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Media Management and Projects?
I have not bought FCP X yet. But I have read the online manual quite thoroughly and I am a bit concerned/confused regarding how FCP X handles source media, projects and timelines.
As I understand it there are no such things as (old fashioned) projects anymore. Where you had a collection of sequences and bins that were relevant to the specific project. Instead each project has one (1) timeline only, or in other words each timeline is it’s own project.
Media is stored in events, and accessed through them or through Smart Collections based on metadata. Delete something from an event and the source file is moved to the trash. And all media and “Events” are shared between all the projects.
Am I understanding things correctly? It sounds a lot like the way say iPhoto or iTunes is organized. Great if you have a collection of things that you wan’t to have random access to. But not so great if you have different projects that you want to keep separate. I hope I’m misunderstanding, because I like to be organized and have every job in a separate project. And have all the media relevant to that job in front of me, not everything I ever worked on.
Stephan
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13 Replies
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Hi
Underneath the hood Apple is doing EVERYTHING differently, so the old concepts of QuickTime media and XML projects is totally GONE.Here’s some of the new jargon 😉
Editing
AV Foundation uses compositions to create new assets from existing pieces of media (typically, one or more video and audio tracks). You use a mutable composition to add and remove tracks, and adjust their temporal orderings. You can also set the relative volumes and ramping of audio tracks; and set the opacity, and opacity ramps, of video tracks. A composition is an assemblage of pieces of media held in memory. When you export a composition using an export session, it’s collapsed to a file.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/AVFoundationPG/Articles/00_Introduction.htmlThe management of the metadata for all these created assets is now held in an OS X CoreData database – quite unlike the project concept we have known.
How it all works out is work-in-progress – maybe it will advance further with Lion…
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Yeah. This is what is really confusing me. As a house with 4 or 5 editors who might all work on a project via XSAN, I can’t conceive of any possible way we could use this program.
From what I can tell from playing around this AM:
1) You can’t tell it where you want to save a project (always saves in your “movies” folder like imovie.
2) The “move” project command doesn’t work (I get a “no value” in the Location pull down menu)
3) I can “see” my xsan volume in the browser of FCPXBizarre!
Max
Max Kaiser
Director
Hand Crank Films
https://www.handcrankfilms.comVarious Intel
FCP 7
OS 10.5
RED/XDCAM/7D -
[Paul Dickin] “Underneath the hood Apple is doing EVERYTHING differently, so the old concepts of QuickTime media and XML projects is totally GONE.”
[Paul Dickin] “quite unlike the project concept we have known.”
But Paul I’m not talking about under the hood stuff. I’m talking about how media and projects are handled on the UI level. I really don’t care how Apple chooses to implement project handling on the OS level. I work with projects. My clients bring me projects to edit.
FYI I have read the AV Foundation documentation, and I do understand the technical jargon. I have developed a number of in house applications using Cocoa frameworks.
(And btw the media is still stored as QT media.)
Stephan
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Yeah… we have an Editshare and 14 suites/workstations, regularly sharing projects among multiple editors and assistants.
All of the other “pro” stuff – OMF, I/O cards, etc… – I have faith the 3rd parties and future updates will take of those things, but this Core Foundation/architectural stuff is probably a deal-killer for anyone needing a collaborative workflow.
I just don’t see a way to make that happen.
Throw in Apple’s discontinuation of Xserve, and now, Color, STPro, FC Server – and I think they are putting all of their chips in the “single user” workflow, which is fine for 95% of FCP users… just not for us!
David Jahns
Joint Editorial
Portland, OR -
[Stephan Walfridsson] ” each project has one (1) timeline only, or in other words each timeline is it’s own project.”
How does it handle different cuts? It HAS to have that ability!
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So what will you use?
FCPX is no good…
Premiere can’t handle collaborative…Avid?
I have no experience with this.
Max
Max Kaiser
Director
Hand Crank Films
https://www.handcrankfilms.comVarious Intel
FCP 7
OS 10.5
RED/XDCAM/7D -
I think it does, but it calls them “auditions”?
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A “project” is no longer what you know it as – it’s just a timeline. This is potentially rather confusing at first.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
It seems that you can have any number of different cuts. They are just called projects. And all the cuts you ever did are always present, even years later. (Unless they are on a separate drive and that drive isn’t connected.)
Auditions seem great for trying out different takes, but not try out completely different edits.
Stephan
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And they aren’t “timelines” anymore.. they are “storylines” ohhhh.
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