scrutinising FCPX and john davidson’s timelapse.

[Charlie Austin]

[Bill Davis] “Charlie seem to be discovering – while you might not learn to love the Primary as your FIRST order of business. The more comfortable you get with X, the more you see how it can be a HUGE help in many, many, many editing situations”

To be fair Bill, there are plenty of situations where it gets in the way. Features, promos, Trailers, Corporate, Television, wedding videos… all have different “needs” when it comes to a timeline. X isn’t perfect. But, neither is anything else right? The nice thing for me is now I basically have a MC style timeline, with gap clips etc, and a free flowing FCP classic style timeline all in one. It’s a work in progress though… 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[Bill Davis] “Brilliant! Simple!” [Bill Davis] “(AND magnetism!!!) “ [Bill Davis] ” the VAST majority” [Bill Davis] ” Brilliant! Simple! Took about 5 seconds to re-order my storyline.
“ [Bill Davis] “The primary storyline isn’t a problem for anyone used to it – it’s a solution.” [Bill Davis] “And if your task is to paint every surface with intertwined leaves and branches, the roller might even suck as a primary tool. But most rooms aren’t painted in complex tiny patterns. They’re painted solid and decorated in other ways. And so a roller is a FABULOUS tool. “
[Bill Davis] “In X, the primary storyline is freekin GREAT!”

and finally then:

[Bill Davis] “Nothing in X stands alone and disconnected. To benefit from all of it – you have to at least get reasonably familiar with ALL of it. You have to understand when connections make sense and when and how to disable them. When to leave the connections alone and when and how to slip elements within them. “

fine – that last bit made sense – stop idealising something – sell the primary. No one should need to sell smart keyword bins that hoover up all incoming GFX, or compound clips that function exactly like sequences, or post production that kicks everythings ass.

the issue is the timeline and a coherent description of why its not weird bill.

Is the primary simply a perception issue or are the connections overly rigid? – does the tilde key fix it?

If we lose explicit tracks, does everything immediately have to get parent child slaved?

are you entirely happy with the role of the primary? you’re using it like no one’s business – are you fully happy? Bill – is there anything that irks you?

this forum should at least be as much about that as anything else – if you ever wanted to shut us up, an involved discussion on the mechanics of this software would serve to silence us.
until we bothered our arses to use it properly.

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

[Bill Davis]

[Charlie Austin] “X isn’t perfect. But, neither is anything else right? “

This is an indisputable truth.

Most of us who’ve been using it since launch will note, however, that 10.0.7 is a LOT more refined than 10.0.1.

Huge swaths of editors heard the hue and cry at it’s birth and merely glanced at 10.0.1 and didn’t even want to take the time to investigate what might be useful about the X approach – writing it all off.

And now here we are with X developing in leaps and bounds with constant new thinking and possibilities. So while it certainly is “not perfect” by any stretch, it is -(to quote your famous countryman “getting better all the time!” (dang, I can’t even write that without hearing a snarky “can’t get much worse” in Aindrieas’s prose voice in my head!) – if only because it will continue to evolve. As long as it continues to do that, I’ll be satisfied.

FWIW.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Charlie Austin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “this forum should at least be as much about that as anything else “

Yeah… let’s try and keep this thread proselytization free. I like it. 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I only asked this – I’m not qualified to go near the issue of the primary? “

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m not trying to pull anything here, “

It’s the hyperbole that is forever spewed that Apple is creating dead software, and I also thought that when the FCPX On Air series came out, you were an asshole. But I hear things are better now.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Querying the primary is not kryptonite, and I tried to leave it specifically open to you guys as to whether or not you would want to -at all- engage with it?”

Ok. Now that we both know where we stand.

I find that not using the primary makes my particular edits move much more slowly. In content pieces (vs a VO style promo) the primary is awesome. It allows you to swap elements around so fast and accurately, as well as non destructively without having to do massive keyboard shortcut and mouse click dances, or pre approved track selection, or copy/pasting to the properly targeted auto select boxes or mistakenly overwriting something that you didn’t mean to 7 mouse clicks ago, or having to force overwrite something with more than one kb shortcut when FCP7 won’t let you overwrite or paste or collide.

I think it does need more work, and where it needs more work is that it doesn’t need to be like a track based timeline, it needs to be more like itself.

I find keyboard navigating in FCPX to be great, right up until you can’t do somehting becuase it isn’t invented yet, or there’s inconsistency.

The one that bugs me the most is the edge selection commands.

There’s commands to select the right edge or left edge of a cut, but it can get weird.

If your playhead is parked on a cut, you can hit left or right bracket, or shift left/right bracket, and trim, j/l cut, whatever. It’s fast, it’s accurate, you don’t have to skim or drag a playhead, it’s great.

Now, let’s say I have a selected clip and my playhead is not on a cut, and I want to select the right edge of the clip to trim. Logic tells me that I’d hit the right bracket because it’s the right side of the clip.

But no, in this instance the right side of the clip is actually the left side of the cut, so right is now left and vice versa. I try to practice this a lot, and for some reason my brain can’t make the connection that right and left are reversed, but only sometimes.

Speaking of edge selection and j/l cuts, being able to select the audio separate form the video with a modifier is great. What would be super nice, if you need an audio cross fade, is that it would be available to be a one click action. Shift-t automagically splits the audio shoves each edge left 12 frames and right 12 frames, and puts a node fade on each side.

There also needs to be direct keyboard manipulation and navigation of layers. Whether that would be navigation a stock of connected clips, a stack of audio components, or a stack of filters. There needs to be some consistency and capability to being able to modify and choose my own editing adventure. While I don’t need tracks, I do need to be sometime be able to paste above, or paste below a selection.

It is refinements like this that will come over time. Apple has proven, at least for the time being, that they can change what some see as “default” behavior in the timeline, that they can modify the interface to suit better interaction.

What I find most excellent about FCPX, beside the cataloging Event features, is the grouping. The ability to able to create linked/related groups in the timeline is the most evolutionary in my opinion, and I want more. The primary is central to this idea.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[John Davidson] “Here you go – it’s not available in the FCPX Techniques forum, but you should be able to see this now.”

Next time, can you put an FCPX viewer inside an FCPX viewer inside the FCPX viewer? An FCPX Inception of sorts? We need to go deeper.

fcpx_inception.png

[Bill Davis]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “fine – that last bit made sense – stop idealising something”

Why? If you can pump out your disconnected constantly negative babbling all the time – what precisely is wrong with my cheerleading? Is it because I use accessible english words? If so I guess I can can try to copy your style (perhaps bloviating in bifurcated semi-dense psudolinguistically tortured aphorisms??) – and see if that plus huge doses of bile pleases you? … Naw. Too much work.

(at this point I briefly considered going back and cutting out every time YOU wrote something like NAUSATING, TERRIBLE, CRAP, or USELESS about X and giving it the same LOOK AT ME MA, I”M QUOTING HIM treatment – but really, who cares.)

Heres the thing, dude. I LIKE liking things. Liking things makes me happy.

Hating things makes me biteer and dull and morose. And I don’t want to BE those things. I don’t want to be surrounded by mental processes that make me mad all the time. That’s BORING. It says that I’m defined by my dislikes. And who needs that? (grin)

Strange concept, I know. But just think of it as my special kink.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “the issue is the timeline and a coherent description of why its not weird bill.”

Fine. I’ll ignore that once again you’re blatantly attempting to “push the poll” by presuming that your position that “it’s weird” is the foundational one and that anyone who feels differently needs to be the one to defend their position.”

But that silliness aside, challenge accepted.

Here’s your WHY in a nutshell.

I edit nearly every day. For money. Just like many, many others here. FCP-X is the ONLY editing software I use now because it does everything I need to do efficiently, with excellent quality, responsiveness and ease.

This is the total 180 degrees opposite of “weird” So by using that term – you’ve demonstrated to me that you simply can’t figure out how to see it for what it is.

Which is simply this… editing software that people can use to do all sorts of editing tasks reliably and with ease – such that they feel that it’s worth their time to use.

Period.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Charlie Austin]

[Bill Davis] “Huge swaths of editors heard the hue and cry at it’s birth and merely glanced at 10.0.1 and didn’t even want to take the time to investigate what might be useful about the X approach – writing it all off. “

Oh absolutely, and that’s not going to change. But, IMO, we’ve passed, or are close to passing, the “event horizon” with X… those folks are just a distraction at this point. Any convincing that needs doing can be done with real world examples now. This thread started with a legit question, let’s concentrate on that. 😉

In any case… I don’t feel the need to “defend” X anymore. I use it. It works. The End. 🙂 Now… we need to work on making it better!

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Bill Davis]

[Charlie Austin] “In any case… I don’t feel the need to “defend” X anymore. I use it. It works. The End. 🙂 Now… we need to work on making it better!”

AMEN.

(reserving the right to spar with A, simply because it’s so darn much FUN!)

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Charlie Austin]

[Bill Davis] “(reserving the right to spar with A, simply because it’s so darn much FUN!)”

Well, please create a separate thread for that. As I said, I like this one. Oh, the primary is weird. The whole damn timeline is weird. 😛

… But I like it. lol

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~