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RedShark News: Opinion: Which are the best NLEs right now?
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[John Rofrano] ” What’s a track? There are no “tracks” in real life.”
Actually John, it might be easier to ask where in life there aren’t tracks. I see tracks everywhere from roads to the worn paths across the paddock that the cows make to the watering trough. The way cutlery is organised in a drawer. The hanging space in a cupboard. The pattern of flower petals. The Xylem that deliver nutrients in a tree. The veins and arteries in a body. The passage of planets around the sun. The lattice patterns of crystals. The way we organise the written word on a page.
You are only able to make and read comments about a trackless NLE because of the way the word is organised in tracks. In some countries that can be done vertically or right to left but it is track based or you couldn’t read it.
Can you give examples of totally trackless systems?? When I look at the world I mostly see tracks.
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[Michael Gissing] “Can you give examples of totally trackless systems??”
A Painting. There is a brush, and paint, and a canvas, and an idea in your mind’s eye, and no tracks! I guess tracks on a painting would equate to painting within the lines which I despise.
A “real” Photo Montage. There are picture scattered everywhere on your desk or floor. You move them around, group them, mix them and match them, decide which ones you like and which ones you don’t. In the end you arrange them in interesting ways at various angles that capture your eye and perhaps tell a story. No tracks.
Pottery. There is clay and your hands and an idea, and a potters wheel, and no tracks. Some times video editing is like modeling clay. Throw it on the storyline and see what sticks. Trim it here, lengthen it there. Very organic. FCP X makes it very easy to work this way. That’s one of the reason’s why I like it.
So if tracks are everywhere and roads are tracks then FCP X is my 4×4 for off-roading where… there are no tracks. (for everyone else there is always the highway which… is a track) lol 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[David Mathis] “I am going to rank FCP X and Premiere Pro in a very tight spot for first place.”
Let’s just be sure we are taking about innovation and not market penetration. Because by definition it can’t be the latter, since even in the world of film and video editors, it’s not exclusively Mac. Obviously X is limited to Mac OS, whereas all of the competition is cross-platform or PC-only.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[John Rofrano] “Because that is the real question: “What are all those FCP 7 editors going to do?” Why after 3 years from it’s demise FCP 7 is still being used? “
The reason is that none of the options completely fill the needs as well as FCP 4-7/FC Studio for many customers. Apple really ended up in a nice sweet spot with this product and replacing it is still hard.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Haven’t seen much of an argument for hardware. We have stuck with FCP7 because of our workflow and hardware. We upload media to Edit system X and on Edit system Y I simply point my scratch disc to System X and cut away. We edit over a closed Gigabit network 1080 ProRes. Has been working for years this way and it keeps our 5 edit systems humming no matter where the media is in our systems. We do not use external RAIDs. Rather each MacPro Tower has 8 terabytes of internal RAID storage across four drives. We have updated our video cards, RAM and PCI SSD startup drive to the bleeding edge of performance on these machines.
So our hardware and workflow, along with legacy projects that we refer back to a lot keep us anchored in FCP7.
We do use Photoshop and AfterEffects so I have two seats of CC 2014 and all seats have CS6.
Don’t love Premier’s media management and clunky project/sequence settings, and FCPX is just too scary a jump from the workflow we have working currently, for the past 10 years….
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com -
John, in those examples you are making an object. Editing is taking a bunch of objects and creating almost always a linear storyline. To arrange a sequence of objects even FCPX has a series of tracks to arrange them in a standard left to right display.
So if you wish to work in a totally free form way you will want a system unlike FCPX which has largely conventional video & audio tracks. It really is an illusion to think it has no tracks, as it is more a way of dynamic track arrangement to avoid overwriting. A node based system is less possibly track like than FCPX.
I can’t imagine any linear story compositor that won’t have at least a left to right track pattern.
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[Rich] “Haven’t seen much of an argument for hardware.”
It was in fact hardware that was a great reason why I looked to a system that was cross platform. It made much more sense to me to build a PC with graphics grunt and PCIe slots to use existing hardware cards like Decklink. The Mac hardware to me requires a cost premium and a junking of a lot of existing hardware like monitors, recabling for thunderbolt, problems with integrating into a rack mount system etc.
So a PC running CS6 and Resolve was the best upgrade path for my work.
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[Herb Sevush] “However some editors like the freedom of choosing exactly what elements they wish to move and where precisely they are going to end up, all without any encumbrances, even if it takes a few more keystrokes.”
One man’s “freedom” is another man’s “shackles”. I hate having to handle the insignificant details. I’d rather have the computer handle that for me. But as you go on to say, YMMV and it does. 😉
[Herb Sevush] “I live right next to a railroad, and believe me there are tracks in real life. “
I was referring to “tracks” in the process of editing video. I realize that “tracks” do exist in real life. Sorry for not being more precise.
[Herb Sevush] “If you had ever edited film and used a syncronizer, you would understand where the paradigm of “tracks” came from.”
I never edited film so perhaps there is a corollary that I’m missing.
I understand that “bins” are real life containers where you place film strips so I understood that one. BUT here is my point:
If word processors were designed to work like typewriters, they would beep when we hit 72 characters and force us to hit the Return key when we reached 80! Because in “real life” the concept of “word wrap” doesn’t exist! But that is a limiting design because on a computer we do have word wrap and don’t need to hit return at the end of every line.
I was trying to make the same analogy with video editing. Just because we used bins with film doesn’t mean that we should continue to do so. A physical piece of film can only be in one place at a time and thus only in one bin. But on the computer, I can use metadata to make clips appear in any number of collections. That is a far superior way to work IMHO. So I’m just proposing that we open our minds to the possibilities.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Andrew Kimery] “A place my buddy works at is still on FCP 7 because they run custom software that allows their DAM to work hand in hand with FCP 7. The switch from FCP 6 to 7 required rewriting of the custom software so switching to something completely different is no small task.”
I keep forgetting that people have production pipelines built around specific versions of software and it is almost impossible to change. I don’t work in that world so as an independent editor I often forget about it. Good point!
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Michael Gissing] “To arrange a sequence of objects even FCPX has a series of tracks to arrange them in a standard left to right display. “
Yes, but I can move a scene in the story around and all of the connected clips dynamically move out of each other’s way instead of overlapping each other as they would with tacks and having me sort out the problem. That is what I love about FCP X. I don’t have to manage tracks even though you could argue that there are “imaginary” tracks because of how the clips line up.
[Michael Gissing] “It really is an illusion to think it has no tracks, as it is more a way of dynamic track arrangement to avoid overwriting. A node based system is less possibly track like than FCPX.”
Yes, it’s more like a node based system. It’s very liberating for me. That’s why I like it. I don’t have to add a track before I add another clip. I just add the clip and I’m done. The fact that many clips in a row may simulate a track is the illusion. I could move something and they all scatter to make room for it breaking the illusion of a track which ‘must” exist in a particular place.
[Michael Gissing] “I can’t imagine any linear story compositor that won’t have at least a left to right track pattern.”
Agreed. That’s the “storyline” and it’s a linear progression. It’s just all of the ancillary things that I like having “connected” instead of simply lying on some track waiting to be out of sync if anything moves and requiring my attention to keep it all in sync. That’s what I object to having to do.
When I demonstrate FCP X to my peers that are still using track based PC NLE’s and I set up a clip of an interview with a lower third and some intro music and I change my mind about it’s placement and I move it later in the story and all of the connected clips come with it and other clips move out of the way to make room for it, their jaw’s inevitably drop and they ask me, “how much does a Mac cost?”. lol
The magnetic timeline is very liberating me. I realize that not everyone works like this and some people want full control. I get it… it’s just not for me. I want the computer to do as much work for me as possible so that I can concentrate on higher order things.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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