used for the first time by Apple’s customers and not by Apple’s QC teams. If Apple thought that the results were going to be any different than they are, I would be surprised. Of course, hubris is a powerful emotion.”
I have reached the same conclusions as you about the Apple strategy, but I am relatively sure they did not quite know how bad it would turn out. However, as you note, they may have decided that the upside outweighed the downside. The problem I have with this is that they knew this was a problem months ago and yet gave a preview of the product and set very high expectations for it in June. Stringing your loyal users along as part of “fantasy-marketing” strategy is just the wrong thing to do.
These problems are virtually identical to what we experienced with the botched release of FCPX. Except in this case, instead of it only affecting a very specialized, niche market, it’s being seen by the biggest, most mainstream market Apple has. I have no doubt Apple will recover, but the risks here are big. Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago Sun Times writes:
Here at the end of its first week, I consider Maps’ POI problems to be an embarrassment. If the problem persists to Halloween, then I’ll think of Maps as a failure. And if Apple doesn’t turn Maps around and make it into a reliable, trustworthy resource by the end of the year, then I’ll consider it a fatality. Maps will be moved to a cot in Apple’s windowless attic, where they keep Ping and the iPod HiFi.
What happens with Maps remains to be seen. Since this is a visible and serious problem for Apple, no doubt it will get much effort, investment and priority. But as the cartographer points out, the challenges are huge. I feel Apple has now created a similar problem for itself in the post-production market. It may not be as broadly challenging as mapping, but real-time database-driven media software is really hard to do well. Given the comparatively small size of the market and how Apple uses their engineering resources, I have to wonder if they are up to the long-term challenge they’ve created for themselves with FCPX.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
[Oliver Peters] “Generally the A/B-roll comparison in FCP X stems from editing news packages”
Oliver,
This is the sense in which I have always referred to an “A/B editing” model, and not the earlier film model. I did try to find more historical information but my initial search turned up very little.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/21027#21065
Your definition fits my own, and I think the way that A/B editing is commonly discussed, where the film practice is lesser known and thought of as more of a technical process than a conceptual approach.
Thanks for the Murch article.
I’m going to guess that that is his “final” (locked?) timeline before lab work and not his working timeline?
I note the issue of FCPX is very conspicuous by its absence, and yet I can’t imagine you didn’t ask about it …
Franz.
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[Oliver Peters] “I think fixating on the A/B roll analogy sidetracks the discussion a bit. There are various A/B roll concepts. “
And this is what I was trying to get to. If you are talking to me, I didn’t mean to sidetrack, but I know the a/b convention has come up in the past. I was trying to get to the root of the issue. I wanted to see first what was meant by an “a/b model”, then how people thought FCPX served it, when really I don’t think it necessarily serves that model, or if it does, it’s not very good at it.
[Oliver Peters] “I challenge anyone here to come up with an FCP X timeline that’s anywhere as dense without resorting to compound clips. ;-)”
I love a challenge. I will need to preface this by saying the last time this happened, I think I was misunderstood. A few people said I was trying to over simplify what Walter Murch does. Let me be clear in saying that I am not trying to undermine the fantastic work of Walter Murch or compare his style of editing to anyone, I am simply looking at the mechanics of the edit and of the timeline. I have the utmost respect for Walter Murch, and I have also learned by listening to him speak and reading about him, that he has a propensity for technology. I would love to be able to sit down and talk about the concepts with him, I think it would be fascinating, and I am sure he would be open minded about it, but that is my rampant speculation. On to the examples.
First, thanks for the article. I really enjoy these “process” articles about the thought and work ethic that goes behind making a program of this sort.
Second, this is the image that I am going to focus on first:
https://digitalfilms.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/df_hg_5.jpg
What is interesting about this to me is the connections. As everything is getting to be digitally acquired, and there needs to be many versions, along with the speed and ability to get a decent cut together, as well as being able to track, and perhaps display the different versions, tracking all of this is getting to be more and more necessary and essential. In your article, it is mentioned that File Maker Pro actually generates the dailies assembly complete with text spacers. This is the power of the database and the communication is two way (in and out via XML).
If you take a really good look at that timeline, you will see that the bulk of it is v1 and a1-a6.
You will then see v2 is nothing.
There are 8 audio tracks that are being used for spacers.
Many individual audio clips appear to be disabled, and there’s one complete audio track that is disabled as well as the various disabled layers in the video tracks some of which may or may not be the text layers mentioned as well as the visual descriptors that was mentioned.
Beyond that, there’s a LOT of empty space. The tracks here are used to sort, perhaps there’s the VFX related material in a couple of those tracks, or different needs (color correction, whatever, etc).
Without even comparing it to FCPX, don’t you think there’s a better way to do this?
FCP7 lends itself to this method, but is it the best way? The most creative way? The most efficient way? The most accurate? The most familiar? 🙂
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