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New blog post from Philip Hodgetts. Worth the read.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I do find that the earlier on in the edit FCPX is faster (the 80% of the work) but once finesse and nuance starts to come in, that’s when FCPX slows down a bit,”
End-to-end time is the only valid measure of “faster”. Add color correction, mixing and output to deliverables into the equation and it’s both faster and slower depending on which part you are judging.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Herb Sevush] “Bill, your post is crazier than Andreas’s“
What was crazy on my last post????????
My name is Andreas and I try to get the best out of FCPX.
Andreas 🙂
Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools -
[Herb Sevush] “In PPro why would you want to make proxy files? (not being argumentative, just trying to understand.) What’s the advantage of Proxies if you can edit natively?”
It depends on your workflow. For instance, I just got off a shoot were we shot 4kHD Epic R3Ds and Alexa ProRes 444 LogC.
This footage will need to live a few different computers, there’s a desktop machine were it will finish and a few laptops. Most of the initial cuts are done here in house, then at some point we will take a laptop over to the clients (as it’s much easier for them for us to go over there) and then fine tune the final edits before coming back here for finish and output for broadcast. Having a lightweight Proxy workflow makes this doable. The Alexa footage can pretty much be handled natively on a laptop, even with a LogC to video filter on all the footage. The red Footage has been transcoded to ProResLT. If we wanted to move even faster, I would bake a 709 LUT in to the Alexa clips, but things seem to be OK with the 444 material.
If FCPX can garner enough native container support, it would be easy to make proxies, then simply reconnect to the high res footage once the edit comes back to the studio.
Also, when making review copies and usually in an offline edit in general, using lower resolution proxies that are native to the NLE means that process goes much faster as you don’t have to transcode on export (like you do in PPro). Again, I am talking about 444 and Epic footage here, not Avc-Intra or AVCHD/DSLR. There are circumstances were working natively all the time isn’t necessarily an advantage. Highly compressed H264 footage is extremely processor intensive. Adobe Media Encoder is pretty cool though, and seems to crunch through footage pretty well on desktops. When working remotely on lower powered laptops, things tend to slow down.
Having a Proxy workflow gives us a bunch of flexibility for the offline stages, of course, not everyone needs that.
Jeremy
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[Oliver Peters] “Correct. As yet, Avid doesn’t have background functions. But, neither does FCP X. Its “background” functions are really “idle time” functions.”
Still, it happens when I’m not thinking about it, and it allows me to continue working while FCPX takes advantage of me stepping away for a second. I personally, like the way it works, although I do turn off timeline rendering. The transcoding and proxy creation part of it is helpful to me, though.
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[Oliver Peters] “Sure, you’ve got as point. I think it’s silly in both directions, whether coming from customers (pro and con) or whether it’s coming from internal marketing spin (aka “the reality distortion field”).
“There aren’t that many Corps. that get away with “you’re holding it wrong,” and have the faithful respond with, “oh, pardon me.”
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Gotcha, thanks. All my work is still HD, haven’t used Red or Alexa yet, so that didn’t occur to me.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Chris Harlan] “There aren’t that many Corps. that get away with “you’re holding it wrong,” and have the faithful respond with, “oh, pardon me.””
True, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with a company defending its product designs or points-of-view. And “antenna-gate” really isn’t a great example (though it provides great fodder for levity), because Apple got plenty of push-back. They offered a remedy and subsequently altered the design.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
“What is weird is that After Effects has a proxy generator.”
Well, maybe it’s not so strange… considering that AE isn’t designed to work in real time…
Shawn
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[Chris Harlan] “FCP X? Only a little at this point, and just out of curiosity. I just can’t justify the time until someone makes a good argument about how it will fit successfully into my work flow.”
Completely understandable.
[Chris Harlan] “Not PPro. But I’ve been a paid editor on almost all other NLEs. Some still exist. Some do not.”
But have you taken a look around recently or has it been all FCP7 all the time? Just wondering, not judging. I work with FCP7 most of the time, too. FCPX is still in testing for us at this point, but I do try and kick the tires every day if I can. I just added PPro to the list as well, alas there’s only so much time in the day!
[Chris Harlan] “One thing I should say is that I do use long developed editorial practices and procedures–for instance, turning bugs or certain filters off while editing, or leaving items I’m not working on un-rendered–but from what I’m reading in the the Techniques forum, background rendering and gfx creep seem to be adding their own bug-a-boos to FCP X.”
Yes, but it’s much much better than FCP7. FCP7 without effects/text is fine, once you start adding even the little effects, things get much slower. FCPX offers much more real time support, and I might get some flak for this, but sometimes it feels like sketching. Also, green screen work is pretty damn sweet in FCPX, even if it’s just for an offline. Doing this in FCP7 is a chore. Straight editing in FCP7 with ProRes files is fine, though.
[Chris Harlan] “If I’m working on a trailer with a heavy deadline, I can cut from locked picture off of an Avid dump on DVCproHD, and than easily replace it with final picture using almost every other existing NLE, except FCP X. “
As I said, it falls flat on it’s face for interchange. That’s not what I mean when I say feature for feature. FCPX as of right now, is a bit of an island. So, feature for feature (and removing the huge duty of interchange) I am talking about import, organize, edit, fx, text, audio and color, all finishing right in the application. I understand that conform to another master file like we have talked about with your workflow doesn’t work with FCPX at this time. I am talking about starting from scratch with camera raw and building a story, using those files to finish. This is something I can get closer to doing in X than I can with FCP7.
[Chris Harlan] “The very fact that it lacks tracks, bins to organize, no way to have multiple sequences open make it much, much slower for many people. “
Well, it certainly works differently. It does take some getting used to, no question. There are ways to do everything you mentioned here, but there are no bins or tabbed sequences, yet there are functions to mimic those very things. I am not saying it’s perfect or works the same, but you can’t expect FCPX to work like FCP7 because it doesn’t. I can understand if people don’t want to get used to that fact. It’s a big point of contention, and some people like the new UI, some don’t.
In my younger days, people used to say that M100 works “the way I think” when compared to FCP the younger (version 2 and 3). Well, in certain ways, FCPX does this for me, especially in the organizational phase. Of course, it won’t work for everyone that way, and Philip Hodgetts says that X is not for everyone either.
[Chris Harlan] “Not as often as I like, because I seem to have become niched and highly specialized, which has its rewards but also its distinct drawbacks. I’ve got a documentary I’m working on right now–right now being a relative term, in that it is a long process–about NC, Andrew, and Jaimie Wyeth. I also start occasional film promos from dailies or dumps of dailies.
Of course scratch can mean something else, as well:
My current promo project takes up a little under 3 TB in source, not including access to my SFX library (made up of four other full libraries). I expect this to get a bit larger, though not by much–maybe another TB at most. There are only about 400-500 source files in the project–not including SFX–so the number is small, but 40-50 of those files are 42+ Min long, and need to be prepped by removing unnecessary audio channels and then converted into multiple selects timelines that act as bins. So, what I lose in sheer number, I make up for in time and attention.
So, the answer is yes in both respects.
Again, Jeremy, I do not doubt that FCP X has its advantages. I don’t doubt that there are many people for whom it is the best choice. I only take exception because PH seemed to be arguing that FCP X was a better solution for the world I work in, and–to me–that is clearly not the case.”
Absolutely. Thanks for that. I think Ph is offering X has certain strengths to help speed up certain workflows, even though it’s not quite there yet.
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[Oliver Peters] “Chris Harlan] “There aren’t that many Corps. that get away with “you’re holding it wrong,” and have the faithful respond with, “oh, pardon me.””
True, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with a company defending its product designs or points-of-view. And “antenna-gate” really isn’t a great example (though it provides great fodder for levity), because Apple got plenty of push-back. They offered a remedy and subsequently altered the design.”
All true. I just can’t resist now and then. Frankly, I didn’t think anything of it until I read the bio (I still had my 3GS) So it is still a bit fresh for me.
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