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Large projects
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alright sure – say – Occams razor jeremy – which is better: multiple tabbed sequences as we understand them, or FCPX architecture employing gaudy auditions?
Why am I trapped in weird visual tricksy metaphors? who came up with them? how familiar were the FCPX designers with job paying workflow? how boring is that reality for them? how much do we think they care for implementing and curating an incremental skills base for a niche target market like editing?
I will now carefully quote the only thing we really do know, from a half decade FCP coding alumni called sachin argawal.
“I worked on Final Cut Pro from 2002 to 2008..
Apple doesn’t care about the pro space. The pro market is too small for Apple to care about it. Instead of trying to get hundreds or even thousands of video professionals to buy new Macs, they can nail the pro-sumer market and sell to hundreds of thousands of hobbyists like me. Apple doesn’t compete on features
From 2006 and 2007.. people were choosing their hardware and software based on format support, or specific features they needed. That’s boring. Apple doesn’t play that game.
let’s… have that last line again – it refers directly to our entire industry, our livelihood, out ability to put bread on the table:
That’s boring. Apple doesn’t play that game.
one more time- truncating.
Apple doesn’t compete on features . That’s boring. Apple doesn’t play that game.
Apple had the market won, and we had good ground under our feet, but it grew to bore them so they trashed it all for their own ends.
Auditions are just a tricksy thing that apple engineers came up with to please Steve Jobs at the weekly board room demo. this application is a half imovie corporate infighting mess. Larry Jordan is now flat out saying that they ignored all private feedback. He uses the direct phrase hubris.
It goes to the heart of what apple are, or are not, as a software company: Apple are not fit to generate professional software.
and sure here – let us all enjoy the last section of Sachin’s post with my own rude interjections..
So… it was time to reinvent the video editor. And Final Cut Pro X really delivers there. LOOKS GREAT. FCPX isn’t defined by a feature chart. It’s not trying to do more than its competitors, it’s doing it better. YOU GENIUSES.And once again, Final Cut Pro stands on its own. LIKE MOTION BECAUSE THAT WORKED OUT.And once again, Final Cut Pro will expand the market of video editors out there, and I’ll be one of them. YOU”RE BRILLIANT.Final Cut Pro 1.0 didn’t win over every Avid user, and Final Cut Pro X won’t win over every Final Cut Pro user. NOT A SINGLE ONE. But they’ve laid the foundation for something incredible, ITS CALLED PPRO AND AVID MATEY. and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here. THEY’RE SHUTTING DOWN PRO-APPS IN 36 MONTHS Congrats to all my friends on the Final Cut Pro team who shipped this incredible release! THEY OUTDID THEMSELVES BUDDY THIS IS A NEW, BRUTAL KNEE INTO THE GROIN TO THE ART AND CRAFT OF EDITING.
to you apple – to you, and your hideously self involved care for the crazy ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9GTUMh490
if anyone is confused – this ad means absolutely nothing.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
Tom Baker! You lucky pup. As far as my childhood self was concerned, he was THEEEE Doctor. His face still comes to mind at the Doctor’s mention, just before the others. All three of the last Doctors give him a run, though, with David Tennant a bit in front.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “that aside: the doctor’s wife?
BEST. BLOODY. EPISODE. EVER.
“Agreed! Or nearly so. That or the “Are you my Mommy?” two-parter. Though “Let’s Kill Hitler” has a lot of bang for the buck. My daughter and I are greedily awaiting the Christmas Special.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Guys, relax. It’s an alternative way to do things. Don’t worry, you won’t use it.”
No worries, just interested in understanding new workflows 😉
[Jeremy Garchow] “Do you guys ever version anything like Chris does? You need to make multiple versions of the exact same timeline?”
I rarely version completely identical timelines. My most recent job is a more typical scenario – two pairs of short videos, an A and B version of each video with a minor editorial change in one section. Each video is in two languages so there’s four videos total.
My workflow: edit English A version, duplicate sequence, make English B version, dupe English A sequence, replace V/O with German, dupe German A sequence, edit in B video and German V/O. Simple, straightforward and typical.
I suppose in FCPX I could do two versions, English and German and use auditions to make the A/B changes. But the differences between A and B require a few edits so I’d have to compound the changes to be able audition them.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Auditions are crucial here, you don’t have to use another Project, therefore you don’t have to load another Project or create a whole other set of render files, which is how this conversation got started.”
Sure. I see the utility of the your example, but the tradeoffs are worth discussion. It’s true you change fewer sequences in your example but you give up having every version always ready at your fingertips. I don’t mind doing the work to make more changes. It’s billable time so I get paid to do it. The benefits of having all versions complete and ready are especially important when the client asks me to redo “German version B” a year later.
Do you really want to be going thru auditions and rebuilding a piece a year after the fact? What if you have multiple differences? At what point do you decide that a version is different enough that it warrants a new project?
Like everything in FCPX, I’m sure audition-based versioning is great for many specific uses. But I really question if giving up the flexibility of multiple sequences per project was worth it.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “alright sure – say – Occams razor jeremy – which is better: multiple tabbed sequences as we understand them, or FCPX architecture employing gaudy auditions?”
Oy. The razor? Again?
As I said, you don’t have to work this way, you can make as many Projects as you want.
I am not trying to make FCPX work like FCP7. I am accepting 10 for what it, and what it’s strengths are.
You can disagree with how they have things laid out. That’s fine. There’s plenty that Avid or Vegas or Windows Movie Maker that works “how you work” or “how you think”. If this is the razor, so be it. I don’t have a rebuttal in that sense.But.
If you divorce yourself from the FCP7 interface for just a minute, which I know you are smart enough to do, and look at what FCPX can do in a surprisingly efficient amount if space (many audio tracks not withstanding, that’s a problem). The Project and Event system is very different. The way it is setup now, switching between Projects is kinda clumsy. If Auditions help me to work faster, or have multiple timelines within the physical space of one timeline, what’s the big deal? That it doesn’t work like it used to? Who was it that said if you have a hammer every problem starts to look like a nail?
So, if Apple doesn’t play that game as “they don’t compete on features” out of boredom, what else is new? Fcp7 was hardly a modern NLE. They have never competed on features. It worked for them in the past, why change now?
Have you read some of the Avid articles and forums? I constantly here over and over that they can’t change much in the interface becuase the Avid faithful will get restless and grumpy. WTF? Where does that leave a potential new customer like me? No thanks.
Apple won the market on, wait for it….price. If FCP wasn’t as cheap, it would have never been a contender. This is the company that brought us DVCPro HD over FireWire. Wow! Hardly a pro solution, but boy, was it easy, cheap for the time, and fast! HD on a laptop, with one cable! Your arguments while valid, are already extremely dated. This is the way it’s always been, but perhaps your perspective has changed a bit. In that same article you mention, the guy goes on to explain how excited he is to use the new FCP, and congrats to the FCP team. Weird right? Isn’t that like shaking your hand while I stab you in the back?
As far as the marketing piece, yeah, it’s marketing. Aren’t you a promo producer? You should know how it goes.
For marketing, read this. For $99 it already “does more” than fcp7 ever will feature wise: https://www.magix.com/us/movie-edit-pro/plus/
Magic. Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and take a look around every once in a while, you could miss it.
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[David Lawrence] “I rarely version completely identical timelines.”
Ok, then. Perhaps auditions won’t work for you. For spot work, they are rather flexible. Change the slate/tag. You could do 40 spots on one timeline.
[David Lawrence] “It’s true you change fewer sequences in your example but you give up having every version always ready at your fingertips.”
I would disagree. It is at your fingertips, it’s just wrapped in a different package. It’s fine if you don’t like the wrapping paper, I find that it’s kinda cool and most importantly, useful. Shoot me.
[David Lawrence] “Like everything in FCPX, I’m sure audition-based versioning is great for many specific uses. But I really question if giving up the flexibility of multiple sequences per project was worth it.”
Then it’s quite possible that X might never work for you. It doesn’t have tabbed sequences, so I look for other effiencies instead of looking for non existent tabs.
Sorry about my iTyping this morning.
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Jeremy Garchow
Ok, then. Perhaps auditions won’t work for you. For spot work, they are rather flexible. Change the slate/tag. You could do 40 spots on one timeline.
In principle this could work but in practice this would be pretty clunky. The main reason being that you can’t actually identify the contents of an audition without actually selecting it and checking it’s waht you want.
There’s a lot of nice cover-flow type chrome going on there but it would be much more desirable to be able to name your individual audition clips so you could see at a glance which you were trying to pick. Usually what you have to pick out in this kind of scenario is some small detail of text which you’re just never going to be able to see in the audition until you load the wrong one …
Also I would have to set up the slate/tag/clock as an audition and try and work out which was which there as well – experience tells that this would quickly lead to mistakes. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get the wrong slate on the wrong spot even when you’re been really disciplined about it which is why I’d have thought it was always going to be best to have each spot tidily arranged with its corresponding slate and end tag in a conventional timeline type situation rather than selecting stuff out of an audition.
In FCPX I’d still prefer to stack connected clips above each other with variants (muting as necessary) rather than use auditions because it’s just quicker and less tiresome. Auditions really do feel to me like a gimmick at this point rather than a powerful new tool – though anything could change …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
And of course Auditions at the moment have only one edit mode – whatever you add to the audition will change the length of the audition. Even if this is thought to be desirable as a default behaviour which I frankly can’t see that it is, there should absolutely be an alternative mode that keeps the audition the same length – especially for the kind of tagging work that we’re talking about here. Very tiresome to have to pre-edit your new source clip to the right length to fit the audition.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “And of course Auditions at the moment have only one edit mode – whatever you add to the audition will change the length of the audition. Even if this is thought to be desirable as a default behaviour which I frankly can’t see that it is, there should absolutely be an alternative mode that keeps the audition the same length – especially for the kind of tagging work that we’re talking about here. Very tiresome to have to pre-edit your new source clip to the right length to fit the audition.”
All of the spots that I would use it for would have replaceable parts that are all the same length.
They would all be named by ISCI and all be very organized.
Perhaps yours don’t work that way, to each their own.
Instead, you could make 40 sequences, and command zero back and forth to each spot. Fun.
If Auditions don’t work for you, fine. It’s just a suggestion. No one is right or wrong here, although you seem to think I’m wrong for some reason.
And as far as what it was designed for, multiple take auditions, it works well there too with minimal fuss. You can watch a bunch of takes of something, and the rest of the timeline simply adjusts. No reason to make more sequences, no reason to stack anything, and usually takes aren’t exactly the same length, so if they ripple everything else, it is much easier than manually editing every take in, but whatever if you don’t find it useful that’s cool.
No, it doesn’t work like fcp7.
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Jeremy Garchow on Nov 27, 2011 at 7:10:13 pm
If Auditions don’t work for you, fine. It’s just a suggestion. No one is right or wrong here, although you seem to think I’m wrong for some reason.
It’s not that I couldn’t get them to work, it’s just that like so much else in FCPX it seem to me there’s a reasonably good idea there that feels like it needs a lot more work done to get it really up to speed.
I’ll shut up now – as always I do find it very illuminating to hear your ideas for integrating this stuff into your workflows and though I seem to keep arguing with you believe me a lot of what you are saying is being absorbed and processed. And wouldn’t it be dull if we agreed all the time?
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “It’s not that I couldn’t get them to work, it’s just that like so much else in FCPX it seem to me there’s a reasonably good idea there that feels like it needs a lot more work done to get it really up to speed.”
No one needs to shut up, that’s not the point. Chris asked about Auditions after I originally mentioned them, and I answered. It’s up to everyone to find what’s best or argue that they don’t work if they want. Yes, the interface isn’t the best quite yet, but I tell you as using it, it does work well and is easier than FCP7 in some regards in less screen real estate. It also requires a bit of a different style of thinking, which is reallyeasy to dismiss as a gimmick, or a razor, or whatever.
[Simon Ubsdell] ” And wouldn’t it be dull if we agreed all the time?”
Depends on whose seat you are sitting in, I guess.
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