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More Bricklayers and Sculptors from Oliver and Simon
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[Tony West] “[Tim Wilson] “If you’re “editing in the Browser” (or in Bins), you’re simply not going to be making the kind of frame-accurate and value-laden edits that I am making every single time with this method. ”
This statement is saying, if you are not editing this way you are not a Frame-accurate editor. Or, in other words your doing it wrong.
“A) To be precise, you’re quoting me quoting Simon, and I wouldn’t actually have said it that way, and B) it’s not saying that at all.
[Tony West] “How would you find that clip, since you never bothered to organize anything in the bin or browser.”
Who said that? I said I never organized FIRST. Did you think that when I deleted something from the timeline that I threw it away? Deleted the footage from my drives? No, of course not. When I deleted it from the timeline, I put it where everybody throws things away: the bin. ????
Part of what we’re getting into here is job roles. My jobs ALWAYS started with my shoot. I had every project two-thirds edited in my head before I shook the interviewee’s hand and got back in my car to go start the edit, which really quite often did turn around just that quickly.
So not only did I label each tape, I marked what was on it. Shocking! I know!
Then when I digitized, each roll of tape had its own name. Again, shocking! I know!
Then I’d take that tape, put the whole thing on the timeline in one piece, and carve out the pieces I wanted. Anything that looked good went in a bin called….wait for it…B-roll….and anything else went in a bin called Unused. But in fact, most of my B-roll was SHOT as B-roll, literally as its own roll, so it was already in the bin as a reel. The reel just happened to be named B-roll.
One particularly complicated project was with a pair of scientists who were placing bands on sooty terns in the Dry Tortugas islands. I mic’d them both and let them work, with them talking to me and each other the whole time.
So maybe I’d be looking at Scientist A’s hands banding a bird while Scientist B was talking, and maybe I didn’t actually want the picture at all. So I’d use markers — crazy, I know, why would anybody do that — and sometimes even, wait for it, name the subclip based on what was in the clip!!!!!
Of course in this case, the shape of the conversation dictated where the B-roll was, so some of the b-roll never left the timeline. I just moved it to another track, directly connected to the A-roll. The bin was literally for nothing but footage I’d decided wasn’t worth using. Anything useful was already on the timeline, so I never needed to hunt through bins for it.
This worked just fine for me, editing no less than 40 and as many as100 half-hour episodes of TV a year, each with 4-6 segments, many of which spanned multiple reels. This one bird story took an entire box of 30-minute tapes, which I intentionally limited myself to because the film guy in me still believes that it’s part of your job as a shooter-producer to also be editing on location.
Always be editing.
(By the way, I wrote a story about one such shoot a few years back that somehow bubbled back up online and has been making the rounds on Twitter this week. I’m actually pretty proud of the writing on the article — it’s a story that involved me wading in the Everglades with alligators swimming around, and why I wasn’t wearing any underwear — but you’ll quickly see what I mean when I say that I was shaping the stories while I was shooting. I bet that most of you can imagine exactly how you’d cut a story like this.
“Before I Forget, Don’t Wear Any Underwear”
But I’ll concede that some of my disregard for over-organizing came down to how organized my tapes were, and an exceptional memory. I can’t tell you my phone number without looking it up, and I frequently get lost driving myself home, but this shoot was over 20 years ago, and I can tell you that I had 75 minutes of raw footage and the final package came in at 11 minutes.)
Now in practice, at the end of my A story, I had to start thinking somewhat more bricklike. Okay, this thing is 7 and a half minutes, the cold open is 45 seconds, credits are 1:10, intros to the next 2 stories add up to 1:15, I’m up to 10:40, leaving me 15:20 to get to 26 minutes, in two more segments with 2 minutes of black separating them.
Story 2 I’d usually keep pretty loose, and let it try to tell me something about how long it needed to be, but by the time I got to Story 3, the length was no longer flexible. It had to be exactly one length (ie, whatever was left) and not one frame more or less — but I built it the same way. It was the #3 segment because it wasn’t as important, so I never had as much footage, so it was still easy to throw it all on the timeline, and carve, carve, carve until I had what I needed.
To repeat the old joke about how to sculpt David — start with a block of marble and carve away anything that doesn’t look like David — that’s how I preferred to edit. Start with everything together, and carve away anything that doesn’t look like the story.
This gets to a larger conversation about style, and that is, what’s my role?
If my role is to collaborate as part of a larger team, maybe my only job is what we tend to assign to the function of assistant editors: log, group, rough edits, everything focused in a bin. I can imagine many AEs going for months without touching a timeline. Their work is no less editing, but it’s one KIND of editing that never applied to me.
I wouldn’t have wanted an assistant editor even if I could have afforded one, because it would have forced me to start my edits by looking at what’s in bins and putting that stuff in the timeline, additively, rather than starting with EVERYTHING on the timeline, and editing subtractively.
This is also to underscore that people determined to make Simon out to be somehow casting shade on X when he insists that none of this is NLE-specific that, in fact, NONE OF THIS is NLE-specific. It’s just not.
I’m going to make a casual observation that Simon did not, though, and it’s not something I feel terribly strongly about…but despite my yet-to-be-surpassed or indeed, yet-to-be-equaled enthusiasm for X by ANYONE in this forum, the parts of X that many people seem most excited about are exactly the opposite of the way I want to be editing.
Me, personally. But that doesn’t make me like X any less — hence my unparalleled enthusiasm — because I know that I could use it to edit the way I wanted to. One big window (ALWAYS my preference, going back to the 70s when I first started), one timeline, bins only being used for depositing things I’m not using.
I know you’ll sputter that I’m missing all this great stuff about skimming or whatever, but that’s the opposite of what I want to do. It just is.
Ironically enough, this is one reason I rejected Media Composer back in the day. The much-vaunted trim tools notwithstanding, it all felt way too binny in its approach. What they call “media management” is so oriented around “bin management” that it was irrelevant to me and the way I wanted to work.
My feeling in general about this kind of “prep every piece before you start putting things together” — yes yes, to be finessed into place on the timeline — approach is that it creates another job for me, when I already had plenty. I’m already the shooter, producer, writer, color grader, sound designer, music editor, compositor, animator, editor, AND NOW I get to also be the ASSISTANT EDITOR? No thanks.
It’s lovely that X takes on so many of these assistant-ish burdens, but like I said, I explicitly rejected those roles for myself, so X streamlining a bunch of tasks that I never took on was never part of its appeal to me. Nor did I ever assume that I couldn’t configure FCPX to work primarily subtractively. This isn’t about NLE choices. It’s about editing style.
Which is to say, the central metaphor holds. Do you prefer to start your project by tagging, sorting, trimming, etc., and THEN starting putting those somewhat polished pieces onto a timeline for final finessing, OR, do you prefer to start with everything in one place in the timeline, carving away everything that you feel doesn’t belong?
Additive, or subtractive?
For me, subtractive, all the way, every day. But I certainly understand the appeal of editing additively, especially if you have assistants. To me, though, anything much more than naming the reels is an obstacle to my editing. An extreme position, perhaps, but surely you’re not surprised by that. ????
Always be editing!
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[Tim Wilson] “This isn’t about NLE choices. It’s about editing style.”
Amen Tim! I think several of us here have been trying (without much success) to make that same distinction in this discussion thread.
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From afar, it seems like the PrPro advocates and the FCPX advocates are sort of arguing about the same thing just different ways to acheive that same thing. The Always BE Editing (is this the same as Always Be Closing as exemplified by the dialog in Glengarry Glenross? ) school seems to defy the fact that with complex projects there really does need to be an organizational scheme when you have lots of hours of footage.
It seems to me this discussion could be called “how do you get to know your material?” There is the Simon way – always be editing stringout method and the Robin Kurz- Bill Davis tagging, keywording mode.
I find it interesting that the editor cited in the second article Oliver posted uses DV tape as grounding metaphor for how she “processes” or gets to know her material. -
[Mark Smith] “I find it interesting that the editor cited in the second article Oliver posted uses DV tape as grounding metaphor for how she “processes” or gets to know her material”
Precisely. We all have mental constructs that make us comfortable, and what makes ANY process comfortable is repetition.
We are all “stuck in our ways”, because to be anything else means you live in constant uncertainty and inefficiency. Our “normal” whatever that is – is what comforts us. It may be Walter Murch surveying his wall of index cards or knowing how the FileMaker Pro database is structured – it may be Simon imagining his storyline as a big block of Carrara Marble – and it just as easily be me skimming through footage expecting to REJECT everything between the last “cut” and the next “action” – only to see an unexpected whip pan while the camera (inadvertently left rolling while moving between setups) and settles on the company logo on the wall after a blaze of color. I’d probably tag that range as WOW before moving along – secure that I OWN that randomly discovered shot now – even if I have no clue whether or IF it may ever contribute to my work.
But apparently that’s dumb.
Because there’s no way when your being a SCULPTOR!! (Pause here for the trumpet volley) to tuck away a piece of marble that may or may not fit the eventual statue. (That just ain’t how sculpture works, does it?) Once the chisel strikes, the surface falls away. You must KNOW with absolute certainty the shape of your vision hidden inside the Block of stone. Because gods forbid you accidentally chip off Venus’s nipple.
What continues to bother me about much of this thread is the vague presumption that we even need to point out the imagined purported deficiencies in ANYBODY else’s workflow. (Move along dude, there are SCULPTORS working here – Bricklayers meet in the basement.)
It’s pretty overtly arrogant on its face, IMO.
My 2 cents.
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[Tim Wilson] “This statement is saying, if you are not editing this way you are not a Frame-accurate editor. Or, in other words your doing it wrong.
”A) To be precise, you’re quoting me quoting Simon, and I wouldn’t actually have said it that way, and B) it’s not saying that at all.
“Go ahead and feel free to explain what it is saying then, instead of what it isn’t saying.
[Tim Wilson] “[Tony West] “How would you find that clip, since you never bothered to organize anything in the bin or browser.”
Who said that? I said I never organized FIRST. Did you think that when I deleted something from the timeline that I threw it away? Deleted the footage from my drives? No, of course not. When I deleted it from the timeline, I put it where everybody throws things away: the bin. “
Did you see me write that you threw it away?
First of all, I took this quote right out of his article
“The very first thing I did after importing the source material was to grab it all and put it on a timeline”
He didn’t say, the first thing I did was organize it and then put it in the timeline.
At no point in the article did I see him write about organizing source material in a bin or browser so to me the whole point was he was using a string-out to organize instead.
So my question remains, did he organize in the browser AND in the timeline, or just the timeline and if it’s just the timeline walk me through the process of finding shots in the bin that he did not organize.
His example was he had 4 hours of source material and through it all in timelines. That worked for him. I had 45 hours of just interviews, that’s not counting broll, pictures, documents and other source material.
[Tim Wilson] “Additive, or subtractive?”
It depends on the project and how much of the source material is gong to remain.
I just never heard of anybody putting say, 45 hours of interviews into a timeline. I’m going to go ahead and say it…..It just sounds made up to me.
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[Oliver Peters] “That’s a really grown up way to have a discussion.
“I think it’s more grown up than you twisting yourself into a pretzel to try to find a hole in X’s swing.
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[Oliver Peters] “Only if you choose to view the world from a very limited perspective.”
????… sure, Oliver. Talk about a arbitrary straw man. As if that had anything to do with anything. Just ignore the quote to cloak the actual context of what I meant as well as the capriciousness of your “argument”.
“That’s a really grown up way to have a discussion.”…
– RK
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Bill Davis-
What continues to bother me about much of this thread is the vague presumption that we even need to point out the imagined purported deficiencies in ANYBODY else’s workflow. (Move along dude, there are SCULPTORS working here – Bricklayers meet in the basement.)I think that pretty much nails it. Sculptors are artists and bricklayers are pedestrian. So what if the bricklayer was some one creating a mosaic and not a bricklayer which is a perjorative term in this forum of artists. I can still vividly recall the mosaics left behind by the people who occupied the Matsada , an ancient mountain top city in southern Israel. Those mosaic compositions weren’t waiting to be carved out of the abundandant rock of the mountain, but rather created ‘additively’ from thousands of little pieces that some artist organized and composed into their final form, with tiny ‘bricks’ by a bricklayer.
The additive-reductive argument seems more like a self justification for claiming one way you make ‘art’ and are therefore and artist and the other way you are a chump.
Maybe Simon would like to make a video of what his editing process is like so we can all learn something from him. Hopefully he doesn’t edit as fast as Thomas Carter, I always need to watch his stuff frame by frame as he edits both addtiively and reductively a bit too fast . -
[Oliver Peters] “So you spend 90% of your time messing around with browser organization instead of actually editing.
[Robin S. Kurz] “Certainly no “pancaking””
Too bad. It would make X better, just like 7 used to be ☺”
Maybe I’m missing something here. But one reason I don’t do string outs anymore is that the filmstrip view in the Browser is basically a string out. Is it tangibly different having a whole bunch of named sequence string outs versus having a bunch of keyworded selections? And given the way the skimmer works in the browser I’d say it’s more efficient than a string out. Not to mention FCP X’s weird timeline history makes string outs even less efficient. Plus it’s easier to go from browser to timeline than timeline to timeline.
And to those that argue there is no spatial information in the browser, well that’s just wrong and uninformed. Yes it has a horizontal and vertical orientation versus only a horizontal one, but one might argue that’s a MORE efficient use of space.
I also find throwing a lot into a timeline really slows down the editing process. Maybe my brain’s channel capacity is more limited than others. ☺ If you have the luxury of time, it’s not a bad way to work. But, you essentially have to make decisions twice about whether a clip belongs in the edit. In my editing process I work with what I think belongs in there. Cut what’s not working. When I don’t quite have what I need, I go back to the browser. I just find it faster that way.
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Brett Sherman
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[Tony West] “I think it’s more grown up than you twisting yourself into a pretzel to try to find a hole in X’s swing.”
We’ll simply have to disagree on that one.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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