-
Musings on FCPX’s most powerful feature.
-
It just seems from the way you described your workflow, the tools in X might end up being something you’d really enjoy.
Dangerous was a compliment – it’s an acknowledgement that you’ve learned how to make Legacy really sing despite it’s aging feature set.
I’d imagine that if you had full access to “X-style” instant search, sort and find via tags in an NLE – but in an editing interface you could be comfortable with – it might make a big difference for you.
Nothing more than that.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
-
[Bill Davis] “The only real difference to me is that I don’t have to “load” my projects since I can skim them directly in the project library – and in Legacy, you need the entire sequence loaded in order to view what’s in it.”
The main difference is that multiple sequences can be open at the same time in their own windows. No only can you skim, you also have direct access to all your clips in the sequence.
While it’s true you can skim projects in the project library, in order to have access to the individual media elements, you have to double click a project and open it up. And you can only do this with one project at a time. To me, this is limiting.
_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
[Sandeep Sajeev] “Bill,
Can you expand on your contention that editing in the event browser is more efficient?
How do you cut together complex scenes with foley, location audio, music etc without going into the timeline?Thanks,
Sandeep.”Editing in the EB is efficient because the decisions you make there are persiseant and are be shared across any and all subject storylines you want to use them with. When you understand X, you don’t try to do EVERYTHING in the event browser, it’s not designed to do that. It’s designed to let you prep material, and attach keywords and metadata there so that you can use the constructions in one or more storylines later.
The productivity boost comes from being able to attach powerful search, sort and find criteria to ranges of your imported material.
Timeline editing is sill important if your goal is to do complex or refining work on your videos. That’s why there IS a timeline in X – to finish your projects.
It’s kinda like the difference in cooking between custom cutting everything in a single cooking session, verses doing all your prep chopping and sauce creation in advance, then combining the pre-worked ingredients into the recipe near dinner time.
It’s just more efficient, the more prep you do in advance.
In that sense with X, it’s no longer AS necessary to do EVERYTHING in the timeline. But it’s equally true that the EB is no more suitable for full scale editing than a prep kitchen is for serving up a fine dinner. (I mean you’re OK serving something simple like chopped raw carrots right out of the prep kitchen then you’re cool… but it’s NOT the place to do full scale cooking – and was never designed to be.
And if you choose to do stuff in the EB, there’s a lot of bonus power you can harness that leverages the value of the work you do in the EB across multiple projects. Again, like prepping food in advance so you can serve large numbers of people very efficiently – or if you just want to cut down the work you have to do to create each and every plate of food.
Hope that helps.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
-
[Bill Davis] “But things are better now.
The people who don’t like X now are increasingly that smaller group for whom it’s unique attributes just aren’t relevant – which is fair, in my estimation”
In the estimation of your dreams Bill Davis.
FCPX is rightly trashed for a number of good reasons. And scale relative to editing industry, you guys are in a pokey shack in the woods, by a dim fireplace, waving your hands and saying – “the magnetism is amaaazing – when are they bringing out the ipad edition??”
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
-
very nicely it does.
and sure then stay – check out the veal – the curves, warp stabiliser, true keyframing, dynamic trim, AE integration, magic bullet that can actually render, crisp beautifully arranged minimal, customisable interface, open timeline, feel your jaw dropping at that notion of tracks, use the tilde key to focus hover explode any UI section to fullscreen (if you haven’t tried that, you haven’t lived)
then check out the suite! prelude – hey thats really nice! media encoder – hey! I get render complete reports and any issues, and its fully hyper thread enabled, rock solid, blazingly fast. Audition – man thats nice!
And hey – all those design assets, AE assets, they’re just flying in and out. And you know, we’re talking AE and PS – Gods own standard, right in there.
Maybe they’re no motion, but I think they have a shot.
I’m…
so conflicted in the end – the barmy magnetic one off app silo, that gets no job postings, from the company that just blithely killed the entire FCP studio,Or these crazy newcomers Adobe, working their ass off, in direct constant feedback and collaboration with professional industry from single shops to say associated press and – in some cases – large scale employee, london post production facilities, – with a particular focus on adobe anywhere for distributed asset workflow –
but so anyway, these Adobe dudes, they’re apparently talking pretty constantly to all these guys on the direction and feature set of PPro. Blogs everywhere, they actually appear on forums and stuff – all kinds of things like that.
It is…
just so hard to figure the right choice here.
real, real Quandry.https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
-
[Bill Davis] “[Neil Goodman] “but the timeline still needs tons and tons of work, and imo thats the most important feature.”
If your orientation remains that editing begins and ends in the timeline, I’d fully agree.
The whole point about X is that it’s built to challenge that historical view.”
I’m sorry, but that is – laugh out loud funny – Kool aid.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
-
[Charlie Austin] “Hopefully they’ll make the project “history” buttons stickier, then it’s kind of a non issue.”
Yes. This works very nicely and very quickly on both the Source and Record sides of Avid, and does a lot to make up for only being able to have 1.75 timelines open at a time (I DO like the Source Timeline quite a bit, and wish other NLEs had something like it.) Also, being able to open multiple sources as pop ups is nice. So, yeah, I agree that a responsive history button helps quite a bit, and might even be preferential on a laptop.
-
I haven’t used X a ton yet, just messed around at home… but here’s what I don’t like about the timeline that noone else seems to be bothered by… i don’t mind the horizontal magnetism, which of course can be nullified, its the vertical magnetism, or as i call it the “gravity”, where all clips have this unstoppable gravitational attraction to the centerline… I use the tracks in my FCP7 sequences, especially during very complicated long-form, as reassuring method visual categorization, i.e. all my GFX clips on track 7, all my stock photos on track 6, etc. etc… same with audio, i push all my music down to tracks 10/11/12/13, etc… so can i very very quickly just zoom out to the big picture and SEE what my music is doing, SEE where clusters of photos or graphics are… i find this much quicker and more visually elegant than having “roles” show me where things are in a jumbled X timeline… it helps my brain feel organized simply by seeing the whole thing as an orderly graphic object, rather than the forced jumbled pile of blocks of an X timeline.
In short, I like to put things where I want to put them, vertically, and have them stay there.
Otherwise i really like X.
-
[Bill Davis] “I guess I’m kinda missing how having a bunch of tabs open in Legacy and switching between them is functionally so different from having a dozen projects in your Project Library and being able to call them up at will.”
For me the difference isn’t when things are tabbed, as much as it is when multiple sequences and multiple Canvases are open all at the same time and spread across several monitors. Or even layered across a single monitor. I realize that a lot of people aren’t aware that you can do this, but it is one of the more outstanding features of Legacy. Premiere lets you do it too. When I’m working in Media Composer, its the single thing I miss the most, though pop-ups and the delightful source timeline go a long way to mitigate that.
-
[Joshua Pearson] ” …rather than the forced jumbled pile of blocks of an X timeline.
In short, I like to put things where I want to put them, vertically, and have them stay there.
Otherwise i really like X.
“Hopefully they’ll make roles groupable so they’ll stick together and, in a perfect world, maintain their position relative to on another. that would be nice…
————————————————————-
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up