Olympics Editing (not FCP-X)

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
It may have sounded like feature editing but I only ever edited documentaries for BBC TV etc, From 1965- to the last film project in 1988. I will stand or fall by the BBC’s reputation 😉

I tend to regard it as ‘wrong’ in FCP Legacy if you break tidy Media Management, and multiple clip instance in the browser risks breaking subsequent MM – and definitely breaks it if you drag clip instances between projects, as they become orphans. Extra care is needed to avoid problems down the line.

Still I made good money clearing up other people’s FCP project spaghetti when it wouldn’t export LOL. I don;t remember their commissioning producers being very happy with their workflow ‘preference’….

[Herb Sevush]

[Paul Dickin] “It may have sounded like feature editing but I only ever edited documentaries for BBC TV etc, From 1965- to the last film project in 1988. I will stand or fall by the BBC’s reputation ;-)”

Oh, well, you cut for the BBC, geez if I had only known, I guess I should be honored, cause you know over here in NYC we didn’t know anything and wow to talk to someone who actually knows how to use rewinds and sync blocks and everything …

I cut film from ’74 to around ’80 and by then, other than spots, most everything was video post, even the stuff being shot on film. There are as many good ways to work as there are good editors, if you like to work in bins then more power to you.

I have never had an instance where multiple copies of a clip in a browser caused me any trouble. Then again I don’t ever use the FCP Media Mangler because I think it’s sh*t and I have enough storage that I don’t need to.

I have no idea why you brought up the subject of dragging a clip between projects since it has nothing to do with using bins or timelines to organize and view your media, but if it’s an independent sub-clip you are right it can cause it to become orphaned – there are times when I’ve done it expressly for that purpose. On the other hand, if you know what your doing, you can drag timelines and/or bins between projects as much as you want without causing problems.

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

[Aindreas Gallagher]

me too, this be the way I go at it – short form easy peasy stuff in my case, but thats how I do it.

I think I find a task modality in it that I like. I enter that sequence and whack down all the rushes for a set reason, and i treat it differently than I would a master edit sequence. Its a particular place – I’ll often copy and paste repeats of the final music track under all the rushes to get a feel for how lift sections play with the track – its an assembly area.

The ability to skim within the horizontally constrained UI space of the event browser (with filmstrip cascading down vertically) I find fundamentally less satisfying. the mental operation is different, I don’t find I’m in the right place. the lozenge version up top in list view would have been completely unusable with the long record slugs of activity I was dealing with.

more than anything else I don’t have the ability to keyboard moment to moment zoom in, and by increments, investigate the shot moment, quickly playing little loop repeats on a section to see whats what.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Aindreas Gallagher]

I’m thinking a surprisingly long time.

I found out yesterday that Turner in London turned over its FCP suites to PPRO 6 apparently – or at least the ones on EMEA stuff – bar that not a single post house or shop has budged yet that I know of, including stuff like UNIT. I just got to quiz a guy way more informed than me. there are simply an insane number of FCP editors in london. And facilities with investments in it.

I still think its going to be tippy toe to premiere, because avid has cost implications, and there is, so far, a weird halt where so many people are FCP, and so many facilities and design houses have the hardware and workflow based entirely around a file system management organised around FCP being transparent in the file system.

I think its the folder structure more than anything. footage element and project accessibility, numbered below client number code folder naming populates near all london that has based itself on FCP. any change to that amounts re-laying continental rail tracks for some organisations.

again premiere has the best shot at allowing the continuance of that client/spot architecture. FCP’s file source finder transparency got leveraged into an almost accounting level organisation for many places – including per project default folder structure that was copied and pasted before new project start. because FCP was finder naked – anyone could access the VO, the track, the graphics, the offline, the compressed output, the final master, simply by going to the folder that is always named the same, and always contains those elements. Avid will simply never work in all these scenarios because the internal bucket will never expose these assets for the assistant producer, or art director who needs to pull that track, or view that offline. I kind of think this point gets overlooked. the internal structure of FCP was a publicly available resource, within the finder, for multiple parties in a given organisation.

everyone always said that FCP was finder messy – but the source material transparency in the finder is a big thing in a well organised scenario.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[Paul Dickin] “viewing disparate clips in a timeline disassociates them from their binning and browser-column information “

stupid question – if you were instead attempting to hastily interrogate a large volume of footage, of similar character, with a horrible awareness that you were going to, no matter what, miss some critically good stuff, would you rather set about making a controlled selects reel environment, or would you instead rather skim through the film strips in the constrained real estate of the events browser in FCPX?

I find I like that the selects reel is a declared space, that runs the width of the monitor, that has a memory (in that I am creating spatial edits within surrounding footage, and I get to duplicate the sequence before I savage it down to my selects?)

I have, regrettably, no position on the editorial style within full blown narrative documentary, because I have done it, like, you know, twice. (although storyville, … said the doco director to me, did say they rather liked the 8 minute cut pitch for a documentary that never ever, ever, ever ever got commissioned. 😉

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Jeremy Garchow]

And the Legend of FCP Legend continues….

[Herb Sevush]

[Jeremy Garchow] “And the Legend of FCP Legend continues….”

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?

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

[Aindreas Gallagher]

no seriously jeremy – I do actually think a structured exposed finder backend for third parties outside the editor is a thing, if a hack – you guys probably have a default folder asset system right? if you were trucking FCP? It just comes up so often?

say when you want to check assets for a previous project or whatever – specifically within GFX renders, scripts, PSDs, audio tracks, clean plates that fcp sent, dated draft edits to get a notion, VO for the most recent, FC server didn’t even do some of this stuff as well I think.

maybe I’m stupid on this, but it was one of the things where FCP was an almost accidentally brilliant opposite of a hermetic editing system.
Its file system was the file system.

It’s not legend, but it’s certainly usable working practise?

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Jeremy Garchow]

Aye. The Boss.

[Herb Sevush] “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”

My archive of FCP7 projects surely feels like the truth.

[Bill Davis]

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

This sentence is ludicrous as written.
“

How would you know?

Your own post immediately above had this line…

“I’m the most neutral observer you can find. I’ve never tried X and openly admit I have no working knowledge of it.”

So doesn’t that make you singularly unqualified to argue the point since you don’t have the actual experience to compare them?

I do. I have. And I stand by my contention. Anyone here is welcome to go down the same road I did. Take the time to learn X properly. Or simply ask the folks here who have.

There are more and more every day. Are you hearing “Heck, I took six months working with it regularly until I know how the darn thing really works – and in the end decided it was crap?”

But funny how I haven’t heard that chorus of voices yet. Even tho there are probably a couple of million editors bashing around in X day by day.

What you’re hearing is that even those for whom it’s workflow isn’t a perfect match, they’re using it when they can because they can see it’s value for a lot of tasks.

By your standard we should have heard from a litany of pros of all stripes who put it through serious paces and have come back to say that the whole experience was just a big waste of time.

But that’s kinda NOT what’s happening, is it? The more time people spend learning it, the more positive they seem to be about using it.

Imagine that…

“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