-
More Bricklayers and Sculptors from Oliver and Simon
-
[Tony West] “If you are not the director it’s not going to be your call anyway, of what goes in my story. Back in the day they walked in and said go to this tc and go to that tc. They already had that info to cut down on the time they have to pay you. If they didn’t do that, then they don’t have a clue.”
In many docs, the editor is the de facto director and even writer. Yes, there may be a director in name, but it’s often the editor who shapes the story and does indeed make the decisions of what to keep and remove. And what to re-arrange to tell a cogent story. So yes, it is your call.
The director may review your work and ask for alternates, but in my experience, they almost never have the patience to sit through the raw interviews and make such decisions.
That’s often the way reality TV works, too, although usually editors work in tandem with story producers. The days of a producer knowing what TC to go to have long passed. I rarely ever work with producers or directors who still have that discipline anymore.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I used to use string outs all of the time, only because it was the best way to handle all of the material in FCP7 (and Premiere). It was the easiest way to slog through lots and lots of footage. After a while, it becomes cumbersome, because you make many sequences, some for “organization” and some for the edit.”
I think it’s all ultimately about what makes you comfortable and gets rid of the mental clutter.
In this case, what constitutes mental clutter is what differs from editor to editor:
For you “too many sequences” creates mental clutter.
For editors like me it’s “too many bins/keywords/tags/markers/notes”.
I can totally accept that your objection to “too many sequences” is a real, lived experience. But then so is my preference for sequences over “proliferating bins, etc.”
I never find I have “too many sequences” because for me they are a way of reducing the “clutter” not increasing it.
For both of us the “clutter” that we prefer reduces the “clutter” that we dislike.
Does that make sense?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I think it’s all ultimately about what makes you comfortable and gets rid of the mental clutter.
In this case, what constitutes mental clutter is what differs from editor to editor:”
No question. Too many sequences and I tend to get bogged down in where everything has ended up. And, as has been mentioned, FCPX isn’t great a multiple timelines. I would certainly welcome tabbed timelines, even just for mastering, let alone organization of selects.
What I like about the FCPX tagging and mark up is that it allows multiple ways to organize, which is something that bins can’t do very well, at least without a lot of media duplication (i.e. Clutter). For instance, the current non-scripted project I’m working on has keywords for the five different cameras that shot this piece. This information doesn’t really matter to me, but it does to the director. When he walks in and says “there’s a shot where I used the Osmo,” I can go to all of the Osmo shots quickly, and then he tells me a day, and I can sort the bin by date and drill down further very quickly. I also have keywords for each location, of which there are 12, so when he is looking for a shot from a particular location, I can go to that keyword and it has all of the footage from that location from all of the cameras used in that location. This would be hard to do with certainly a single bin or even series of bins or sequences. It gets cluttered quickly.
Then I have the keywords that matter to me, the keywords that inform my thought process in editing, and then from there I can simply favorite shots/comments I like for whatever reason, and create a smart collection that dynamically gathers all of my favorites (a group of selects). To me and this probably points to the way I create, it is much easier to keep track of elements and reduce the amount of duplication and clutter.
Also, just for the record, I didn’t see your article as a class division between artists and craftsman, but rather different means to the end product of an edited program. Certainly, everyone creates differently and uses the right tool for the right job, even if the goal of the job is more or less the same, and the tool may or may not work as well for another artisan craftsman.
I also think different programs have different needs. Movies/Scripted pieces come in with what is already an established linear organization that starts from the script on paper, and moves the script that was shot on set, to each scene. Once the edit begins, that organization can be fluid, but those boundaries are still present. Docs differ, commercials differ, taking heads differ, and all can require more or less self imposed organization beyond what’s on the written page, and can also depend how much has been done in production before the edit even reaches the editor.
-
[Oliver Peters] “FCPX assigns “used” metadata, but no “previously used but removed” indicators.”
A “tried this and it didn’t work” tag? Wouldn’t the mean that it didn’t work before but it might work again? And wouldn’t that simply be a favorite that doesn’t have a “used” tag?
-
[Tony West] “So you just can’t imagine somebody looking at this and not agreeing with YOU. They must not be thinking right.”
Tony, I must have been unclear. I haven’t expressed a value judgment on ABE-style sculpting yet, but more on that a little later. I’m just saying that a lot of people here are talking past Simon’s article. They seem to have missed a key point in Simon’s approach — always cut in context — and I was hoping that starting on the same page would make this discussion a lot more interesting.
There’s a lot of emotion here, too. You summed it up:
[Tony West] “The debate breaks down right across NLE lines and anybody that can’t see that is not being truthful. All the same people who use X as their favorite tool are against and folks who don’t are for. Simple as that. I just don’t happen to think that’s a coincidence.”
Let’s drop that! Simon is describing a really interesting, non-traditional way of cutting that works in any NLE. That is the kind of conversation I hang out here for.
I’ll start. My name is Walter, and I’m a bricklayer.
I’m a so-called digital native, but I learned to edit on a Sony RM-400 or 450 or the like, controlling a pair of U-Matic decks. Maybe I’m carrying some old-school linear baggage with me, but for me, editing has always been about what I choose to put in, not what I choose to take out.
When I was cutting full-time in FCP Legend, I spent a lot of time in the Browser. Like a hipster burning his mouth on his coffee, I was drinking metadata before it was cool. I subclipped the heck out of my footage. I used color-coding and scene/take columns and the Good Take checkbox. I wore out the Alt key on my keyboard scrubbing picons, then I freely switched to column view and pretended the browser was Excel. I gave myself fake smart collections with constant Find operations.
I appreciate the browser-first approach Bill preaches for FCPX, and I appreciate the strength of the toolset in FCPX. I even actually use FCPX from time to time!
But I use the browser everywhere: FCPX, Pr, even After Effects. I avoid Photoshop and do stills work in Ae, in part Photoshop has no browser equivalent!
I cut a piece a couple weeks ago in Premiere, and I did my entire rough cut in the browser in icon view. I made my view of a couple of bins full-screen, I did a bunch of hover scrubbing and poster framing, and I re-arranged the clips within the bin like one big storyboard. Simon’s first step is to make a sequence from his footage; here, that was my very last step.
But it strikes me that Simon and I still have something in common in our approaches here, even though mine was additive and oversimplified while his is subtractive and rich: we were both working in context. I could see in my pseudo-storyboard what I was putting before and after each shot, and that juxtaposition of sequential shots was more important than any one shot in particular. I cut a lot of good shots out because they didn’t fit with their neighbors, and I went out to find others that did. There’s an interesting contrast here between the other browser-first methodology described in this thread of prepping selections is isolation, then combining them later.
Anyway, I can’t answer all the questions that you and Jeremy and Bill and Robin are asking. ABE isn’t my go-to approach. But it obviously works well for Simon, and I’m eager to hear more about how other people work so I can learn.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Bill Davis] “Well Walter, I just don’t see this point as consistent with sculpturalists acknowledge that when I started talking about making precision edits inside my event browser some six years ago – what I was doing was an equally valuable form of l “always be editing.” – just in a form more consistent with my desire not to LEAVE the benefits of reproducible decisions behind whilst doing it.”
Bill, this is exactly the nuance that I hope we can explore here.
I’d argue that you are making precision SELECTIONS in the event browser. They’re not precision EDITS until they’re made in the context of their neighbors in a timeline. There’s something to montage theory.
I see the value of context — please see my other post where I talk about my storyboard edit as a way of achieving some form of browser-side context. You prefer to evaluate clips in isolation. I’m curious to understand better what benefit you are trying to keep (“reproducible decisions”) as you trade away context.
Yours in bricklaying,
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Bill Davis] “Oh my… how I yearn to be able to go back 4 years, substitute the word Magnetic for ABE – and post this in this very forum.”
Surely, the biggest lesson of this forum is that one who says something is impossible should never interrupt another who is doing it!
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Jeremy Garchow] “To me and this probably points to the way I create, it is much easier to keep track of elements and reduce the amount of duplication and clutter. “
I completely get what you’re saying here, even though it’s not the way my editing mind works. For me working with sequences rather than conventional organisational methods is about dramatically cutting down on the number of “entities” that I am juggling – fewer bins, fewer keywords, fewer notes, fewer markers, fewer distractions, and most of all less time spent organising and more time spent cutting, cutting, cutting.
For you “unnecessary” sequences are a distraction and simply not helpful. Organisational tools are your gateway to shaping your thinking about the edit.
For me a relatively small number of sequences become repositories for an immense wealth of organisational data and even more importantly creative decision-making. And because I have been editing from so early on, I feel I am getting way ahead of the game. That to me is important too – I want to get a feeling for how it’s all going to come together at the earliest possible stage. I just don’t get that sort of early feedback from working with the Bin/Browser type method.
But I cannot stress enough that this is a personal choice. To me it makes perfect sense. To you it makes no sense at all. And that’s all good.
However, one of the most important things for me about the method that I use is that from the earliest stage of the entire process I am building what I have called “editorial chunks”. (I guess you could say these are my version of “bricks”!)
On my timeline, as I work through the material, I am constructing mini units that are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting for me later on. This is a non-trivial point. It is extremely important to me to be able to construct these elements on the fly and have them readily to hand at any time. I don’t want to have to think about “storing” them anywhere except on my evolving timeline and I want to be able to juggle them instantly without having to go looking for them.
A unit might consist of Clip A13 + Clip B2 + Clip C12 + Clip A6, where A-Z represents the stop/start of the entire clip and 1-1000 represents selections from a clip.
I will want to experiment with putting Unit AAA before or after Unit JJJ, or maybe try it next to Unit MMM, and I will want to be doing this long before I have committed to any sort of final shape for my timeline.
That to me is very different from selecting a single range out of a clip in a browser type situation or even playing through from one browser selection to another. These are non-volatile units that persist and persist usefully because they are already edited.
How might you go about doing something similar with your method?
Or maybe this is something you just don’t find useful or important?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Walter Soyka] “I’m a so-called digital native, but I learned to edit on a Sony RM-400 or 450 or the like, controlling a pair of U-Matic decks. Maybe I’m carrying some old-school linear baggage with me, but for me, editing has always been about what I choose to put in, not what I choose to take out. “
It’s interesting you mention this because “my method” (it really isn’t my method – many, many editors use it in one form or another across every genre) originated in working with tape (and film).
Cutting on tape, you could either laboriously go to your box of tapes and stuff a new one in your deck and shuttle up or down until you found the next shot you needed. Eject the tape, find the next tape, shuttle up or down, find the next shot. And so on. A lot of fun if your idea of fun was stuffing tapes and waiting while they shuttled to the right place.
Or you could create a single selects reel from your source tapes and edit from there with an absolute minimum of stuffing and shuttling. Of course, generation loss made this less than ideal and you would usually have to rebuild the final edit from the original tapes, but the time saved in the actual creative part of the edit made this an overwhelmingly preferable route.
Which is why when NLEs came along …
I think you can probably see how this feeds into the current discussion.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “How might you go about doing something similar with your method?
Or maybe this is something you just don’t find useful or important?”
It is absolutely important.
I think that I put those moments in my timeline, and there they sit. I don’t put them in a separate sequence, and marry them to my main sequence.
I used to work the exact way you describe in FCP7, and currently in Pr. It’s the only way, really, to put clips together in “mini edits” because bins are difficult to manage in this way. With FCPX, I may keyword or mark the clips of a mini edit, put those clips in the Project and sequence them to my liking. Sometimes, if that mini edit isn’t working, I will snapshot the sequence and keep working, or more often, I will put those clips in a secondary storyline or compound, and disable them, and keep them attached to that place in the edit while I work on a new mini edit for that section. That way, it is nearly always in front of me. And that can get a little heavy too, admittedly. It is at that point, that I do snapshot the Project, and delete the stuff I am truly not using out of my main project. And if I did compound the mini edit, that edit (although now, literally, one brick) is recallable from the Browser, and can be edited in to my Project and decompounded. I usually name my Compounds something useful like “*edit” or if I compound clips, say to make one transform on a series of clips (like a slow push in on three shots) I will name them *move and set up smart collections to collect those particular tags. That way, all of those mini edit choices are not in my timeline, but in the browser, and I didn’t even have to really put them anywhere as FCPX tracks them in a smart collection that looks for *edit, which is separate from the collection that’s looking for *move. Sometimes I make a separate Event for Compounds (you can choose which event the compounds are directed when you make a new compound) or I sometimes make library level smart collections. It really depends on the job.
So really, the principles we are working towards are very similar, we just go about it in a very different way, using the strengths of each NLE’s UI and tools. This isn’t new knowledge, of course, as it’s been hashed out in this thread already.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up