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Motion TRACKS versus FCP X Trackless
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Well, I’m glad final cut pro has caught up after 20 years. Kudos to the ProApps team for ripping off a truly great idea!
In all seriousness though, it’s not just about scrubbing a thumbnail. 7 had it, it didn’t work that well.
[Oliver Peters] “While I agree it’s nice, I don’t see the tremendous leap over FCP 7.”
I do. It’s different for me and works differently. I cannot setup 7 like X and have it work as efficiently. Perhaps you can. I constantly have to use timelines in fcp7 to see what I have, I don’t have to in X. Via key wording/favoriting/compounding, I have access to either clips, collections of clips, or timelines of clips AND my master timeline in one interface. 7 works differently.
The keyword system is hugely dynamic, the bin system is not. I cannot get access to every piece of media in my event like I can with bins, unless I dump everything in the root level of the 7 project, and then that destroys all of my organization, not so in X. Even if all my clips are at root level in 7, there’s not much I can do to them until I load them in a viewer, not so in X. There are master clips I have to be mindful of, not so in X.
I could go on, but in my opinion, 7 and X (and Avid) don’t work quite the same way. I favor X’s approach. It fits me. A big pool of data, rather than shelves and hallways that I have to go pick up what i want, take down off the shelf, set in on a workbench, and return to the shelf, or return part of it to the shelf, leaving behind what I need.
I agree about batch expo, and source side effects. I would imagine, all in due time, although I am hoping for a step up in real time LUT/color transforms than baking proxy media, but there’s advantages to both sides. It’d be nice to be able to bake that stuff in when “creating proxies” in X. Man, that’d be sweet. In the “create Proxy” dialogue, the ability to add an effects stack. Sweetness.
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By the way, Oliver, do you think Motion really has tracks?
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Ok, Michael. I’ll bite. Explain it to me.
How is the Fairlight approach superior? How would you reflect those ideas as not just an audio editing system, but one to handle visual content of all types – video as time streams, stills, titles, et.It seems to me that sound based systems always deal in streams unfurling over time. But in video targeted systems, we have to deal with all sorts of content that must persist over ranges of time. Titles, stills, bugs, etc. etc.
What is there in Fairlight that those engineers were able to give you that escaped the designers of all four primary video editing approaches?
When Apple’s engineering staff looked for inspiration and ideas to use in X, as they must have with access to plenty of audio folk with a Logic, and Soundtrack Pro teams in house, why do you think they decided to craft X like they did rather than more like a DAW?
I’d honestly like to know your thinking.
“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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Firstly let me qualify by saying that I am arguing about track vs magnetic or trackless timeline. NLEs need different ways to organise media and FCPX is heading in the right direction with ideas about tagging and using metadata, which as you say was already in FCP7 but not elegant so kudos there.
The perceived problem was overwriting. Most NLEs and a lot of DAWs overwrite when things are dragged, pasted or nudged around the timeline. Apple have been typical in that FCP, Logic and STP could overwrite clips on a track and erase complex edits. What Fairlight did (borrowed from dSP, another DAW company that they acquired the IP) is to allow clips to stack as layers on a track. Bingo no erasing when dragging copy pasting etc. But there the power begins. By treating audio as layers the same as the video tracks of NLEs they could edit and crossfade between layers. So they took the idea of NLEs that layers interact on the so called video tracks. I see video tracks in an NLE as layers of a single output stream. This is a track in audio parlance.
So the function of a track is that it can be a layered area where complex editing can be done, with alternate takes in place on lower layers streaming as a track to the downstream mix process. Where I see the power in controlling both audio and video streams is in retaining the advantages of a track based spatial layout with the advantage of being able to layer elements. I mentioned earlier that it would be very powerful to treat layered video as a track to interact with other complex video layers in other tracks. I have worked on a number of projects where video layers had to be nested or baked into a file and reimported in order to have another video layer or layers be blended or keyed.
If accidental overwriting or getting out of sync can be totally avoided by stacking layers on tracks then apart from solving the irritating problem that is solved by the magnetic timeline, a whole new power of ‘in place’ manipulation can be done without messy nesting or bouncing material to composite files.
To me the other great power of a track approach is track based processing. In audio, levels, EQ and dynamics processing can be done both at a clip level and the track level. If video had real tracks, not just layers and clip based processing, I can see that a single app could start to approach an all in one finishing tool. So to me the magnetic timeline takes away the power of tracks to solve a problem that layering within a track fixes. But worse, it means that the power of combining layers with tracks isn’t realised.
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For me the future is having a timeline framework that will allow incredible power to be manipulated quickly and intuitively. As bottlenecks in data rates are reduced with thunderbolt and processing power at CPU and GPU allows a level of really complex real time processing, then the organisational power of layers within tracks will be able to be manipulated.
Editors love the way audio can be played with via faders and knobs. Imagine doing that with vision as well. To me the framework that is tried and proven for real time human control in audio is better suited to video. Throw away the track and you throw away a simple means to have control over groups of layers.
When roles were introduced, it immediately signalled to me that the people behind FCPX realised the magnetic timeline was limited. I fear though that the structure is so ingrained that they added roles on as a fix. I can’t see how roles can be as powerful as tracks via the bussing and auxiliary control that track based audio systems enjoy. It is all about control and making spatial sense which magnetic timeline and roles doesn’t seem to have.
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[Bill Davis] “I’ve used the example before of how I import long raw narrations into X. Use the range tool to mark the good takes, and if I do that with some care, I can just drag everything tagged as a FAVORITE to my timeline and essentially my initial “edit” of my voiceover is done. I’m left with nothing I don’t want. I can become more “precise” on the timeline if I need to.”
Actually I’m surprised that you think this is a better way of selecting VO takes than editing in the timeline (although I can see it has some uses).
One of the key things with VO recordings is to know how one take sits against another, how well the intonation, inflection and other factors match, especially if there has been a pick-up in the middle of a paragraph or even a sentence. The only way you’re going to make those judgement calls correctly is to hear the edited takes back to back, in context, on a timeline.
“Editing in the Browser”, which is what you are describing, is not going to allow for this. It’s adequate for rejecting stuff you definitely don’t want to use, but not for actually making choices about which takes work best together. And let’s not forget that quite frequently you’re going to want to steal or a word or two here and there from takes that are otherwise “useless”.
(Having said that, editing VO on the FCPX timeline definitely feels a lot quicker and easier than in other NLE’s, for a variety of reasons.)
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
By the way, Oliver, do you think Motion really has tracks?
I answered that in another reply, but yes, I see the layers in Motion and in AE as tracks. The reason is that you can adjust their position against time and you can also change in/out points and slip the media content of each clip.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
“Actually I’m surprised that you think this is a better way of selecting VO takes than editing in the timeline (although I can see it has some uses). “
It seems to me that one of the key missing functions is the ability to drag a Project directly into an Event. I realize you can “open in timeline” and you can start a compound clip in the Event, but these all seem like workaraounds. Why not the same behavior as we had with bins? Assemble a timeline of selects and drag that into an Event for organization.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Bill Davis] “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 think that’s a fair, accurate assessment of some of the pluses of X. In 7, I do most/all of what you are talking about here with a combination of bins, notes, timelines and color tabs, but your approach would be a welcome alternative that I would certainly add to my workflow. It might even supersede my workflow or create a hybrid that worked better for me than either. I enjoyed your description, btw, of the process you used.
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[Oliver Peters] “By the way, Oliver, do you think Motion really has tracks?
I answered that in another reply, but yes, I see the layers in Motion and in AE as tracks. The reason is that you can adjust their position against time and you can also change in/out points and slip the media content of each clip.
“I agree with this, and I’d be willing to call a Photoshop layer a single frame track if anyone wanted to get into a donnybrook over it. Personally, I would love an NLE that could group tracks in the way Motion does. It would be totally rocking to have the option hierarchical track Groups so that all sfx could reside in a single group that could be expanded/contracted, have filters or volume changes applied globally, etc. Maybe somebody will do it some day, though not with X since it is the antithesis of what X is about.
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