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Motion TRACKS versus FCP X Trackless
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Bill Davis on Feb 23, 2012 at 3:12:21 am wrote:
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?
From an audio point of view, although vast numbers of sound engineers do use Logic – and indeed ProTools and many other similar systems – for serious high-level editing, the actual ‘editing’ capabilities (as distinct from tracking and mixing) of these systems are fairly basic in comparison with more specialist editing DAWs such as SADiE, Sequoia, Pyramix and soundBlade. (Braced for ‘red arrows’!)
So the Apple engineers may well have looked at the typical editing going on in Logic and thought ‘we can do this better’. If they’d looked at some of the editing going on in specialist DAWs I think they may have thought twice – much of that would probably be pretty traumatic without a track-basedc paradigm!
Gary Cole
Regent Records UK Ltd -
[Chris Harlan] “I’d be willing to call a Photoshop layer a single frame track if anyone wanted to get into a donnybrook over it.”
To be really pedantic, a Photoshop layer doesn’t have to be a single frame – all you have to do is go into the Animation mode and you start getting time based media there too! There’s a timeline where you can trim and offset clips and apply a variety of animated parameters that make is quite like a kind of cutdown After Effects.
Animation is Photoshop is surprisingly powerful but not much used.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Chris Harlan] “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.”
Isn’t this just what you can already do when you compound clips in FCPX?
A Compound is not hugely different to a Motion Group in a practical sense if not a design one.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “[Chris Harlan] “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.”
Isn’t this just what you can already do when you compound clips in FCPX?
A Compound is not hugely different to a Motion Group in a practical sense if not a design one.”
Certainly, and it is one of the nice ideas of X, but it comes at the expense of the other elements of track-i-ness, which–for me–far outweigh the usefulness of compound clips. In Motion, each layer still retains both its relations across time and its assigned hierarchical level within the group.
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[Oliver Peters] “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 think that those are things that layers have in common with tracks, but I think there are differences, too.
Tracks are containers, whereas layers are singular elements.
Tracks allow some group operations (in FCP7, this is pretty much limited to muting or track-based selections, but in an audio system, tracks may be routed and submixed).
Tracks may be used for organization or to encode metadata about the clips placed within them (i.e., titles and only titles on V5).
Moving clips among tracks is usually non-rippling (in terms of the composite) by default, whereas moving layers in a compositing stack is rippling by necessity (since there is no concept of hard vertical space, layers can’t overwrite each other or leave vertical gaps).
In other words, tracks are fixed while moving clips vertically; inserting or deleting a track is an operation entirely separate from adjusting clips.
In terms of Motion, I think a group is more analogous to a track than a layer is.
(Veering off-topic a bit, I meant to mention this earlier: a lot of nodal functionality exists within Motion’s layer-based system through clone layers. Pretty clever solution!)
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 -
[Oliver Peters] “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.”
I very much agree and this is a really major missing piece for me.
On the one hand there is the Bill Davis school of editing for people who are deliriously happy making all their selections in a browser environment and who feel that the job is pretty much done once this has been accomplished … OK, so I simplify for rhetorical effect, but you know what I mean!
On the other hand, there is a popular school of thought that likes to do their editing on the timeline, in the sense of making selects as a sequence rather than a folder/bin/collection of assorted clips.
The huge advantage to the latter way of working is that you can immediately see how the different clips might fit together, but also get a feel for how they flow into one another.
When you make selects in the timeline you can already feel the edit coming together as an edit (rather than just a list of decisions about what to include or exclude).
Ideas start to come together about the organization of the material that might never have occurred to you if you hadn’t been working this way.
More than anything else, you get to know your material in a very real sense, but you keep watching it and rewatching it. (I’ve seen quite a few feature editors who even like to keep alt takes back-to-back in their scene assemblies, just so they can continously be evaluating – and re-evaluating – the different choices.)
Conversely, the former school of thought involves staring at a database of clips that is effectively inert – there is no synergy between one clip and another, not way of knowing how they might fit together from just lookoing at them this way.
And most disadvantageous of all – and I know this because I’ve seen too many editors work this way – a lot of good material simply gets lost because it is not being reviewed enough. There is a feeling that because the browser has been organized and selections made that the onus of reviewing the material has somehow been removed. Time and again I’ve seen editors looking at bins full of detailed clip names and thumbnails and all sorts of organizational aids, but not really knowing what’s actually in those clips becaue they’ve only looked at them once.
One of the key lessons of editing is that the really good stuff – that one little moment that will really make your edit sing (or possibly get you out of that impossible hole that you can’t fix any other way) will very probably be hidden somewhere you least expect it.
And I think the FCPX model with its insidiously seductive data management tools makes the danger of losing track of your material all the more acute. There’s clearly even more of a sense in which the organization takes the place of the actual editing. There is a real potential for false confidence, confidence that you’ve rejected, and selected, the right stuff and you can start the edit from that point – without going continually going back.
Bill Davis tellingly describes this as a “two-stage process” – organize first, edit later. My concern about this is that “stage one” seems to be shutting the door on the selection process as though it’s all done and dusted.
For me, and it’s just a personal judgement, editing is essentially one process from start to finish and it’s a process that involves continuous evaulation – and more importantly re-evaluation – of the material.
That’s why I’m not sure that FCPX is necessarily a force for good in all this!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “(Veering off-topic a bit, I meant to mention this earlier: a lot of nodal functionality exists within Motion’s layer-based system through clone layers. Pretty clever solution!)”
Could you explain?
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Veering off-topic a bit, I meant to mention this earlier: a lot of nodal functionality exists within Motion’s layer-based system through clone layers. Pretty clever solution!”
[Simon Ubsdell] “Could you explain?”
Gladly.
Say, for example, you’ve generated a procedural matte that you want to use multiple times in the same project.
Nodal compositors excel at reuse of a single element (by piping its output to the inputs of multiple other nodes). Layer-based compositors cannot do this; you have to either duplicate the layer (and maintain any manipulations on both copies) or pre-compose (which, without intelligent render management, incurs processing and memory penalties).
Clone layers [link] let you re-use a layer in other places in the compositing stack, similar to how nodal compositing lets you send multiple outputs from a single node.
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “Clone layers [link] let you re-use a layer in other places in the compositing stack, similar to how nodal compositing lets you send multiple outputs from a single node.”
Thanks for the explanation. I did know this about Clone Layers but I wasn’t sure quite what you meant about the “nodal” behaviour. Maybe this discussion is using the word “nodal” more as a metaphor a lot of the time rather than an actual reality, and I kind of think you are doing that there. But your point is still a good one.
Motion is pretty amazing in many ways, I think, and doesn’t deserve to be judged so adversely in comparison to After Effects when there are in fact a number of important things that it does much, much better. Pre-comps in AE are really not a good design idea whichever way you slice it, whereas Motion Groups (and things like Clone Layers) give you a distinctly superior control a lot of the time.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I’m sure Thomas Kuhn would agree with you 🙂
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