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Olympics Editing (not FCP-X)
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “steve baby, I barely have a workflow, or an editors union card. I was supposed to be a graphic designer of some description.”
and I’m an Editor who ends up doing graphic design, I think it might work better your way round!
Steve Connor
“The ripple command is just a workaround for not having a magnetic timelinel”
Adrenalin Television -
[Bill Davis] “I’m going to get yelled at, but so be it.”
No yelling Bill, just a few points.
[Bill Davis] “In Legacy, the only place you can “skim” stuff is in a timeline.”
And in the viewer window if you grab the CTI, which means you can take any clip in the browser, double click it into the viewer and skim away, setting in and out points and markers to your hearts content. Admittedly, skimming is easier than grabbing the CTI, but not much easier.
[Bill Davis] “So you have to build a new project and populate it’s timeline as step one. . So you do. Then you “skim” and mark in’s and outs or make your actual cuts – however you like.
THEN when you’re ready to edit that stuff, you have to make any cuts you didn’t at first, and delete the clips you don’t want. This leaves a timeline with HOLES. So you have to go back and delete the gaps. “That’s one way. How about this. You populate the master timeline – 5 seconds. You copy the timeline – 5 seconds. Now in this second timeline you set your first in-point at the beginning and skim along till you find something you like. Now set your outpoint and ripple delete, getting rid of what you don’t want. Keep skimming till you get to the end of the clip you like, set your next in point and continue. No holes, no gaps, by the time you have skimmed and marked your selects the rough cut is there and ready to go. Now I would still love to have Aindreas’s “delete all gaps command” which would allow either way of working, but this works pretty well for me.
[Bill Davis] “In X you skim in the Event Browser. You don’t need to “Cut” anything at all. You just mark in’s and outs the same as X, (or you can use the Range tool to select them in a single stroke – and tag them. You can do this by omission (mark rejected) or by inclusion (mark Favorite) as you like.
Then when you show favorites (if you’ve marked that) you just drag those clips to a new timeline and you’re done. You’ve pre-edited your selects without every having to razor blade or “delete” anything.
It removes an entire necessary step – gap selection and deletion.”
I don’t see the difference between marking an in-and-out or cutting an in-and-out or selecting a range – the time consuming part is watching the material and deciding where the beginning and end of useful info is. As I’ve already demonstrated you can avoid gap deletion in Legend if you want to. Furthermore I personally like to have the material laid out consecutively left to right, as in a timeline – probably habit from my old days cutting film – I find the idea of searching and jumping between picons in a browser very disjointed. But that’s just personal preference.
[Bill Davis] “Finally, (and IMO, this is a big deal) the next time you go to USE those selects, all your prior decisions are there waiting for you. So you don’t have to close whatever you’re doing and open your old project and “skim through” any junk to find the decisions you’ve already made. You’ve ALREADY done that and X has saved all those decisions and is making them available to you for other projects whenever you need them.”
This is a good point although it has nothing whatever to do with skimming. It can be a strength of X that you have all your material loaded at one time. Those same decisions are saved in Legend, or Avid or any other NLE but you have to open the project they were cut in. Of course this strength doesn’t help if you have multiple competing clients, where you are using one of the many techniques discussed here of hiding assets when you don’t want Coke to see that Pepsi was there yesterday. So if you don’t have multiple competing clients and you have figured out a proper labeling methodology to know where all your pertinent data is I agree this is very valuable. It is also totally off subject, which was Steve Connor’s statement that “The skimmer is simply the fastest way to get through lots of footage on any NLE that exists today.”
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/40252
The subject was skimming specifically, not X as a asset manager. On that subject I have nothing to say, having no experience to go on. Nowadays I only intrude when people make unsubstantiated grandiose claims that can’t be backed up.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Chris Harlan] “How well does it work on large files? I tried to play with it on a 45 min. clip back when it first came out, and it seemed real mousey, like I was speeding through to much at a little flick of the wrist. Was this just me? Or is it harder to use on very long clips?”
Are you talking about skimming in the browser now?
With FCP7, dragging the playhead through the viewer locks the speed to the horizontal width of the viewer. You can only adjust this scale by adjusting the size of the viewer itself.
With FCPX, skimming speed is locked to the width of the the clip in the browser, and the timescale of the clips as filmstrips is adjustable. I think you have more control here with FCPX than with FCP7.
It may not make up for FCPX’s other UI sins (like the current lack of a viewer or truly customizable interface), but the skimmer itself is a big improvement for shuttling through footage over FCP7.
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 -
[Herb Sevush] “Furthermore I personally like to have the material laid out consecutively left to right, as in a timeline – probably habit from my old days cutting film – I find the idea of searching and jumping between picons in a browser very disjointed. But that’s just personal preference.”
You are not locked to viewing clips as picons. Have you seen the browser’s filmstrip view? It’s both spatial and visual.
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 -
[Chris Harlan] “How well does it work on large files? I tried to play with it on a 45 min. clip back when it first came out, and it seemed real mousey, like I was speeding through to much at a little flick of the wrist. Was this just me? Or is it harder to use on very long clips?”
You can adjust the zoom level in filmstrip view. It’s just like any other NLE in that regard. The length of the clip effects the throw of your mouse in the same amount of screen real estate. A 45 minute clip will have a lot more frames to cover than a 30 second clip when you have
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that much space for both of them.
Command Plus and Minus will adjust the zoom level in the Event Browser as well as the timeline, or use the zoom tool “z” in the timeline, like the days of yore.
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[Walter Soyka] “Have you seen the browser’s filmstrip view? It’s both spatial and visual.”
when you skim to the end of clip 1 does it automatically take you to clip 2?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] ” Furthermore I personally like to have the material laid out consecutively left to right, as in a timeline – probably habit from my old days cutting film …”
Herb,
One of my (many) realizations over the past year in this forum has been realizing the difference between what I call “sequence-based” editing practice versus what I call call “clip-based” editing practice.
Those names may not be the best way of delineating them, but I think you understand what I mean.
I am very much a sequence-based editor and FCPX looks to me designed around clip-based editing. (Not to say it can’t be used as a sequence-based editor, just that it was designed around a different practice.)
Franz.
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[Herb Sevush] “when you skim to the end of clip 1 does it automatically take you to clip 2?”
If you turn off grouping in the browser, yes; the filmstrips will be placed back to back and you can skim across them as if they were a single unit. They will still be separate clips and you can’t define a range across them.
However, you could select multiple clips, compound them (all in the browser alone), and then skim and edit from it as a literal single clip (while retaining the ability to open and edit the compound’s timeline).
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 -
[Herb Sevush] “which was Steve Connor’s statement that “The skimmer is simply the fastest way to get through lots of footage on any NLE that exists today.”
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/40252
The subject was skimming specifically, not X as a asset manager. On that subject I have nothing to say, having no experience to go on. Nowadays I only intrude when people make unsubstantiated grandiose claims that can’t be backed up.”
The claim is based on my 20 years of experience in editing as well as my year of actually editing on FCPX.
Steve Connor
“The ripple command is just a workaround for not having a magnetic timelinel”
Adrenalin Television -
[Franz Bieberkopf] “I am very much a sequence-based editor and FCPX looks to me designed around clip-based editing. (Not to say it can’t be used as a sequence-based editor, just that it was designed around a different practice.)”
Yes, it’s designed differently. Isn’t that what the backlash is about?
Call it what you want, but it’s semantics. A sequence is a container of a bunch of clips in a specified order. When you nest a sequence in a sequence it becomes a clip, so can’t we agree that a rose it still a rose by any other name?
I am a “sequence based” editor in FCP7 because you almost have to be. There’s really no way to sort a mass of selects with the FCP7 bin structure, so really I have no other choice but to lay it all out in a sequence if I want to see things put together rather than view them clip by clip in the viewer by double clicking each clip in succession.
That’s not the case in FCPX, but you do have to take some time and use FCPX’s tools and not sit there wondering why it doesn’t work like FCP7’s bin structure.
Also, when you start to combine Event side Compounds with the Project below, you get some very cool ways to view material in context of the greater edit. Then if you start to really use favorites, and then sort the event by favorites, you have a skimmable run down of all of your selects, without a sequence, but of course, you could open any clip at any time in it’s own sequence is that’s what makes the most sense to you. At any time, you can get a birds eye view of every single piece of media in your Event without having to double click and view anything. Simply single click on the Event, sort by all clips, and there they all are, skimmable from front to back. Also, you can toggle the granularity with the keyword collections you create, or smart collections you create, or sorting by different categories.
You simply cannot do this in FCP7 without stringing everything out in a sequence and then double clicking that sequence or moving back to that tab, then finding what you want, copy, move back to the other tab, paste, rinse repeat.
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