So long, and thanks for all the fish

[Michael Sanders]

The post, nor the information contained within it, was designed to impress – just a response to the point made in Bernard’s post that FCP X may not be right of the BBC – it seems there are others (currently working within the BBC) who might disagree.

From his own post Bernard makes it know he retired/went freelance in 2001 – I don’t know what he’s up to now nor seek to belittle him or his views. I do know that in the intervening 11 years the tools for television production, the stories people tell and how they tell them have changed and have changed dramatically. In some ways for the best, in someways.. well that’s another day’s post 🙂

But that’s by the by. In response to the rest of your post:

No real (read professional) editor should ever go just on what someone else says, no one should be impressed with what someone else is using. I’m not impressed by what tools my decorator uses, but the fact he can paint my house well as well as he does impress’s me.

I would always listen to other people’s suggestions, but trust yourself, trust your abilities and screw everyone else. Even working on the same kind of programme we all work in different ways – and the beauty (or not depending on your point of view) with FCP X is that we now have a different way of working – not three edit systems fundamentally the same,

I still regularly meet editors who happily pronounce FCP X as “the most utter piece of crap ever” – despite never having used it, or in most cases actually played with it.

I really can’t believe that almost a year later we’re still having this basic argument.

One editor I know won’t touch FCP X because well, in his words “Walter Murch said its not up to par so that’s good enough for me”. Well far be it for me to disagree with one of the worlds top editors, but so far FCP X works for me on the stories I need to tell. Another editor admitted he was never going to try FCP X because it looks too much like iMovie and he hates iMovie.

For about 70% of the time I’m a DOP, imagine the response if I said I hate the ugly design of RED so I’m not going to use it! I’m not a huge fan of the RED one for many other reasons, but I’ve come to that conclusion from working with it. Lets be hones,t just because RED isn’t as easy to use as an Alexa doesn’t make the RED less of a professional camera.

There are some excellent editors doing great things with FCP X, who have bothered to play around and looked at what it has to offer. It is never going to win over every editor in the world, just in the same way FCP 7 never did. For me – I get it. I get the metadata driven workflow, trackless doesn’t bother me – in fact it works for me. I’m not totally won over by the event/project layout – but then on the current project I’m editing its a massive bonus.

What I really hate is the inference from a lot of people that because I use FCP X I can’t be a “professional” editor. I work to the highest standards I can, both technically and artistically. Be it shooting or editing I use the tools I have to the max and often go beyond what the clients ask because it will be better.

My clients (some of whom I’ve worked with over 13 years since I went freelance) value my editing skills for my ability to tell a story. They trusted my abilities when I worked front panel on BVW75’s, then again on Sony 910’s and again on FCP 7. As long as I deliver the goods to the standards my clients have come to expect – I suspect they don’t give a rats arse what I edit on. That’s how I define a professional editor.

Actually thinking about it the fact that I bothered to investigate FCP X so deeply I think is testament to my professionalism – what would it say about me if I said to my clients, “Oh, people told me FCP X is crap so I haven’t bothered”

One last thing, just don’t tell my clients I’m doing it faster on FCP X – or they will expect lower bills!

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Frank Gothmann]

[Michael Gissing] “I saw the promotions recently and had a look at the software features online. I searched for a reference to using external cards like Kona for broadcast accurate monitoring and saw nothing so lost interest in Edius. Also I need a tool that can import formats like XML and AAF plus round tripping to a grading program (da Vinci is now taking over from Color for me).

Does anyone know if it supports export and import of any standards and if it has proper output via a Kona?
“

Edius outputs AAF and edl, also reads FCP XML V.5 (haven’t tried that but read it does). As far as hardware support, the situation is a bit like Avid MC pre 6, ie. Grass Valley have their own IO hardware to go with Edius (Storm 3G would be the Kona equivalent, It was in the machine I tired. Output is super smooth as we are used to via FCP.). However, there is one BM card that works with Edius at the moment and rumors have it they might open up more in the future. Current V.6 is more than a year old so there will be a big release this year (the 3D capable version of Edius is in beta and that Beta will expire around NAB so…). Not sure though, GV is a hardware company mainly so they want to move their own IO boards. It’s certainly an app to look at very closely. Again, I was very impressed with the UI and the speed. It’s pretty much like FCP on PC, just much faster and native.

[Dominic Deacon]

Since the FCPX switch I’ve been using Edius pretty solidly. It has a bunch of great points.

Firstly in terms of real time playback it’s the fastest thing out there. Adobe always likes to make that claim for Premiere but in my experience Edius smokes it.

Seondly it accepts the broadest range of formats I’ve ever seen. I do a lot of short promotional pieces for bars where they give me footage on DVDs and all sorts of exotic formats. Just chuck them all on the same timeline without any transcoding and your good.

The colour correction tools are pretty extensive and excellent. I love being able to throw as many filters as I like on top of my footage and play it back immediately without rendering. The little split screen before and after tool is super handy as well.

I also really like the interface. FCPX people may like the magnetic timeline but to my way of thinking it doesn’t have too many advantages over using Edius in Ripple and Tracks Locked mode. All the footage dances around as you edit in much the same way. Of course with Edius you can turn that off.

The big problem for me is project bloat. I’m working on a feature with it right now and starting to wish I’d gone with AVID. The project file- which is admittedly very large- now takes five minutes to open and it’s slowing down a touch as I go. Still way faster than FCP7 ever was but I’ve gotten used to everything being instant.

[Michael Gissing]

Thanks Frank. I am trying to capitalise on overpriced hardware already purchased. Edius might be worth a trial but I have to have proper monitoring and output to HDCam & digi beta.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Michael Gissing] ” I am trying to capitalise on overpriced hardware already purchased. Edius might be worth a trial but I have to have proper monitoring and output to HDCam & digi beta.”

Same for me, totally agree with you. If there was full-on 3rd party io support plus if they made their own codec cross platform it would be extremely interesting. It’s still a 32bit only app so it will also be interesting to see if the next rev will move it to 64bit. I am keeping an eye on that one, NAB could bring some interesting new alternatives. Nevertheless, if you have a windows installation I’d recommend to check out the trial and just play around with it – it was just plain, pure fun for me regarding speed and responsiveness.

[Chris Conlee]

[Dominic Deacon] “The big problem for me is project bloat. I’m working on a feature with it right now and starting to wish I’d gone with AVID. The project file- which is admittedly very large- now takes five minutes to open and it’s slowing down a touch as I go. Still way faster than FCP7 ever was but I’ve gotten used to everything being instant.”

This is something I don’t think non-Avid people realize: in Avid, every single bin is a separate file, wrapped in a folder which IS the project file. Simply stated, it takes very little time to open a project, because you’re just pointing to a folder. Each bin opens quickly as well, as it’s only a subset of the entire project. It’s also this architecture which allows Avid’s extensive project sharing capabilities.

Every editor can have read/write access to the master project (ie, the folder), but only the first editor who opens a bin has read/write access to that bin — everybody else simply has read access. Actually kind of amazing that Avid had this thought out 20 years ago and it has proven so robust that I can still open AVBV projects from the early nineties on a current generation Avid.

I’m consistently frustrated on other NLEs when I have to wait more than a minute to open even the most complex projects.

Chris

[Ken Zukin]

[Michael Sanders] “What I really hate is the inference from a lot of people that because I use FCP X I can’t be a “professional” editor. I work to the highest standards I can, both technically and artistically. Be it shooting or editing I use the tools I have to the max and often go beyond what the clients ask because it will be better.
“

Totally agree with this — FCP X isn’t a good fit for me now, and may never be. But like a crap guitar in the hands of a journeyman guitarist — some sweet notes are going to be created no matter what.

[Geoff Addis]

I’ve been a long time user of Edius, also Premiere CS5, FCP7 and FCP X since its launch. In the pre FCP X days, when I commented how slow and render intensive FCP7 was I was looked upon as I if didn’t know what I was talking about, how could anything be better than FCP? FCP X has changed things and now I hear from these same people how much the old FCP needed to improve and how terrible FCP X is! My experience with X gives me hope, in many ways it is far more efficent than FCP 7, but it still has a long way to go to catch up Edius’s real time performance and stability. Colour correction is a breeze and I would suggest that for anyone interested, it is worth down loading a 30 day trial also looking at these tutorials and GV announcement:

https://www.grassvalley.com/news/pres…ing-reputation
https://www.onscreentraining.com/
https://grassvalley.csod.com/selfreg/register.aspx?c=gvedius6
https://www.misterfrag.com/EdiusWBCC.wmv

Note:

GV is to make their codec cross platform and that they provide input/output hardware that is suitable for brodcast monitoring.

The software does not utilise either GV or other graphics cards for accelerating their own FX.

If you have a Black Magic Intensity Pro card, that may be used for ingest although it does not (at yet?) provide an output.

+True, Edius may not be suitable for everyone, but for many it could be the answer.

[Bernard Newnham]

Of course, I couldn’t resist coming back for one last time to see what people said. I would have left it longer, but Cow has a rather average board system in which any given subject disappears very quickly. Perhaps time for a new paradigm in bulletin board technology, or perhaps be like all the others…..which brings me neatly to –

First, thanks for the Edius links. It’s interesting to see so much praise in this particular forum. I’ve been playing some more with it, and though I can’t seem to place a wipe transition at the moment, I expect I’ll manage it soon. I’m sure that back a long time ago Edius was pretty basic, and that has really changed – the more one looks the more there is to see. A serious system.

Now to Mr Sanders, who says –

“From his own post Bernard makes it know he retired/went freelance in 2001 – I don’t know what he’s up to now nor seek to belittle him or his views. I do know that in the intervening 11 years the tools for television production, the stories people tell and how they tell them have changed and have changed dramatically.”

Well, I think I noticed that life moves on. TV isn’t black and white any more, and last time I was at Television Centre I couldn’t find a 2″ machine anywhere. But actually an awful lots stays the same. I’m always slightly amazed at the size of studio cameras. I stopped being a studio cameraman in 1977. The cameras were heavy and moved around on Vinten peds with steering rings. The viewfinders were about 7″ and the length of the camera was around 3 feet. They had panning handles, focus knobs and a place to put your shot cards. If one looks now, they are pretty much the same only lighter, and they’ve been mostly the same since tv started. The design parameters long ago settled down to what worked.

And that’s the thing about NLEs – after a time of trying out various ways of doing things, everyone settled down to a common way of working. Not much is different between one screen and another. A bit like cars with the accelerator pedal on the right – it works so don’t screw around with it. Anyone, even Apple, change things at their peril. Ir’s an amazingly arrogant thing to do.

And Mr Sanders says –

“I really can’t believe that almost a year later we’re still having this basic argument.”

It’s because people still can’t believe they’ve been so betrayed by a company they relied on, even believed in, in some cases. Simple as that.

Back at the BBC, I don’t know much about what they’re up to. A current member of staff told me about the Salford editing problem. I imagine whoever decided to equip the place with FCP is feeling as betrayed as everyone else. I can’t imagine the arrogant people at Apple are going to listen to the BBC.

Just for fun, something else that didn’t work –
https://tech-ops.co.uk/next/2010/09/the-vinten-peregrine-stories-6/
and something that much much later did –
https://www.tech-ops.co.uk/page164.html

Ta Ta

B

[Daniel Frome]

I’ll just add my own personal story that Edius is indeed a monster. It rips through anything, faster than any other NLE.

I’m not a ‘freelancer’ in the sense that I use my home equipment very much, and therefore I’ve been happy to edit on FCP or Avid, which ever the television show has already set up.

However, I once edited a short piece on Edius and I can say with certainty: This was on a Core 2 Quad (non hyperthreading) with 8GB RAM … no matter how many FX and filters you throw at it, Edius screams. Even today, people say “oh you need a 12 core bla bla bla” — well I feel like I had already won that war with my home-made quad core system and Edius.

It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never seen/used it. Just about any NLE has a dedicated, expected render time, maybe even a bit of a delay when you’re scrubbing around the timeline, general slowness here or there. Edius, on the other hand, hardly ever does this. It seems that no matter effect, filter, or complex edit, you feel like the effect was already rendered to tape and you’re just shuttling back the playback to watch it. I actually like to refer to it more as if you’re a DJ with analog records… it feels very analog in a good way, in the sense that there’s no ‘computation time.’ Hope that makes sense.