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Re: After a year has perception of FCPX changed?
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[Liam Hall] “The timeline isn’t designed with complex editing in mind. The file structure and media management aren’t designed with a busy editor or facility in mind. And the trackless timeline, with its roles/stems, connected clips and storylines… …well, that’s all simply mindless…
Among other things, I find “Events” and “Projects” ill-conceived, and whilst I know there are workarounds, I’m not convinced FCPX is designed with editing in mind.”
Interesting opinion, many of us will disagree with you.
Steve Connor
“Sometimes it’s fun to poke an angry bear with a stickl”
Adrenalin Television -
[Liam Hall] “The timeline isn’t designed with complex editing in mind. The file structure and media management aren’t designed with a busy editor or facility in mind. And the trackless timeline, with its roles/stems, connected clips and storylines… …well, that’s all simply mindless…
Among other things, I find “Events” and “Projects” ill-conceived, and whilst I know there are workarounds, I’m not convinced FCPX is designed with editing in mind. I’m sure FCPX looked good on Randy’s powerpoint presentation though.”
I think this is all relative. I have a much different view of this. What we see today does not represent a “final” product. It represents the beginnings of an infrastructure. It still needs work, sure, but for an out of the box sharing solution, it’s a very decent start, and I wouldn’t say it is ill conceived.
First,let me say that I can understand your frustration. X is a totally different beast when it comes to media management and sharing. I am not saying you don’t understand it, I’m not discounting your expertise and knowledge, but speaking as someone who is trying to figure this out, I will say it’s really different. Certainly different than fcp7, but different from the other big NLEs as well. It most closely rivals Avid’s and media100’s finder level bin/timeline system, but yet it’s different than those as well.
If you have a SAN, especially an XSAN system, the true “facility” level that’s built right on to X makes a whole lot of sense. I understand that working with local drives and multiple machines isn’t ideal at this point, but if you are a SAN facility, the media management support in X, I find, to be a pretty good start. In my opinion, there was some thought put in to how to share media, Project, Events between many users, relatively easily. The events and projects are separate, and for good reason. The method employed in how X can reference media into many Events means that people can have their own Events, but reference the same media without doubling/tripling media. There’s also the Merge Events and other media management commands (such as consolidate). Instead of sending an XML of a bin, timeline, or sending a project with those things as one would in 7, you simply send the Event or Project file itself, and since X has what some might see as a “rigid” file structure, it actually works to an advantage. Quit fcpx, place an event/project in the proper place, relaunch and everything is connected. I imagine at some point we might get an “import Project” dialogue so that you won’t have to shut down X to refresh the libraries, and the file system will be taken care of automatically (similar to how the iMovie project import works today).
Sure, some more work is needed, such a being able to trim if you need to dupe media for whatever reason, more robust XML support so that metadata can be passed around outside of fcpx and reimported if need be, and Project only timeline conforms.
Custom filters are also a bit of a kludge at this point, but Andreas Kiel has been working on system that helps to mitigate some of that: https://www.spherico.de/filmtools/MTT/index.html
So while it’s not perfect, the starting infrastructure is actually pretty interesting, even if all the pieces aren’t quite there. It is obvious that Apple has put thought and time in to this, and is thinking of “facility” level sharing. The “SAN Locations” (which serve as an Event/Project check in/check out system of sorts) that are built in to X work pretty well. I think that there’s not a lot of people that have SAN’s on this forum, and that’s understandable, but if you do, I encourage you to take a good look at it. In my mind, it’s a rather decent and forward looking start of a shared file system built right in to the NLE, even if it doesn’t appear that way at first.
I also think that thunderbolt will make having smaller SAN based systems cheaper and easier than ever, but that is just more speculation.
I’m not saying this system will work for everyone, or even that you will like it, but in my opinion, there’s some real thought put in to how this system will work, and it will take sometime for it to get there.
Jeremy
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well, I have to admit after reading all the posts in this and the original thread, I am more willing to give it a go. I will probably purchase a copy after the next update.
I’m still not convinced I can make the magnetic timeline work in my particular workflow, but I guess it will give it a shot (even though the thought of the time I will have to invest to get competent kind of depresses me).
Overall, I still think the general perception (outside of the COW forum) is still pretty negative concerning FCPX. Though Apple has made strides to fix many of the complaints about the original release, I don’t think the success some editors are having is getting out there into the collective conscious of the movie world. I think the general perception is still as if it were in the 10.0 version.
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[Steve Connor] “Interesting opinion, many of us will disagree with you.”
Yes, and many will agree with me.
There’s still much I do like about X and I’ll continue to use it for quick, simple edits. I’d like to know how some of you cope with the disappearing in and out marks? That drives me mad…
Liam Hall
Director/DoP/Editor
http://www.liamhall.net -
[Liam Hall] “Yes, and many will agree with me.
There’s still much I do like about X and I’ll continue to use it for quick, simple edits. I’d like to know how some of you cope with the disappearing in and out marks? That drives me mad…
“Shhhhh! you’ll start the PIOP debate all over again!
I now use the “F” key and it bothers me much less than it used to
Steve Connor
“Sometimes it’s fun to poke an angry bear with a stickl”
Adrenalin Television -
[olof ekbergh] ” We are really seeing the democratization of video production, and I am all for it.”
People who use this buzz-phrase must have a particularly perverted sense of “democracy”.
Video production has always been open to anyone who could afford it, there is no monarchy or dictatorship involved — its just cheaper now and so is the product.Maybe its just a semantic distinction, but the term “popularized” might be more accurate.
Like its “popular” to discuss advanced quantum mechanics and cosmology at parties without any qualifications or understanding of the field.
jPo
You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?
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[Liam Hall] “The timeline isn’t designed with complex editing in mind.”
Well, a Steenbeck wasn’t actually designed with “complex editing in mind” but that didn’t stop legions of editors from cutting very complex projects on it. So i guess I’m just clueless about what you mean by “complex.” Probably just me.
[Liam Hall] “The file structure and media management aren’t designed with a busy editor or facility in mind.”
Now this just baffles me. How is elevating a relational database to near parity with the editing interface an example of “aren’t designed with the busy editor or facility in mind?” It seems me that X in time is likely to outstrip most current editorial platforms in media management simply because they designed the database and editorial functions to function totally in tandem. But we must just see this very differently as well.
[Liam Hall] “And the trackless timeline, with its roles/stems, connected clips and storylines… …well, that’s all simply mindless…”
To me, it’s almost completely “mindful.” It appears to me that massive amounts of careful though and consideration went into the construction of the X interface. Primary evidence of that is that it would have been MASSIVELY easier just to do “tweaked” versions of the same workflow approaches that every other software package had done before.
The changes in X might not resonate for you – and that’s all well and good – but to apply a word like mindless is to argue that they are NOT changes – just accidents. And like it or not, the change in X is far from “accidental” – the definitional opposite of “mindless” no?
[Liam Hall] “Among other things, I find “Events” and “Projects” ill-conceived, and whilst I know there are workarounds, I’m not convinced FCPX is designed with editing in mind.”
Interesting. Can’t recall who it was and whether or not it was here, but I was reading something yesterday from someone who was commenting about how he didn’t like Events or Projects at first either – but as his work and database got more complex, he appeared to reconsider that initial opinion. IIRC, in the face of increasing workflow complexity – those concepts started to make a whole lot more sense than that did to him when he viewed every “project” as it was in Legacy editors – separate, discrete, “cut off” constructs rather than entries in a “stream” of accessible projects – one of the foundational thinking changes I think that X has made. After all, if you’re still working “one project at a time” – then the entire Event Library makes little sense. OTOH, if you see your work as a series of discrete events – shoots, sound recordings, photo creations, downloads, whatever, that are all brought together into an initial key wording, coloring, and perfecting space (the event browser) – and you’d like access to all of not only that projects assets but ALL your projects assets to be accessible, then the Event idea starts to make huge amounts of sense.
[Liam Hall] “I’m sure FCPX looked good on Randy’s powerpoint presentation though.”
Well, you had me seriously engaged up to this.
This is just, IMO, undeserved snarkiness. It implies that X is some kind of empty”all sizzle and no steak” tool and implies that everyone here who’ve spent the past year exploring it are all just clueless fools – and that our year of discussion is based on us being too dense to understand how clever Mr. Ubillos snuck one over on us rubes.
The other view, of course, is that the guy responsible for empowering more professional editors than any other single software designer on the planet, just felt that there might be better long-term ways to assemble media in the modern era – and that those might be worth codifying into a new type of editing tool.
Perhaps you are correct, and all of us who find editing in X to be faster, more flexible, and more interesting than we felt editing was after our years editing in Legacy are just delusional.
But I suppose I’m content in my delusions. And far too polite to publicly say anything your comment above about whoever wrote the current version of Premier or AVID or Vegas – since those folks are all likely worlds smarter about NLE design than I am.
Thanks for expounding on your views, anyway. I personally see them as being largely based on “feelings” rather than “facts” so I remain far from convinced the the arguments – but I certainly appreciate your taking the time to try to explain your point of view.
Thanks.
“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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[Clint Wardlow] “I’m still not convinced I can make the magnetic timeline work in my particular workflow, but I guess it will give it a shot (even though the thought of the time I will have to invest to get competent kind of depresses me).”
Clint, the big secret is that the “magnetic timeline” is actually pretty trivial to wrap your reflexes around. Bite the bullet and give it two weeks. The magnetism will become immaterial faster than you can imagine. It’s absolutely a red herring. If you can edit without magnetism, you can edit with it. It’s no more complicated than driving with a clutch or an automatic car. You get conditioned to expecting the behavior or each quite rapidly.
The real challenge in X is not actually learning how to do basic editing on it. I can teach anyone new to editing how to do that in a couple of days – for really experienced editors who have extensive “muscle memory” from other NLE approaches to overcome it might take a few weeks or even months to re-program your reactions – particularly if you have to work the old muscles concurrently with building the new ones – that can be a challenge for editors who cant’t take the time to “deprogram” and “reprogram” their thinking due to mission critical on-going work.
But trust me, learning basic editing in X is actually extremely straightforward.
It’s taking the time to learn the truly new stuff, the relationships of metadata flow, and where the hundreds of hidden drawers that contain useful tools are in X that takes months and months to explore.
FWIW.
“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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[Joseph Owens] “People who use this buzz-phrase must have a particularly perverted sense of “democracy”.”
It’s just a meme.
In the internet era, a meme is a a useful landing on the staircase roughly adjacent to the emoticon and the acronym to save bandwidth.
After all, the guy didn’t just use a small “d” – he “verbified” it properly as “democratization” which we all know in 21st century videospeak is supposed to call to mind images of teenagers stealing our livelihoods with their “HD” cel phone cameras.
The proper response isn’t to call into question the term itself – but rather to form a mental image of a mall-rat, or skatepark kid with a half-busted go-pro getting hired to shoot the next project YOU wanted to land – in exchange for a $30 trade credit at GameStop.
(muttered: “damn kids”)
; )
“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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[Bill Davis] “But trust me, learning basic editing in X is actually extremely straightforward.”
It’s not the basic stuff that worries me. It is the complex layers of image and audio that I use so often, that worries me.
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