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Motion TRACKS versus FCP X Trackless
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[Bill Davis] “I’m saying that in Legacy it was the ONLY place you could edit. Now in X, you can also do basic functional editing (clip selection, rejection, basic trimming, etc) in the Event Browser”
I disagree, Bill. Wasn’t all of this functionality available in FCP Classic’s browser, with its persistent in and out points, bins, subclips, markers, good column, comment fields, and labels?
[Bill Davis] “We can all think of lots of typical stuff where that’s all the editing that a person needs. For instance, making window dubs for client review. They don’t need precision, they just need the dreck removed and a timecode burn applied to the rest. If you do ALL the work in the EB and just use the timeline as an assembly point that work sticks and when the client asked you to make 5 projects (like spots) out of the pool of scenes in the EB – the rough edit decisions you did are alive and well and waiting to form the basis of your “final cut.” Once again, it’s seeing how a new tool – used in a new way – might make things easier.”
I would have done exactly what you described entirely in the Browser (well, in conjunction with the Viewer) in FCP7.
I know you’ve been working with FCPX for a while now. Can you think of another everyday example that was dramatically easier (organizationally) in FCPX which would have been nightmarishly difficult in FCP7? I believe that FCPX has great advantages here in theory, but I’m curious as to what they are in practice.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Bill Davis] “Editing as ALWAYS been a “two stage process.””
Maybe so, but my point was that a) if there are two stages then the organization one has traditionally been of far less consequence than the putting the shots together process, and b) I don’t agree with the notion of stages as such, but rather that there should be a constant free interplay between selecting and editing.
But perhaps we are talking about a difference of emphasis, and more to the point a difference of editing styles and/or requirements.
[Bill Davis] “We can all think of lots of typical stuff where that’s all the editing that a person needs.”
I can see where you’re coming from and, yes, there are some advantages to be had from the FCPX methodology. However, I think to talk about this type of work as “editing” is possibly confusing. It’s really just “prepping” or whatever other term you want to use. Almost by definition, editing is what happens on the timeline … or is that an preposterous thing to say!??
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I would love to give you a race Bill, to select, fit and mix a voice over track. With a tool like Fairlight I can sort, select, trim, globally adjust levels, apply EQ and fit to a guide narration all in the timeline at a speed that would surprise. I can also stack alternate takes in preference order on the one track so the director can audition in place during the mix.
I know you have often thrown the V/O example up as an advantage of FCPX methodology but I can’t see how it is as efficient as doing the same job in a DAW like Fairlight. To me it isn’t an example of why the FCPX magnetic methodology is superior. Whilst it may confer some advantage over other NLEs, it still fails in my mind to justify the awkwardness of handling multi tracked audio that Jeremy was talking about in another thread.
Specifically on the idea of tracks or layers in tools like Motion, how good would it be to have both layers and tracks. By that I mean the idea of keeping track based streams that can be used to blend with other tracks whilst having layers within a track that can also be interacting. An example would be a chroma key with foreground, background elements on one track doing an opacity blend or other blend mode with another track that might have images that dissolve, key, fade in/out plus a title on top which is a composite on another track. Think of it like in Legacy having V2 with a complicated nest doing a blend with V1 which is a nested chroma key. The layers within tracks could be collapsed down to look like a nest but are adjustable in the timeline when expanded so they are not nests that open up another sequence.
I think FCPX by throwing away the track based paradigm has missed out on an opportunity to introduce layers within tracks that would have made Motion unnecessary. It can all be built into the timeline so round tripping to other apps is a thing of the past.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “”prepping” or whatever other term you want to use. Almost by definition, editing is what happens on the timeline … or is that an preposterous thing to say!??”
Simon,
It’s not preposterous at all. I’m probably over-emphasizing the joys of the event browser – but I’m doing so with intent.
Everyone who edits understands the conventions of the old way. One thing about X is that it challenges us to consider new ways to interpret and view old conventions. Walter S. (in another thread) is pushing back on the fact that one could do much “pre-organization” in legacy. And he’s right. But it’s no where near the same. (I’ll address why I think so in that thread.)
For this thread, I’m trying to challenge people here to break free of some of the conventional thinking about the structure of editing and what you can do in the new X interface. Not everyone will need, want, or be comfortable with thinking about the new tools in new ways. But for whose who do – I want to encourage them to look at the structure and see what it “might” be good for.
A good example is my VO work. It was the very last thing I migrated from Legacy to X. I was completely happy and totally comfortable cutting VOs in Legacy. I was fast, sure, and had everything I thought I needed.
I do the VO recording and rough edit. The clients do the final layback.
It took me a few weeks of tinkering in X to get up to near the same speed, but by that time, I started understanding how tagging and the database structure and auditioning could create some new possibilities in VO assembly. It’s not that Legacy couldn’t do that really well, It certainly could. But X’s unique capabilities kept me asking myself “with these new tools” how can I use them to perhaps make this job more interesting and effective. In the past, if I had four “reads” of a line, I’d just pick the best. I seldom swapped them in and out since the differences were marginal in effect and it caused me to have multiple takes of the same thing cluttering up my timeline. (and honestly, I pretty much know I’m just pick the take I “like” best nearly all the time anyway and doing too much “auditioning” can be a waste of time!) And the client typically doesn’t want “multiple takes” just the final VO as a unit.
But the “capability” for auditioning in X had me asking myself if I ever got in a quandary with a piece of important work, and have a few nearly identical reads for “paragraph 3?” Would the “auditioning” space built into X help me pick the best?
What I’m saying is that I can’t tell in advance if I want to use the new process, until I both know it’s there – and have explored it well enough to uncover it’s utilities and weaknesses. That’s what all of us are doing with FCP-X right now. Exploring.
Which I enjoy.
And I firmly feel that the best way to uncover it’s strengths and weaknesses isn’t helped by just focusing on what’s missing or different, or what’s “kinda like” what we had in Legacy. It’s uncovering the reality in this particular piece of software. Something I’m enjoying doing (and discussing) with others.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Michael Gissing] “I would love to give you a race Bill, to select, fit and mix a voice over track. With a tool like Fairlight I can sort, select, trim, globally adjust levels, apply EQ and fit to a guide narration all in the timeline at a speed that would surprise. I can also stack alternate takes in preference order on the one track so the director can audition in place during the mix.”
Sigh,
I think so many people are still missing the whole point. Let me try to be clear. FCP-X isn’t the finest tool for all jobs on the planet in every case. Purpose built tools of all sorts will out-perform it every time. That’s not the point of X in my estimation.
I’ll try to explain it in yet another lousy metaphor. We’re coming out of the age of steam train editing. Those hauled people and cargo amazingly well. They were what we needed at the turn of the last century. Big solutions to big needs. They’ve changed the whole planet. Then along comes this new “automobile” thing. It’s useless to say “it can’t haul freight like a train. Because it can’t. Nobody’s saying that it can.
And if you’re moving big stuff between places where there are tracks but no roads, a car might even be a really stupid thing.
But what happened with cars in the early days? Some folks used them in cities. Some used them cross country. Some knuckleheads even RACED the darn things. Some of those folks got hurt, failed, drove into ditches, scared the horses, etc.
Eventually, because the fundamental idea of a fast, affordable, general purpose mode of transport that an individual could own and use for a lot of “individual” things – the ecosystem built up so it was a general use tool that everyone valued.
The parallel is only instructive, IMO, because editing has traditional been an “industrial” game – only recently in history an individual one. Now that is CLEARLY changing.
I think X is a fine early tool for a new era of personalized editing. And know what? It wasn’t long before the smartest guys adapted the basic idea into everything from postal delivery vans to Indy race cars.
X is NOT a Fairlight. And putting it in a race with one is about as relevant to my thinking as putting a tractor in a race with a Kawasaki Ninja.
if you do 90% VO work, doing it on X is probably as silly as trying to harrow a field with a motorcycle.
I do 90% corporate video editing, and probably 25-50 paid VO gigs plus another 50 for my own projects a year. And for that. X is a fine tool, just like Legacy was. I didn’t use it because it’s the “best VO tool in the world.” I use it because it does a competent job and I didn’t have to waste my brain keeping up with FCP and something like ProTools.
Simple as that.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Walter Soyka] “I know you’ve been working with FCPX for a while now. Can you think of another everyday example that was dramatically easier (organizationally) in FCPX which would have been nightmarishly difficult in FCP7? I believe that FCPX has great advantages here in theory, but I’m curious as to what they are in practice.”
A month ago. Corporate client. Two days of field interviews in San Diego. Dozens of subjects discussed. Everything gets imported into X. Linda sits and goes through things in X doing nothing but labeling all the total dreck as “Rejected.” Hide rejected. Then one-step drag everything else to a new storyline. Slap the timecode filter on it and output a window dub for the client. Done.
The look it over and want a New Project. A 2 minute piece on a single topic that was discussed in multiple places in the overall sessions.
Since we can “hide rejected” we no longer have to audition anything but the “first round selects” – we go through those. Decide to keep it simple. Whenever we hear something “on topic” we keyword it as Favorite.
Yeilds 40 or so clips out of 200 plus.- WAY too long. We put them in a bin, Drop a “subject” tag on all of them to keep our choices separated. strip off the “favorites” tag and replace it with “Selects” (in case we want to use “Favorites” again for something else from the dashboard.
We decide to “quality assess” the clips using the simplest possible rating system – numbers 1 to 5, 5 being best. We re-assess the group. (remember we don’t even HAVE a timeline at this point. Everything is being done in the Event Browser. We zero tag a bunch of clips as duplications with better alternatives.
The Event Library now shows us we have 6 clips tagged “4” and 11 clips tagged “3” and zero in any other category! (you never know how an arbitrary rating system will work in advance, do you?)
Click on our tag “4” in the Event Library (SNAP – all the 4’s are displayed as pre-trimmed clips)- drag them all into a new Storyline (they are already come in “rough edited because we trimmed them during the original clip selection process!) At a glance I can see all the best stuff (the 4s) add up to 1:32. To fill the 2 minute request, we know we need another 30 seconds or so. We call up the 3’s and listen to them.
In a minute 3 of them that say something different and gets us to around 2 minutes.
We re-arrange them for a couple of minutes (that magnetic thing!) until we’re happy. I tweak beginnings and ends. Then decide I want the VO to lead the visuals in the transitions between the clips. So the precision editor lets me do “L cuts” so the VO change leads the visual change in all instances.
Title and Closing slate and the edit is done. The total time is completely dependent on how much time you spend discussing and deciding and comparing, but the actual editing operations have been kinda trivial. At each stage, I kept the benefits of the time and effort I’d put in during the stage prior.
The point is that the Event Browser was an integral part of managing, rating, rough trimming, assessing and assembling my story before I ever opened up a timeline.
Now I suppose you could do all of that in Legacy using color tags, bins, and such – so I’m not saying anything here is “impossible” in what we had before.
I’m saying its all easy, practical and FAST do do the above in X. And in fact the interface encourages the tagging and sorting by elevating tagging to equal prominence in the workflow of X, where in Legacy you would have been working in “bins” that many people think of merely as “dumb storage” constructs – rightfully or not.
I presume I’ll use “search, sort and find” every time I open X because it’s a huge persistent part of the interface by design.
To me it’s elevating selection and clip judgment functions to near equivalency with timeline arrangement functions by design.
Something I think it should be in the new searchable world.
Sorry to go on so long. But that’s a quick example of a typical X workflow I’m finding very valuable these days.
It also kicks butt to know the next time that client asks me to re-cut stuff from that event – since Events are persistent storage – I can setup as many projects as I like, and all the tagging, trimming and similar work I did last week will be waiting for me across all projects I choose to link to that event.
So I feel like I’m “building a system” rather than just “working an edit” when I use X.
I guess that’s it in a nutshell.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Bill Davis] I’ll try to explain it in yet another lousy metaphor.
Sigh,
OK Bill I agree with you. It is a lousy metaphor because I think you constantly make the mistake of assuming the magnetic timeline FCPX paradigm is the future and therefore all we have to do is realise the genius and leave behind our last century ways of thinking. I, like many, have tried to argue that it isn’t automatically a step forward. Indeed I see it in most ways as a step backward and I have tried to illustrate how older systems like Fairlight have evolved into something sleek and efficient, whilst solving the same problem. If the developers at Apple want to try and reinvent the wheel in isolation from the history of wheel making, then don’t expect wheel X1.0.3 to be a smooth ride.
I have constantly called on people to question the methodology of magnetic timeline because I think there is no reason not to have borrowed the superior collective wisdom from years of DAW development. That there is a potentially better and more powerful way to solve a simple clip overwrite function without throwing away a tried and proven system like tracks should be discussed without your usual knee jerk reaction that we just have to lift the veil from our tired old eyes or some rant about who or what is a ‘professional’.
I am really glad it works for you Bill but you have so far failed to convince me that FCPX has done something clever or revolutionary. So let us discuss and argue without feeling a pathological need to rush to the defence of FCPX every time we ask can it be better.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “But how sustainable is the notion that FCPX is in any real sense a nodal system? ……… Nothing is actually passed through the connection – and you can’t interpose other types of nodes to change the value of the connection.”
[Walter Soyka] “I’m probably being dense, but I’m not following here. Could you explain this again for me?”Admittedly it’s a very, loose analogy. But the methods of connections and the fact that audio clips can be anywhere in the timeline hierarchy, does mimic a more node-tree-like appearance. And clips do have different properties, developing on where they are, much like the differences in Resolve. So, while not truly the same as a node-based compositor, it certainly isn’t track-like either.
[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think of Motion as tracked so much as layered. “
Well, layered in a similar sense to AE. Track, layer – it’s pretty much the same, as you have a change of motion in the content over time and pinned to a scale of time.
[Walter Soyka] “Apps like Motion (and AE, Shake, Nuke, and Fusion) are fundamentally designed to handle shots, not sequences. “
Well, true, but both Motion and AE have no problem with sequences if you don’t mind the cascade of clips. In fact, today, if you “send to Motion” from FCP 7 on a system with both sets of apps installed, the command opens Motion 5 and the clips you sent over from FCP 7 show up just as they did in Motion 4. Multiple clips in succession from the FCP 7 timeline are just fine.
[Walter Soyka] “Back to nodes, here’s an interesting sidebar: you can see a lot of what’s going on under the hood with Motion inside of Apple’s Quartz Composer, a node-based visual programming system that ships with the developer tools. “
I have. In fact, any user of FxFactory can open effects in Quartz Composer and tweak them as well as create their own brand new effects. Watching the “under-the-hood” spaghetti that some one like Roger Bolton (CoreMelt) builds to create his effects is truly inspiring 😉
I guess my point in this was to question FCP X more than Motion, as well as the design inconsistencies exhibited.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Does Motion have tracks? I’d say it doesn’t, really, anymore so than After Effects.
Is X’s container system a node tree? Kinda, sorta, but not really, but close? When you start adding “adjustment layers”, it gets a step closer, but it’s not as tight of a package.
Actually, Motion’s structure is more like X’s structure in more ways than a track based system.
Groups can be containers, which can compliment X’s clip container system very nicely. A group can be a compound, a storyline, an audition, a multiclip…a role.
We are missing connections and magnetism.
I agree with Bill, that the Event as organization is completely great. It is one of my favorite aspects of X. It gives you a massive amount of data that has been hand picked by me quickly and efficiently, and then allows quick access to view, organize and rearrange further than having multiple selects timelines and a copy/paste function to a “master” timeline, or as a version timeline. In my opinion, it is really powerful, and most of all extremely useful. With a click of a collection, I can drill down even further, or with another click of the top layer of the Event, I can go back to everything.
I have posted this pic before, but since video monitoring came out, I have been running the viewer on a smaller second monitor, and I have the event and the Project stacked on one large screen. My video monitor becomes a new viewer. I I need to switch the setup for more precise compositing/key framing, I simply switch the event and the viewer. I find it works very well, and I rather like it. It’s fast, it’s highly creative, and the “birds eye view”, I get of my media and decisions is so much more tangible and useful than other tabbed based methods.
Pics here:
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I agree with Bill, that the Event as organization is completely great. It is one of my favorite aspects of X. It gives you a massive amount of data that has been hand picked by me quickly and efficiently, and then allows quick access to view, organize and rearrange further than having multiple selects timelines .”
While I agree it’s nice, I don’t see the tremendous leap over FCP 7. Nearly all of this organization could and can be done there in the standard bins and browser just in a different manner. If you want to look at MC, as a different example, it’s been even better for 20 years now. If you really want to be helpful, bring back batch export from the Event Browser. And while you’re at it, make it easier to add source-side effects instead of the SLOW “open in timeline” method.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” I simply switch the event and the viewer. I find it works very well, and I rather like it. It’s fast, it’s highly creative, and the “birds eye view”, I get of my media and decisions is so much more tangible and useful than other tabbed based methods.”
Sure. Works nicely. MC has for almost two decades been able to play the thumbnail or storyboard view as real motion video out through the I/O card to a video monitor.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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