Olympics Editing (not FCP-X)

[Bill Davis]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “Bill,

Do you know of good comparisons between X, PPro, and Avid?

Did you do your comparison before deciding?

Franz.”

As to the first, no, I do not.

As I’ve long said here, I was perfectly happy with FCP Legacy so I used exclusively from April of 1999 when I bought it a week after it was introduced at NAB – until I switched to X. So my entire experience is comparing X to Legacy – which I used consistently on literally hundreds of paid videos over the past 10 years.

Others have to compare X to Avid or PPro – I simply have absolutely no expertise in them.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Herb Sevush] “That all I ask, if your going to make a claim, explain the reasoning.”

That is absolutely and totally reasonable.

I make the claim that X is a faster editing program than Legacy.

The reasoning is that I’ve personally edited hundreds of programs, long form, short form, commercials et al – many on deadline – in Legacy for more than 10 years. Now that I’ve learned X, I can get more work done much faster.

That’s it in a nutshell.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Walter Soyka]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “Well, there’ll always be people who think I’m wasting time editing … but the word that gets said to my face is “fast”.”

I’m not sure where our disconnect here is. I’m not saying that refining edits in real time is wasteful; on the contrary, it’s necessary.

I am asking you to imagine the waste if you could ONLY move in real time.

I say this to highlight the importance of non-realtime interaction — jog/shuttle or timeline scrub. FCPX has all of these, and it improves on them by adding the skimmer. With the skimmer, FCPX does everything that FCP7 did, but it does it with greater responsiveness and less penalty for context switch.

I concede that different editors doing different work may value this feature more or less highly, but are you arguing that non-realtime interaction is flat out worthless in some cases?

Let’s go back to the original scenario: you have 3 hours to make a highlight reel of 10 hours of footage. What’s your approach?

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

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “How can we legitimately talk about speed?”

We probably can’t because we can’t control for variables.

If the editor using both simply has more hours in – or better muscle memory for Editor X, he or she may be faster at one than the other all other things being absolutely equal.

So again, I think it comes down to listening to what a wide spectrum of voices say and trying to assess how it might or might not work for you.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Walter Soyka] “Let’s go back to the original scenario: you have 3 hours to make a highlight reel of 10 hours of footage. What’s your approach?”

Walter,

My consistent strategy here has been not to get hired to make highlight reels. I leave that for professionals. So far, I have found this the fastest approach.

[Walter Soyka] “I say this to highlight the importance of non-realtime interaction — jog/shuttle or timeline scrub. FCPX has all of these, and it improves on them by adding the skimmer. With the skimmer, FCPX does everything that FCP7 did, but it does it with greater responsiveness and less penalty for context switch.

I concede that different editors doing different work may value this feature more or less highly, but are you arguing that non-realtime interaction is flat out worthless in some cases?”

Understood. I’m not at all suggesting non-realtime interaction is useless. I don’t really think of it as “review” though (at least not most of the time). Again I would make a distinction between search-type interactions (which are a kind of review) and screening (which I suppose is also a kind of review) – though you can call them both “review” they are quite different.

Also I think most of the discussion has been about skimmer use outside the timeline.

You can count my vote for greater responsiveness.

Franz.

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “I make the claim that X is a faster editing program than Legacy.”

This sentence is ludicrous as written.

I assure you if X were faster than Legacy for my workflow I would use X. Not only is it not faster for me, it’s barely capable of functioning at all for me. I still do tape output, I occasionally still do tape input. All my material is organized by time code, I need to see source time code at every moment as I work – where’s my time code sync indicator to keep my multi-clips in sync once I move the various elements around.

I almost never use anything other than ProRes and therefore don’t care about X’s ability to handle mixed codecs. My material is organized and named as we shoot in such a manner that I know precisely whats on a clip just by looking at the clip name – I don’t need most of your data handling. I could go on and on about all the nifty things that X does that I don’t need, and about some of the basic stuff that X doesn’t do that I do need. How would X be faster for me? And if it’s not faster for me how can you claim that “X is a faster editing program than Legacy” without qualify that statement.

[Bill Davis] The reasoning is that I’ve personally edited hundreds of programs, long form, short form, commercials et al – many on deadline – in Legacy for more than 10 years. Now that I’ve learned X, I can get more work done much faster.

That’s it in a nutshell.”

That’s fine as far as it goes. For you X is faster than Legend. But that doesn’t mean it would be faster for another editor and their workflow. With me for instance the lack of a time code sync indicator would slow me down beyond belief. So objectively there’s no way one can make the statement “my NLE (put name here) is simply faster than any other NLE” without having tested out every possible workflow and we both know you have not bothered doing that.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[David Lawrence]

Interesting thread.

The skimmer is an awesome tool for quickly going thru tons of visuals. Great for finding B-roll.

For interviews, I don’t see any significant value. If you have hours of interview, at some point someone has to listen to them. Maybe up to doublespeed, but you still need to hear what’s being said. I don’t see how the skimmer helps with this in any meaningful way. A talking head looks like the same talking head no matter what’s being said. Sometimes there are no shortcuts to playback. Just saying.

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

[Steve Connor]

[David Lawrence] “For interviews, I don’t see any significant value. If you have hours of interview, at some point someone has to listen to them. Maybe up to doublespeed, but you still need to hear what’s being said. I don’t see how the skimmer helps with this in any meaningful way. A talking head looks like the same talking head no matter what’s being said. Sometimes there are no shortcuts to playback. Just saying.”

You are correct, in this context the skimmer is no advantage at all

Steve Connor
‘It’s just my opinion, with an occasional fact thrown in for good measure”

[David Lawrence]

[Steve Connor] “You are correct, in this context the skimmer is no advantage at all”

Thanks Steve 🙂

But for visuals, I totally agree it rocks. And yep, better than PrP6 hover scrub.

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

[Alban Egger]

[Herb Sevush] “I don’t ordinarily have to go searching thru tons of un-scripted shots so excuse my ignorance but what’s the big deal with skimming? Select all your shots and throw it on a timeline – takes 5 seconds. Save the timeline and duplicate it – takes 5 seconds”

Oh boy…you haven´t used it, have you?
To compare FCPX skimming to timeline dragging?

Now let´s assume that would be as fast and convenient, what if you need lots of In-Out that you want to use later and you might also want to “keyword / subclip” a bunch of the clips? You can mark parts of your timeline, but you can also set markers in a skimmable event. It is hard to explain, but is simply a very different way of working than anything FCP7 offers in any way.

If you don´t have unscripted stuff, you might not mind. But even then…maybe the director wants some B-Cut out of 14 takes……..