My Life in FCP

[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Lawrence] “As long as you organize the way Apple allows you to organize.”

I don’t get what you mean.

[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t get what you mean.”

Every editor I know has their own organizational style. Mine’s likely very different than yours yet both of us get our work done efficiently. Different projects have different organizational demands as well.

I currently find FCPX very strict with how I’m allowed to organize media. It’s optimized to do things it’s way but as soon as you want to do things in your own style, it tends to get in the way.

For example, I rely on the flexible space of the FCP7 timeline to let me set up all kinds of organizational groupings that I’m making up on the fly as I go through my source material. It’s a very fluid, organic process that I don’t even think about. Compound clips, metadata, etc. are not a substitute for having an open canvas to play on.

I’m not saying you can’t do these types of things in FCPX, you can. But you can’t make up your own way to do them. It has to fit FCPX’s structured model or you hit a wall. I think this is part of the reason why we see so much resistance to FCPX from many editors.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
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[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Lawrence] “For example, I rely on the flexible space of the FCP7 timeline to let me set up all kinds of organizational groupings that I’m making up on the fly as I go through my source material. It’s a very fluid, organic process that I don’t even think about. Compound clips, metadata, etc. are not a substitute for having an open canvas to play on.”

We will agree to disagree. I don’t see why you can’t make a new “project”, or even use a compound clip as a timeline as I just explained.

[David Lawrence] “It has to fit FCPX’s structured model or you hit a wall.”

I still don’t get it. What wall did you hit? What did you want to do that you couldn’t?

[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t see why you can’t make a new “project”, or even use a compound clip as a timeline as I just explained.”

Because doing this forces me out of the context of my main sequence if I want to refine my edits.

When you work in compound clips, it’s like working in nests in FCP7. You go into a new timeline outside the context of of your main sequence. For me, this isn’t useful most of the time in fact, to this day I rarely use nests except for very specific things. It’s similar when working with FCPX projects. There’s a context switch that takes you away from where you were working.

I constantly zoom in and out, jump back and forth between sections, etc. all on the same sequence. Copy paste, duplicate, move back and forth. It’s very fast and makes for flexible versioning. It’s organizing on the fly.

I agree that it’s possible to do most everything I normally do in X, but right now it doesn’t feel nearly as direct, flexible or efficient as before.

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Lawrence] “I agree that it’s possible to do most everything I normally do in X, but right now it doesn’t feel nearly as direct, flexible or efficient as before.”

Fair enough. I find the connections the hardest part to learn. You can move things around on an FCPx timeline very easily but it is different from FCP7, for sure.

For me, I find FCPx’s organization (keywords et al) to be what I always wanted it to be but I guess I’m weird.

Jeremy

[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “For me, I find FCPx’s organization (keywords et al) to be what I always wanted it to be but I guess I’m weird.”

I don’t think you’re weird at all! All those new organizational features – keywords, metadata, etc. are awesome. I love what they offer and have also wanted them for a long time.

Same with smarter object behavior. One thing that’s always annoyed me about FCP is how dumb it is about object groups. For example, you can select a group of clips and unlink the audio, but if you make the same selection and want to relink the audio you’re out of luck. You have to relink each clip individually. Dumb!

FCPX has tons of awesome that I really like. What I’m skeptical of is the new interaction model. Apple threw away some very efficient, time-tested tools for their new timeline model. And since this is where I do all my work, it really concerns me. I think they could have given us all the awesome without reinventing the wheel. And I’m still waiting for demonstrated proof that the new wheel is more efficient!

_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl