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Range-based keywording: unique to FCP X?
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[Walter Soyka] “I disagree. FCP was not a DAM.”
Totally
[Walter Soyka] “With respect to its DAM, FCPX’s current design simply doesn’t scale. That’s not forward-thinking design. It’s either bad design — or it’s completely immature.”
It’s not a data asset manager, nor will it be.
Will it have aspects of it? Yes, but in my opinion, of you want an asset manager, get one.
[Walter Soyka] “I have 24 TB of storage online, and it’s not nearly to hold all my work.”
Totally, agree. We have 23-ish TB online right now, and 70+(!) LTO4 tapes for archive. There’s no way this will all be online, ever, unless Moore’s law start applying to storage.
[Walter Soyka] “Jeremy seems to have a lot of confidence that future updates to FCPXML will allow third parties to deal with this. “
The interesting thing about ALL of this is that FCP7 was a very capable metadata storage system. XML is an easily searchable text document and FCP7XML allowed the passing of metadata pretty easily. It needed some work, and it wasn’t perfect, but it was there. What FCPX has done is shown is that metadata can be very useful if you can give the proper amount of usability to it. When it’s hard to use, no one uses it (well, I did in FCP7, but that’s me). When it’s easy to use, people will use it, and then they will come up with all new and exciting ways to implement it.
The ironic thing about X is that the backbone of FCPX metadata is there. Just have a look at the extensive list that FCPX can store. Right now, you can’t get it OUT of there as the XML doesn’t carry most of that information. There’s no reason that Apple would build this list and functionality if it wasn’t gong to be useful someday, especially with FCPX’s very present and easy text search/sort abilities and the numerous ways to use this metadata to rename/resrot your footage with a few clicks. Go in to the inspector, find the info tab, see the Drop down at the bottom if the window that says Basic View, then click on “edit metadata view” and check out that list.
[Walter Soyka] “If metadata is going to be a true advantage for Apple and for FCPX in ongoing projects versus one-offs, they must really innovate that toolset.”
My feeling is that it’s innovated, we just haven’t seen the whole feature set. It’s still in the oven.
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[Michael Hancock] “So all projects have to be online all the time?”
Not exactly. There is a significant difference between Events and Projects.
Media show up as Events.
Projects show up as Projects.In 7, you would have to import the media into the project. That is not how X does it.
Describing it here is silly. Until you actually do it, it won’t make sense.
All I’m saying is sometimes I need to make a reel and the footage is on another drive somewhere else. I would like X to tell me where it is.
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Ah – I’m not up on my FCPX lingo. Thanks for the clarification. I’ve worked with the trial a bit (first release – not 10.0.3) but it was really buggy on my system so I stop playing with it. I guess I never got my head around how FCPX renamed projects and bins and sequences, et al.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
There’s only 2 FW800 on the client’s machine. I can only plug in two at a time. Right now we’re up to 7 drives. This guy, Byron, has been shooting since the 1940s; he’s 87 — WWII footage (not war footage, but on leave) from Bolex transferred to MiniDV. (I’m trying to talk him into transferring the 16mm to an HD format. This doesn’t even begin to discuss his stills collection: large format, large format 3d, and other amazing stuff. Next week I build his Web site, so I hope to share some of his stuff.
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[Michael Hancock] ” never got my head around how FCPX renamed projects and bins and sequences, et al.”
FYI: It ain’t painless. But now that I know it, it’s actually faster than 7. But that first project was a real PITA.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Yes, but in my opinion, of you want an asset manager, get one.”
Got a recommendation?
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That works with FCPX?
CatDV.
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[Richard Herd] “There’s only 2 FW800 on the client’s machine. I can only plug in two at a time. Right now we’re up to 7 drives. “
OK, I understand more about what you’re saying, but without a project file, this isn’t possible with any NLE.
Actually, you don’t need a DAM, you need a catalog system, which is much easier and much cheaper.
Have you thought about a more centralized storage raid? or why not daisy chain?
How much material over the 7 Drives?
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Actually, you don’t need a DAM, you need a catalog system, which is much easier and much cheaper.”
Sorry, check NeoFinder as an example.
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[Michael Hancock] “Then it’s poor design. Avid media is handled by a database too, and it can generate detailed reports of your sequence and bins showing you where that footage lives. What’s the point of having a database with all of this information being tracked by the software if it’s being held hostage by that same software? This is exactly what these databases are good for – tracking assets and giving that information to the editor.”
I understand that this is how you see it. I see it differently. I use X nearly every day for all my editing. It’s capabilities have made me feel like I’m using a much better editing tool than I’ve had during my last 10 years as an FCP-Legacy editor.
I’ve never edited with Avid. (or Premier or Vegas for that matter) so I’m not qualified to compare them. If such a comparison is important to you – then talk to others.
I’m qualified to talk about my personal experiences transitioning from Legacy to X for my full time work as a corporate video producer/editor who typically creates and edits 30-100 or so projects in an average year.
I know there are plenty of high volume shop or TV station editors who might edit that many projects in an average month – or even one massive project in a ear that has a budget that dwarfs my aggregate total by orders of magnitude.
That’s the point. I’m not arguing that X is the right tool for every editor in every situation. Just that it works amazingly well for editors like me.
YMMV.
[Michael Hancock] “So all projects have to be online all the time? Even for a one man shop that’s silly. When I was the only production guy at a small ad agency I would work on 20+ clients in a year, complete hundreds of commercials/videos, and generate terabytes of footage. Having to keep all of that online all the time because my software won’t share information with me isn’t good. This should be addressed by Apple. It’s a reasonable and logical feature request.”
You’re still just not “getting it” – and I’m not sure I can help you.
You keep trying to link what X is to your pre-conceptions. And that’s going to fail for you, IMO.
Not to beat a dead horse here, but NO, you aren’t “required” by X to have “all projects online all the time.” The number and arrangement of your projects is totally up to you. I regularly move mine onto backup drives. They stay out of sight until I connect those drives. Then all the projects on that drive are “INSTANTLY” connected to my workspace with all their clips linked.
This means I control the library by the simple process of choosing which drives to connect.
That plus one of the trivial disk cataloging programs like Disk Librarian, and give me all the tools I need to locate archived projects in seconds – and lets me determine what I want ti arrange on-line or off-line.
Again, you keep pushing about what the software does or doesn’t do. And all I’m telling you is that much of it is NOT like other NLE’s I’ve used.
What I see in it was confusing at first, but every week becomes more useful to me – and I better appreciate what it is and how it’s likely to keep growing over time for me. Even if Apple never adds a single new feature what’s in X right now has made my editing life easier with tools I don’t want to leave behind to go back to edit like I did in Legacy.
It may never work for you like it does for me.
Because our needs might never be the same.
But I’m one kind of very typical editor. One with clients that have on-going video needs with usually show to medium range production time frames (not instant every hour needs like a TV station – and not once a year massive needs like a movie producer) but somewhere in the great middle ground where most editors I know work. A large amount of my work is for on-going businesses where revision and deployment are important factors. Many of them are moving from physical media distribution to on-line access. They want to be able to publish now – revise later and republish the revised content quickly and efficiently. (they used to send out DVDs – now they just want to publish on-line for managed group access via the web.) They used to deploy to break room TV sets (in my corporate training work) but are moving rapidly toward deploying that content on smart devices like phones and iPads.
For those clients and for me FCP-X is an absolutely excellent tool.
It’s simplifying and breaking down the production and distribution cycle and making my content easier to produce, revise, manage and deploy.
And that’s how it’s earned my continuing use.
I’ve said here countless times that X is not the ONLY tool that does any of these things.
But it is, IMO, an absolutely excellent one among others that competes on it’s unique strengths exceedingly well.
Learn it or not. Use it or not. That’s up to you.
But it’s a mistake to judge it if you fundamentally mis-understand it. And your questions appear to me to be evidence that you don’t understand it very well at this point.
No more or less than 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
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