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Markers or Metadata – The Debate!
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[Joe Marler] “I just don’t think this organizational method is efficiently scalable to larger productions and higher shooting ratios, esp. docs.”
Joe,
Your post raises several interesting issues with which I am personally often concerned.
I’m not sure Wiseman uses GoPro (despite them being available to him). I haven’t seen anything from the past 15 years of his films (since the introduction of GoPros) but his sensibility seems to be one person, one camera. (Some might call that inefficient.) I’d be interested to know if I’m wrong, but from reading recent articles it does seem he operates all his own material from one camera which is unlikely to be a GoPro.
But, to you point, let me first say that the approach or organizational method works well on larger productions with higher shooting ratios.
I name the two methods as browser-based vs. timeline-based (or sequence-based). Personally, I’d say they both make use of meta-data (so I would not make the distinction between them on this basis).
I’m not sure why you label sequence-based organization as a “primitive method” – both are as old as film (at least). If you’ve seen film bins and reels then you have the basics of the two methods. Both have been adapted in digital NLEs and both have been developed well beyond what was possible in film or video. It seems absurd to me to call one method “primitive” and the other “advanced” – they’re both well developed and contemporary.
The primary strength of sequence-based editing is the immediacy with which relationships between clips are kept and presented. (Shooting chronology would be one obvious example of this.)
To the initial example of Vashi and your added example of Wiseman, I’ll add my own. I work primarily on non-fiction for theatrical and broadcast. Commonly this means beginning with 100 to 200 hours of footage, though I’ve worked with 300 hours or more on films. Edit schedules range from 12 or 16 weeks to a year or more.
If you’re not convinced that this method is valuable, productive, creative, and necessary given 3 examples of working editors using it, how many examples would it take? What would convince you? By what standard are you going to dismiss them?
The implication in your posting seems to be that Frederick Wiseman is “inefficient” is his filmmaking. My question would be this: how do you judge the efficiency of filmmaking? You will be quite able to find someone who can “finish” faster on any given project (including Wiseman’s films). Would that be “more efficient” in your mind? If not measured by simple schedule, what is your assessment of how efficient an editor or edit is?
It’s a sincere question.
I’d propose that a good measure would be making the best film possible with the time and resources available. How to judge “the best film possible”? How to judge what resources are available?
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/01/movies/frederick-wiseman-takes-his-camera-to-the-races.html
There’s a quote from Wiseman. “’I got the idea as I get all my ideas: I take a lot of showers.”
I’m not sure how that would rate on your efficiency scale. We can imagine the dialogue: the tired filmmaker has the plumber over, pleading his dilemma in platonic bereavement, “This shower isn’t very efficient. It’s not giving me enough ideas.”
The plumber can only offer a few words. “Take more showers.”
Here’s another quote from the article:
“More than any technological improvements that have come about in two decades, what’s changed is my deepened commitment to dealing with the complexities of a subject and resisting cultural generalizations.”
Is it question of efficient tools (“technology”) on one hand and thinking (“creativity”) on the other? Who can separate their tools from their thought process. Doesn’t a hammer and chisel suggest one way of doing something and a bit of sandpaper another? Or to put it another way (with a reference to a forum touchstone): language is analogies all the way down.
Here’s another few lines: “’Most of the year I sit in relative isolation editing alone in the dark, and then it’s on television, and it’s very hard for me to get a sense of what it means that a lot of people see my films … it’s like throwing a pebble in the water. And the only final conclusion is you go on to make your next movie.” Maybe there is a more efficient path to that conclusion. I’m not sure the NLE figures into that one, though. And if it doesn’t, does it matter which one you use?
Is this a forum for entrenchment or are you actually asking how other people work and why?
Wiseman talks more about process here (Jackson Heights, 2015):
https://www.puremovies.co.uk/interviews/frederick-wiseman/“Jackson Heights was 170 hours [of raw material]. The film was just a bit more than three hours, I think. Shooting ratio roughly of 60/1. During the shooting, I just collect sequences. I don’t have any theme or point of view toward the material; the only assumption that I make is that if I hang around long enough, I’ll collect enough material out of which I can cut a film. I discover the themes in the editing process, when I come back from the shoot. I look at all the rushes and that takes me six or eight weeks and at the end of looking at all the rushes, I put aside maybe forty or fifty percent of the material and I edit sequences from the material that’s left. That work can take anywhere from six to eight months.”
Franz.
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Still very uncomfortable with this view.
Metadata gains utility when it’s surrounded by a structure that encourages exploration and manipulation.
It’s going to be very hard to convince me that a marker – essentially a fixed information storage point in time – will ever be able to assist the educated editor in a fashion equivalent to a system of tagged ranges that can not just “mark” – but concatenate, separate, overlap, exclude, aggregate and recall content – from a single frame( like the marker) to an entire scene capture – and let the editor tag and retrieve the groupings instantly and at will.
One of those concepts is NOT like the other.
And one, IMO is simply rationally much more flexible and powerful.
My 2 cents.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “It’s going to be very hard to convince me that a marker – essentially a fixed information storage point in time – will ever be able to assist the educated editor in a fashion equivalent to a system of tagged ranges that can not just “mark” – but concatenate, separate, overlap, exclude, aggregate and recall content”…
I see Vashi’s use of sting-outs and markers as being more than just fixed points in time. He’s also creating a map in space on the timeline. This allows him to “concatenate, separate, overlap, exclude, aggregate and recall content” directly with the material on the timeline with spatial memory.
It’s a different way of working then sifting thru content with tags and keyword collections, but it seems just as powerful to me.
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[Joe Marler] “I just don’t think this organizational method is efficiently scalable to larger productions and higher shooting ratios, esp. docs. The fact these were previously done using primitive methods doesn’t validate this workflow in the modern era. It would actually be good to have more info on what asset management methods are being used today. This aspect is usually given little coverage in these “behind the scenes” accounts.”
On the reality shows and large (in terms of footage) docs I’ve worked on the workflow is fairly similar to Vashi’s with regards to using a wall of index cards to outline the story on a macro level and Google docs/spreadsheets to track things at the micro level and the minutiae. Looking a wall of index cards is a totally different experience than looking at a screen and I think this change in physical perspective can help facilitate a change in mental perspective about the project at hand.
And the nice thing about using Office 365 or Google Docs is easily accessible and up-dateable by anyone that’s part of the production. For example, on one doc I worked on we had a huge spread sheet that tracked everything from shoot dates to status of exports to whether or not the director had finished a paper cut of a specific interview. The spreadsheet also had links to other documents like field notes, transcripts, logged ‘scenes’ (verite as opposed interviews), logged broll, releases, etc., that were in Google Docs.
Jumping back to reality TV for a second, in my experience with that the editors rarely start from raw footage. Typically story producers are taking notes during production and start building the story during the shoot. They’ll then create a stringout for the editor (maybe 8-10min of footage for a 3-4min scene). Usually if editors went back to the raw footage themselves it was for somethings specific. For example, one time I was working on a scene of someone making an upholstery pattern for chair. As I started building a small montage of him working I got the idea to do it in such a way that of the craftsman’s motions would fluidly chain together (as opposed to having a chop-chop-chop feel) so I went back to the raw and looked for footage that had the movements I was looking for. There’s no way anyone, including myself, could have key-worded for that prior to editing because I didn’t know what I was looking for until I’d after I’d started editing and the idea came to me.
I think deep and thorough asset management is more useful in some instances than others. For example, on reality TV shows I don’t think it’s that paramount because the lifespan of these projects is so fast. In a matter of months it goes from nothing to finished product so it’s easier to get away with having lots of info only living in people’s heads. Sure, a few months after wrap people would have forgotten things, but a few months after wrap the show’s season is probably over. It’s just not really a thing that’s ever green.
On the flip side, for someone like NFL Network, who has decades of game film with thousands of different players, yeah, you need top tier asset management if you are ever going to keep it all usably accessible. Especially since editors and producers are going to be cycling in/out on a somewhat regular basis so you can’t depend on institutional knowledge to get you by. Places like this usually have dedicated media asset management programs because their needs eclipse what can be done inside of an NLE.
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[Bill Davis] “It’s going to be very hard to convince me that a marker – essentially a fixed information storage point in time – will ever be able to assist the educated editor in a fashion equivalent to a system of tagged ranges that can not just “mark” – but concatenate, separate, overlap, exclude, aggregate and recall content – from a single frame( like the marker) to an entire scene capture – and let the editor tag and retrieve the groupings instantly and at will.”
Markers can concatenate, separate, overlap, exclude, aggregate and recall content. With FCPX a lot of the users think it is cool to apply metadata to everything prior to adding it to the timeline. Why add metadata if you don’t have to? Having said that using existing metadata is cool but having to add it is not. As everyone is saying both methods work. You can also add metadata to the markers if you want to. For some TV shows markers might be quicker for some movies keyword collections might be better.
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[Shawn Miller] “Wow, what level of compression and how many layers of Redcode Raw?”
That was three layers of 7:1 6k from a Red Weapon. However upon further testing it seems Premiere CC 2017.1 is actually faster than FCPX on the same 2015 iMac 27 for that codec. My recollection was a year or so ago FCPX was faster. Vashi was using Premiere from a year or more ago, so maybe today he wouldn’t need that many cores. Premiere seems to have gotten considerably faster over the last 1-2 years, especially for H264.
This shows how Apple cannot lollygag on performance issues, because the competition is always improving. While FCPX is generally very fast, it has less performance leeway than Premiere or any other editor. E.g, a slower version of Premiere is just a bit slower — you can still get work done. By contrast a slow skimmer or Event Browser is almost unusable — it essentially removes those features from the table.
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[Bill Davis] “Still very uncomfortable with this view. “
Think of it like cooking a meal.
I learned early on as a cook that it’s considerably more efficient to lay out all my ingredients on the work surface before starting, rather than each time I needed something searching for it individually in a different place – hunting for the spices in one cupboard, the pasta in another, the olive oil in another, the butter in the fridge, the vegetables in he vegetable basket, the bread in the bread bin, the meat in the freezer, sequentially going to a different “container” each time in order to add a new ingredient to the dish.
The string-out method is the same thing as laying out our ingredients on the work surface (albeit on a vastly long work surface where you can nonetheless grab anything instantly as if it were all within arm’s reach). The bin method is the same thing as hunting around through your kitchen storage for each ingredient in turn as you discover you need it.
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[Andrew Kimery] “I think deep and thorough asset management is more useful in some instances than others. For example, on reality TV shows I don’t think it’s that paramount because the lifespan of these projects is so fast. “
Avid thinks it’s very important for reality TV, and pitch their Interplay MAM for this: ‘The high shooting ratios and multiple camera angles of Reality TV and unscripted programming pose enormous challenges in managing and logging more media than ever before,” said Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of Products and Services at Avid.”‘ https://www.avid.com/fr/press-room/2013/04/avid-interplay-production-simplifies-file-based-production-environments
So the debate is not between FCPX and Premiere but between using an asset manager vs not using one. Does Vashi’s demonstration mean that feature films can be always be efficiently made without an asset manager? Does it mean that much larger projects with higher shooting ratios can always be efficiently made just using timelines and bins? Then who is buying and using Interplay, CatDV, etc. and for what?
I’m not saying media asset management must be used, but it’s just a logical progression. Over the decades as the data management burden has grown, we first used paper, then index cards, then spreadsheets, and finally databases. This is in many fields, not just film & video production. In the 1960s, Boeing designed the 747 on paper and kept track of the six million parts using file folders. Today they design new airliners with CAD which is linked to a component database.
If it’s not beneficial to tag, keyword and organize content, then why does Adobe Lightroom support this? Why not just keep all the photos in named folders (ie bins), and make collections (ie stringouts) for various groups of interest? We widely accept the benefit of database tagging and keywording for stills, so why not video?
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[Joe Marler] “Avid thinks it’s very important for reality TV, and pitch their Interplay MAM for this:”
FWIW – The community of Avid editors is not enamored with Interplay (now called Media Central UI, I think). It’s routinely disparaged. Interplay works best for hard news set-ups.
– Oliver
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Orlando, FL
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “I’m not sure why you label sequence-based organization as a “primitive method” – both are as old as film (at least).”
As you described, sequence-based organization is as old as film itself. They didn’t have computerized asset management in 1930. Today we do. In that sense solely using sequence-based organization is primitive. This doesn’t mean it should be shunned or isn’t useful. However there’s a difference between using sequence-based organization vs using only that. Using Premiere + CatDV or Avid Interplay or FCPX, you can mix and match whatever degree of database vs sequence-based organization you want. It’s not like you are restricted to one method — unless your product doesn’t provide that capability.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “…If you’re not convinced that this method is valuable, productive, creative, and necessary given 3 examples of working editors using it, how many examples would it take? What would convince you? By what standard are you going to dismiss them?
I’m not saying using sequence-based organization isn’t valuable or useful. You can do that in FCPX anytime you want. But you are not restricted *solely* to that. I don’t dismiss sequence-based organization, only that rigidly holding solely to that method is restrictive given the technology now available. If that by itself was always sufficient, nobody would use MAMs.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “…The implication in your posting seems to be that Frederick Wiseman is “inefficient” is his filmmaking. My question would be this: how do you judge the efficiency of filmmaking? You will be quite able to find someone who can “finish” faster on any given project (including Wiseman’s films). Would that be “more efficient” in your mind?”
Wiseman himself now shoots digitally and edits on Avid. He admits it enables him to find content faster. He is philosophical about whether it speeds up the overall process, but in no interview has he analytically evaluated this. It’s just a gut feel — metaphysical. If he can find content faster using Avid, then *something* is being sped up, and he’s productively spending that time elsewhere.
[Franz Bieberkopf] Wiseman: “’I got the idea as I get all my ideas: I take a lot of showers.”
Walter Murch once said something similar, and here is Edgar Burcksen’s (LucasFilm, EditDroid) view of that (18:47):
https://youtu.be/z99wO2utddo?t=1127
[Franz Bieberkopf] Wiseman: “….Jackson Heights was 170 hours [of raw material]. The film was just a bit more than three hours, I think. Shooting ratio roughly of 60/1. During the shooting, I just collect sequences….”
Of *course* he just collects sequences. That’s all his software can do. He’s not going to saw wood with a hammer. Through decades of experience, he is familiar with that ingrained working style. This is why the EditDroid had a shuttle dial just like a KEM, and graphically presented tracks like a flatbed editor, because editors would otherwise have difficulty learning it: https://youtu.be/dZNffHkQOdA?t=222
We’re now 33 years past EditDroid, and computers can do a lot more to assist than just mimicking tracks of film and mag tape.
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