No audio only clips above primary.

[Bill Davis]

Sorry, a big night as you can imagine. I’m getting to bed super late.

About losing audio “above the line”, I feel exactly the same as when I lost my beloved Project Library in the transition to 1.2. Once again, my small personal loss nets the editing world a much bigger gain. Oh well. I can live with that.

Obviously, my traditionally schooled thinking that tracks should whenever possible be grouped by functions (1-4 dialog, 5-8 music, etc, etc) – often left me with with video and audio clips separated by way too many tracks. Audio with video adjacent was fun while it lasted, but now, with the lanes able to slide around in groups with Roles metadata, I can ALWAYS have the audio groups I’m working on right below the baseline, so I get a good bit of what I wanted, along with lots of significant new capabilities that will be fun to explore.

BTW, we all got a chance to go “hands on” with 10.3 running on shiny new Touchbar MacBook Pros during our Apple visit! (took this photo grab from a 360VR snap after my “turn” driving X – forgive the polar distortion making things in the center of the shot look unnaturally small – I should have used my iPhone but had my little Theta S in my shirt pocket so I just used that.)

Anyway, 10.3 on the MacBook Pro with Touchbar positively FLEW. Really. It was scary responsive.

The modal “TouchBar” was a real wow. You can honestly “see” the mini-storyline with enough detail to swipe or tap anywhere – so moving around even the largest project just got insanely faster and more intuitive. No lag at all. Just tap where you want to go – and you’re there. It’s small (you can barely see the Touchbar in the photo, but it’s there, trust me. Even after it lights up it’s super flat and smooth and not “glare-y” at all – so it’s not like a night light that distracts you from the main screen – It’s got multiple modes, so you glance at it to see what mode it’s in, then watch the screen for the effect it’s having. Just like most of us no longer look at our keyboards, I think It’s going to “disappear” during editing really fast and just become very intuitive. I”m excited to learn what editing is like with it. Think of it kinda like a long, thin trackpad above that matches well with the (now much bigger) one below. I think it’s going to make a HUGE difference as editors get used to it, particularly for things like adjusting colors and sound values in real time.

BTW, those dual “deep color” monitors are BEAUTIFUL. And it shocked me that a LAPTOP’s processors could generate all those 4k ProRes frames to toss around with truly imperceptible lag anywhere on both displays.

It “feels” like a Ferrari for editing. At least as configured at the demo. No knowing if things will feel that perfect when real world systems ship – but the “touch” of the machine in the picture was a big WOW.

That’s my quick “hands on” report. Off to sleep now.

[James Ewart]

I really liked occasionally putting a sound effect such as doorbell ring/knock at door next to those cutaways.

Guess I can still do i with a compound clip and perhaps that’s better manners anyway.

I found lot of FCP Legacy users were not that disciplined with timelines sometimes (myself included in the early days) so allowing people to be even more chaotic when the Magnetic Timeline is otherwise so helpful for keeping a nice tidy timeline seemed to be encouraging bad practice?