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Lightworks
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[Oliver Peters] “The real impediments to me are the supposed strengths FCPX – namely how you edit in the timeline”
Oliver, have you watched the Balis Moviola video on the timeline? Really explained the way it works better than anyone else has been able to explain it that I’ve seen.
Best,
Geoff -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “if you offer someone the choice of a selects reel in its own monitor, or jittering the skimmer around the filmstrips tagged select as the edit timeline viewer collapses into the source monitor – its just not going to fly. No one is going to buy that as a workflow improvement because.. its not.”
Valid opinion, I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate to point out that there is more than one way to tackle a task. You don’t have to skim, you can turn that off and use good ol’ JKL. But if you need to see the next frame all the while you are doing that, as David Roth Weiss previously pointed out, then a single viewer is indeed a no go for you.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Working rigorously to lay out a good selects reel is a part of the process no? just like rigorously naming your clips for easy recall, rigorously preparing and categorising the bins – none of this stuff was broken or went out of style.”
I did say it was how Rodin worked, I wasn’t arguing against it. If it is part of your creative process it is definitely valuable. I was operating under my own idea of a selects reel that didn’t consider it anything more than a playable bin.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “appple got REAMS of detailed feedback from top flight editors on these issues – they just chose to completely ignore it.”
If Larry meant the late stage beta starting in February of this year, then the timeline is too short to have implemented anything from that feedback. Any feedback collected there, aside from bug reports, is for major revs way down the line. Software development cycles for these products are measured in years, not weeks. New features don’t go from suggestion box to shipping product in a few months. Granted, “new” is relative, many of these are probably features that have been on all the old NLEs for years…
We can only really call these suggestions ignored if they don’t show up in 10.1 or 10.2. Of course, none of that at all excuses the hubris shown in yanking FCP7 off the market without offering a suitable replacement!
Best,
Andy -
Damn you man, you are. just. too. reasonable.
I think Larry was referring to the longer term NDA beta testers? Threes months is no time to change anything really.
And yes. The dot releases are sure going to be the answer to all of this. We’re all just hanging around kicking stones in the meantime.Here’s a fun question – do we think the dot releases will be beta tested? As you say 10.1 is a full release that’s probably a year out, but what about 10.0.1 or 10.0.7, when does beta testing crank back up? Are they talking to their original NDA beta testers already? Oh that’s right – NDA.
Still – they do have some alternate timelines lying around:
https://alex4d.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/timeline_different.jpg
There’s a lot less chrome there too.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[David Lawrence] “In FCPX, a keyword collection only shows selected ranges. To play beyond the keyword range, you have to 1) select the source event, then 2) view in list mode, then 3) select the clip from all the other clips in that event, then 4) click the disclose triangle to reveal the keywords then 5) select the keyword. Then you can do what would have taken one double-click to do in FCP7. Five steps vs. one step. This seems to be the pattern with FCPX.”
Yes, that is cumbersome. There needs to be a quick way to find the original source for the keyword range.
Best,
Andy -
If I’m in list view in the event library and I’m viewing a clip from a keyword collection and I want to see the original clip, all I have to do is click on the Event it’s attached to and it instantly pops up the clip it came from, twirls open the clip to see all the keywords an highlights the keyword I was looking at originally. Why is that so hard?
Best,
Geoff -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Here’s a fun question – do we think the dot releases will be beta tested? As you say 10.1 is a full release that’s probably a year out, but what about 10.0.1 or 10.0.7, when does beta testing crank back up? Are they talking to their original NDA beta testers already? Oh that’s right – NDA.”
Apple is very selective in who they gather beta feedback from, and I’m not at all sure if they seed minor revs for apps. They certainly do for OS X, but that is a different animal (har har). I’m not in the Double Secret Probation Inner Circle of Forbidden Knowledge, and if I was, I’d have been disappeared by now for even mentioning it.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Still – they do have some alternate timelines lying around”
Quite the intriguing artifact, no? Love those detective posts from Alex. Particularly the one about shared projects and events.
Best,
Andy -
[Geoff Dills] “If I’m in list view in the event library and I’m viewing a clip from a keyword collection and I want to see the original clip, all I have to do is click on the Event it’s attached to and it instantly pops up the clip it came from, twirls open the clip to see all the keywords an highlights the keyword I was looking at originally. Why is that so hard?”
I’ll be damned. It even places the playhead for you, and you get the colored line indicator of the selection duration. One click, JKL from there.
Best,
Andy -
It’s funny how much we’re tied to software – especially software that becomes central to a whole pipeline in our business.
It’s not enough to be overly familiar with each program’s idiosyncrasies, but we also make financial commitments to other software and, usually expensive, hardware that all must answer to that central piece of software.
In the ideal world, all major hubs (software) would be multi-compatible. So would hardware. If a central piece of gear stops being upgraded, you could easily replace it, and move on.
The ideal world doesn’t exist.
Swapping FCP for Avid still means acquiring new hardware, re-evaluating existing pipelines, etc. Premiere may be easier, but has other issues.
This is not efficient, nor is it good for business.
Yet we swallow it because we must.Unions were set up to protect workers from business owners who had no deterrent for abusing them. Not that all business owners were bad, but without a deterrent, some could be. Greed seems to have a way of growing.
A world where software has replaced hammers and shovels is relatively young.
How long before industries, such as ours, realize the need for a new kind of protection. Not from over-zealous business men (in the employer/employee sense), but in the protection of the user from tool-maker.
As long as companies have complete control over the tools they build and the interfaces they run on, we are forced to struggle with their ideas. Normally, a free market answers to the consumer, but if that consumer is considered to be too small to consider, we then have disruption.So, at some point, it seems it would be wise for an industry, such as ours, to commission its own tool-building enterprise. A linux of editing, as an analogy. Whether it be an open-sourced version of Lightworks, or whatever, it would become the standard by which our industry could establish what we like or don’t like. Financial contributions to make this software work would come from the bigger players, who in turn, are the biggest employers. So a demand for efficiency and quality would be built in as a result of the real needs for those working at the top of the spectrum.
This would offer several advantages.
It sets a standard for what we prefer our tools to do and how we expect them to operate within an editing ecosystem.
It forces the “competition” to answer to our standards, instead of, say, them imposing their own paradigms on us – culled from months of editing vacation videos and such.Seeds for thought, anyway.
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[Geoff Dills] “Oliver, have you watched the Balis Moviola video on the timeline? Really explained the way it works better than anyone else has been able to explain it that I’ve seen.”
Yes, I watched it. Also the “Missing Features” video. You’ll note the issues he has to tap-dance around. Things like the lack of ability to easily roll either audio or video edits without workarounds. Or the easy ability to throw things out of sync once you break items apart.
It helps to understand these issues by actually working with the software, which I have. I keep doing that, thinking there may be a way to integrate the workflow. Every time I do that and dig deeper, more issues become evident.
For example, try taking clips with dual mono audio. Now adjust different audio levels on each of the two tracks and different in/out points. Just one of the many little items that are deal-breakers when you add them all up. Plus the general bugginess of the software at this point.
I’m trying to avoid another “FCPX versus” discussion here 😉 since the thread really started with Lightworks and open source. It would have been interesting to see where FCP COULD have been taken – not where it WAS.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] ”
I’m trying to avoid another “FCPX versus” discussion here 😉 since the thread really started with Lightworks and open source. It would have been interesting to see where FCP COULD have been taken – not where it WAS.”Agreed. Funny there’s more posts in this thread about Lightworks than the entire forum the Cow dedicated to it. But little talk about Lightworks. I looked at it and thought it had promise. The controller looks like a fantastic way to work with footage. And its strength is its ability to be customized to the editors delight.
But I made a decision when I switched to FCP to pick one editor and stick with it so I’m trying to continue that approach with X and find out what will make it work, not that it is necessarily a better way in all regards. As to adjusting two audio tracks, the only way I’ve found is to open in timeline and do it there.
Best,
Geoff
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