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More Bricklayers and Sculptors from Oliver and Simon
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[Tony West] “I had a creative consultant on my film and as I wrote the narration I would show it to him and to my narrator who read it.
they gave their input on it which was great. “As the filmmaker, you certainly have the right to create your films any way that you’d like.
My previous thoughts were speaking to the idea of the editor as a story collaborator since at it’s core, film making or video is a collaborative endeavor and that’s what makes it so rewarding. And it sure sounds like you made use of your creative consultant in just that way. An editor is also a creative collaborator or at least the good ones are.
I recall editing a doc many years ago that involved about 50 interviews. Quite honestly, if we wouldn’t have had a giant binder of transcripts from all of those interviews we would’ve never finished the film.
Adobe Premiere 2017.1.1
Windows 10 Pro
Samsung SSD 850 EVO system
Samsung SSD 850 EVO Adobe cache
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
OWC Thunderbay 12t x 2 in Raid10 configuration (thru Storage Spaces and Disk Management) -
If anybody cares, that’s called X-Bar theory.
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So now we have to come up with FCP X-Bar theory.
It’s Friday, so first and fifth round’s on me!
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[Simon Ubsdell] “[Bill Davis] “That the original post “as written” was pretty rude. ”
Call me an unreconstructed Marxist but I choose not to rank one person above another according to their socio-economic status.
I would certainly not rank a bricklayer above a sculptor and I would not think highly of anyone who did.”
Accepted as fair at face value.
I sorta do wish you’d chosen to use the terms “Sculpting” and Bricklaying” in your original post to clearly make it about technique – not people.
Oh well.
Moving on.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Simon Ubsdell] “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”!)”
And it strikes me that you have just ideally described the way I think about a vertically and horizontally magnetically connected assembly of assets in X’s magnetic timeline!
“Editorial chunks” is EXACTLY how I think about them!
Everything in the total raw material pool unfiltered and sortable not just in such “instant string-outs” as I might wish -, but available with or without whatever curation and/or sorting as I might wish to impose upon it!
All I’m doing is cutting out what I see as “the workflow middleman” that you’re describing above.
And cutting out the middleman is often a nice path to better results.
Not always, obviously. There’s always systems where additional steps in the supply chain will add value. But in this era, real wealth is being generated by those who learn to work direct as well.
YMMV.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Walter Soyka] “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”
OK, I’ll bite.
And argue (a bit tongue in cheek) that your fully “sculptural” editor is needlessly forcing themselves into starting with a massively huge block of marble every time they go to make a statue. And it’s silly in an era where we now have better tools that let the carver rough out the shape they envision without having to cut through so much dreck.
I don’t know any actual sculptors, but the ones I’ve read about seem to iterate endlessly.
And the ALL universally start out with a subset of a larger body of materials to face.
(The Mt Rushmore guy not withstanding)But I’ve never seen anyone carve a finished work at the first pass.
Big chunks fall and fall until the sculptor sees the form start to emerge. Simon apparently argues that the real sculptor must start with the largest block and know before the mallet strikes the chisel if the removal being contemplated is righteous.
And heck, no one wise would castigate a process that has led to a universe of great works.
But I wonder if he might be making the same mistake I’ve been accused of – to wit, having a beloved hammer and thereby seeing every serious problem as too much like a nail?
Editorial adjacency. The ability to “see” the effect of one shot against another? Nobody argues that isn’t an important or even a critical thing.
But the central thing? The thing that causes you to value one editorial approach over all others.
By arguing for “large stringout pile reductive focused editing” to coin an ugly descriptor – as the de facto standard, you’re fighting against the major benefit of a HUGE part of the progress we’ve made in the digital age.
The ability to carve away, but if you feel unsatisfied, to Uncarve!
Hint: this is why we generally prefer word processors to typewriters, right?
And if you remain unsatisfied – ADD.
It FEELS to me, perhaps, that those arguing for the sculptural approach may be doing so (at least partially) because they expect every project really should start with a block of marble or wood and needs to end up looking like a statue.
And I think that’s increasingly worth questioning. Not Always. Some gigs definitely needs lots and lots of sculpture.
But many, many, many (perhaps even most) projects don’t.
I think I prefer a system that values subtractive and additive in more balance and encourages the user by delivering a wider range of tools – and lets the editor elect which approach to use and when.
Fun to discuss, anyway.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “I sorta do wish you’d chosen to use the terms “Sculpting” and Bricklaying” in your original post to clearly make it about technique – not people. “
My French father-in-law, who died just six months ago after a cruel struggle with lung cancer, was a parqueteur all his working life – and what is a layer of parquet other than a bricklayer who works with wood?
Il portait ses bleus avec fierté, secure in the belief that he was “worth” just as much as anyone else in French society.
When you next go to Versailles you will be walking on floors that he painstakingly restored. That’s something I would be very proud to be remembered for but for him pride was about doing an honest day’s work and providing for his family. It was a privilege to have known him.
All his life he voted staunchly for the partie communiste and in a week like this when, barely a mile from where I live, scores, if not hundreds of lives have been lost in an inferno because poor people matter less than rich people, I can see his point.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Metaphors are always imperfect and messy. I think for many of us working methods have evolved as the industry has evolved. The change from film/tape to digital files has coincided with increased shooting ratios, which has necessitated changes in technique just for editors to cope.
This transition also overlapped with the rise of FCP 1-7, which enabled certain changes in style not really available to Media Composer, EMC2, Lightworks, and others. So how I might have cut with early versions of Avid is different than how I cut today. As we’ve changed, the options have increased and our own style have diverged, which is probably a large part of why this thread has become so polarized.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “This transition also overlapped with the rise of FCP 1-7, which enabled certain changes in style not really available to Media Composer, EMC2, Lightworks, and others. So how I might have cut with early versions of Avid is different than how I cut today. “
While I think you’re probably right here about how this style has become more popular since the turn of the century, I was starting to gravitate towards it while working in Media Composer, probably around 1995.
I’d certainly agree that Media Composer doesn’t lend itself naturally to working this way, but for all that I still found it faster and more productive to do so and many of the editors I trained and worked with back then felt the same. We would watch other editors “doing it the right way”, diligently organising their material using MC’s many excellent organisational tools, and we couldn’t honestly say that they were working faster or more productively.
Over the years, as first FCP came along, then FCP X, and finally (I was a late adopter) Premiere, I’ve looked at going back to conventional “pre-organisation” to see if I was missing out on its benefits, but I remain unconvinced in terms of my own experience. I simply don’t find that it helps to make me work faster or more productively.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been working the way I (and my colleagues) do for so long that it simply feels more natural to us and that’s why it’s so much faster. Perhaps it’s simply because it fits with the way I like to think about editing: in other words, to be fully productive you need to be immersed in the strategy that most suits the way your editing brain works.
Everyone is different. I find that fascinating. How dull if we were all the same.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “While I think you’re probably right here about how this style has become more popular since the turn of the century, I was starting to gravitate towards it while working in Media Composer, probably around 1995. “
The process goes back to film, of course, which is why we still refer to string outs as KEM rolls. But, in my experience, it wasn’t followed as much in linear editing, since we were worried about generation loss and often had multiple source machines. Edited master tapes were often only the second generation from the camera image.
When Media Composer came out, you typically only had to deal with a few bins (maybe a dozen at most) and 10-20 clips in each bins. So just about any organizational system worked. In that sense, early NLE structures were more like linear tape editing than film editing.
These days it’s not uncommon to have dozens of bins (or keyword collections) and 100-200 source clips in each bin/collection. So it takes a different clip management workflow to wrangle these, whether it’s X’s method or using sequences as interim sources.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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