Marker thoughts – bugs?

[Bret Williams]

[Nikolas Bäurle] “The problem with the fixed markers at the top are that once the time of your edit changes they kind of become useless. If you need to cut something to a specific time then they really help, but if you don’t have exact time constraints it does become irritating when you have to keep deleting unused markers.

In X the primary storyline is the backbone of the edit, and can be used as a fixed time indicator so its simply a matter of highlighting the primary (if there are clips above it) and marking it.”

This would be a good solution. However, the markers need to stay put no matter what clips are added or deleted or overwritten. IOW, the markers need to be primary based, not clip based. Markers can serve so many purposes. They can simply mark off 10 frame intervals. They can mark beats of music. They can mark a particular point in time where a commercial or break is inserted. All of which should be treated differently. Even legacy acknowledged this in it’s last update, and make time based markers ripple as an option. Which was a welcome addition because clip markers for me, were used sparingly because they deleted when a clip was deleted or they didn’t export to DVDs as chapters. Plus, clip markers are just all over the place. Once timeline markers rippled it was an obvious answer to use them almost exclusively. No reason timeline markers couldn’t do the same in X. Nice and clean. You ripple the Primary and the markers ripple with it just as if they were a connected clip. Simple. Hell, they could even have connection lines down to points in the primary so you could see what would ripple and what wouldn’t.

But I think having “primary markers” (markers made with no selection in the timeline) would be a good option. They might sit on the baseline of the primary instead of on the actual clips. As long as they functioned just like legacy timeline markers with the option to ripple or not. I would assume they ripple, unless you hold down the ~ key. The markers would function like connected clips. Connected markers if you will. But then, they might just make more sense to be in the scrub bar with connection lines just like clips and titles. Less confusion.

[Bill Davis]

[Bret Williams] “The timeline doesn’t float in X anymore than it does in legacy.”

I’m going to disagree with this.

Let’s imagine an infant on the floor playing with classic ABC blocks.

In the Legacy timeline – there is a persistent and immovable left side wall to your block building space, the boundary of which you cannot surmount. Period, end of discussion.

Should you choose to put your first clip against that wall (as nearly everyone working in Legacy does almost universally) you’re stuck with that wall unless you do a complex work-around of shifting EVERYTHING downstream and correctly estimating the “space” you need to leave – fearing that if you make a mistake, you can destructively overwrite content. Yikes.

In X, the blocks are functionally surrounded by free space. You can build right, left, up and down.

In Legacy, the ZERO time WALL is immovable and insurmountable.

In order to change your ZERO you have to manually shift EVERYTHING else away from zero.

In X that’s totally not true. You can put anything you like in front of Zero and the program just resets the time ticks to the new zero, dynamically.

These are NOT the same thing at all.

It’s a central fact of the program’s approach.

My 2 cents.

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[Bret Williams]

Seems completely opposite to me. In 7 I could arbitrarily place my first clip at any point in time. In X you must place it at zero unless you insert gap. In either app, you can insert clips before the first clip and the whole timeline reconfigures itself. Except it’s not renumbeting the timeline. It’s simply rippling the clips downstream of the insert point. In legacy, if you want to rearrange chunks in the same way, simply hold down cmd+ option, and drag them around. The timeline will shift for you. Similar to X. Quite a standard function in NLEs. And if you operate with all the locks off in legacy, you can ripple extend a clip in a track and all the other tracks will slide and shrink accordingly.

I’m not arguing that legacy is better by any means. But it just seems that after using it since 2000, that people are wowedby some of the basic functions that X supports by default that you had to invoke in legacy. The main reason legacy and other NLES didn’t ripple by default is because it’s destructive. It’s going to make you work on a more linear fashion instead of non-linear. To be able to put something at 6:05 and know it would stick at 6:05 unless you did something like an insert or ripple delete was very comforting.

I think the speed of X comes more from the tracklessness. The vertical magnetism. And clip connections. Which have to exist to make ripple work without tracks. Being able to drag something into the timeline roughly without worrying about the precise ins and outs, or if it’s going to overwrite something, allows more work to be done in the sequence without all the 3 point edit fuss. You can argue that always working in ripple mode is faster for rough cutting too, but whether the advantages Are worth it is debateable. I’d like it to function without gaps. But they are necessary because there are no tracks. There has to be something to connect to in the primary. It’s all pretty interwoven.

[Trevor Asquerthian]

[Bill Davis] “Let’s imagine an infant on the floor playing with classic ABC blocks.
“

Bill I never understood why folks got so riled by you…

FCPx is not so different from other editors. We still mark in, mark out, insert, overwrite, ripple, lift, extract, trim, slip, slide, composite, reframe, title, dissolve, wipe, mask etc etc.

FCPx is built on the shoulders of the giants of the past, including FCP7, Avid, Softimage, Autoscreet, Quantel, Media100, Lightworks, Sony, Editware, GVG, Paltex, CMX and Datatron’s Tempo76 to name but a few I’ve been paid to edit on.

And in all those editors you can insert material at ‘zero’. (Even on a Sony MKS-8050 ‘linear’ editor we can make insert edits at the top of the EDL now.)

For me FCPx has some interesting features, which is why I keep looking at it. But I think it is fundamentally flawed in the lack of real world usage by professionals feeding back sane pros and cons. Instead there is a lot of noise about how ‘no-one understands it’ or ‘X Rocks’. I understand why that might occur in the FCPx or Not forum – but here I thought there would be more considered and informed responses.

That is how those other editors improved over time.

[Nikolas Bäurle]

[Trevor Asquerthian] “For me FCPx has some interesting features, which is why I keep looking at it. But I think it is fundamentally flawed in the lack of real world usage by professionals feeding back sane pros and cons.”

I do agree with you that there are bugs Apple needs to address. But that FCPX is fundamentally flawed in the lack of real world usage is simply not true. There are too many professionals already using it successfully for that to be the case. Its really just a matter of what people and companies like to use and wether or not they are willing to master X. Workflows can change anytime. FCPX might not do older or certain current workflows better, but for tapeless workflows it really does ROCK!:-)

I work with FCP7 and Avid almost on a daily basis and they also have flaws and features that work better in other NLEs. And Premiere has its problems as well… The fact that FCP7 is still strong has nothing to do with its quality but the PR disaster Apple created when it released X. And I’m sorry to say that many are just misinformed. I experience it every now and again on interviews. When producers or top notch editors tell me that Apple decided to get out of the professional market, and I’ve heard this more than once, then they are wrong, and haven’t done their research.

Apple left out certain features at first, brought some back that really will be used in the future. Its simply a new piece of software evolving. Everything I do for my broadcasters and postproducers I can and have done
in X faster and sometimes better since you have more time to pimp out fx and cc. Certain bugs and features anybody can live with, X will keep on getting better.

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python