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Spatial awareness and memory recall
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Favorite NLE ever. Bar none. It was the NLE of choice back in the early days of NBC 2000 (the fine folks who gave you squeezed credits and the “seamless sweeper” ID).
The video out of the Cube was roughly comparable to 3/4″ videotape. The Turbo Cube was akin to 3/4 SP. The main reason NBC chose the Cube over Avid was the full raster. The engineering people insisted on a full raster picture, which seemed to knock out any NLE at that time (which was precisely the result NABET and the engineering staff wanted – but that’s a whole other story). Avid output 720×480, not 486. Only the Cube output 486.
We digitized from D3 masters, did our thing, added credits (via the downstream keyed) and output back to D3 for integration into the air master. (Our audio guy did a proper mix and layback.)
In retrospect, it had a number of FCPX-like features: a true A-roll/B-roll timeline (though the b-roll was not “connected” like FCPX), lots of real time fx (although pretty simple stuff by today’s standards. Not ther standard interface, but once learned, you could really fly on that thing. Really fast for promo work – much faster than Avid, at least for me.
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I haven’t. I’ll definitely check out the mac version when it arrives, thanks.
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[andy lewis] “I imagined some kind of supercharged storyboard mode for rough organization of clips. Just filmstrips on the screen with one tiny viewer.”
Possible in Smoke and to some extent in Media Composer.
[andy lewis] “Circle a group while holding command and the clips form a timeline. Not sure how practical it would have been in reality”
You can do this (with selected clips) in Media Composer and FCP X. Of course, you have to invoke an edit command.
[andy lewis] “I’m sure that some kind of modal interface for compression and output would work well though.”
Sort of there in Smoke – a separate output “mode”. But not “nodes” for output. That sort of existed with XM|Edit a while back. You have that in Episode of course, but that’s an encoding tool.
The difficulty in all of these ideas is implementing them in a modern system, where you have different screen configurations and resolutions. And eventually tablets, too. FCP X does a pretty good job of that and still keep things from becoming a total mess.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
This video shows a lot of the flexibility. I too am looking forward to Mac version…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jEJcPKD9p7A
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 -
I find it bizarre that you nearly agreed with when I said the exact same thing as Steve earlier. If X would just let us have multiple navigable event windows that we could position, THEN we’d have everything that legacy had, plus a lot more. It would be nice to have storyboard bins where you can position the clips anywhere within the bin. Or the ability to edit to the timeline the selected clips in the order you selected them. Premiere has that.
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Looks good. I wonder if the Mac version will support ProRes.
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[Chris Harlan] ” I wonder if the Mac version will support ProRes.”
The non Mac versions support ProRes decode so I’m guessing that on Mac it will support full encode and decode in ProRes.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
You were using a cube in 2000? I would think you’d be using the Stratasphere by then.
I’d say the original was more akin to Betacam regular, and the TurboCube was getting closer to BetaSP, at least visually. At 5:1 compression for the TurboCube I’m sure that scopes would say otherwise. But in an era where BetaSP was still being cut in small suites, sometimes via svideo or composite, the video cube looked better than many projects edited on BetaSP via analog suites. By 95 I was working in a place with two turbocube suites, and 2 Sony AB roll suites. In the AB roll suites we were constantly going down a generation or two. Sometimes just to make a dissolve, because the two shots were on the same tape. And sometimes we would make a change at the last minute that required editing from the master to a new master, etc. So by the time you went down 4 generations vs 1 on the cube, it really looked better.
I have some PSA spots I edited on the cube featuring Nomar Garciaparra from 94/95 era that I HAVE to get up on YouTube. Just need to find me a cheap betacam deck to digitize. I think I’d get a few hits. Some other standout athletes back then too… Travis Best, Drew Barry. Might have some stuff from them too.
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Hi Bret.
No, this was mid 90s. (The unit was called NBC 2000 because it sounded good.) The first units we had were the original Cube, then we upgraded to the Turbo. The wavelet compression was pretty good, but the actual horizontal resolution was not quite Betacam at that time. The realtime playback looked good, and as you point out, the downstream keyer was sharp as a tack. But we usually had to render the titles, because the system couldn’t keep up with titles less than about 40 frames. Those credits flew by pretty fast, except for the mandatory 2 second DGA cards. Because everything had a squeeze and reposition, more than 2 layers also had to be rendered. So it started to deteriorate pretty quickly.
The Stratosphere kicked it way up, but by then NBC 2000 had switched to Avid. (On-air promo used avid just for offline, and finished in the linear bays.)
I really liked the Cube. The controller was nice, especially for us old on-line guys. Except for FCPX, I rarely use the upper video tracks on NLEs except for compositing. That goes back to keeping a clean video track for a clean EDL for finishing, but I realize I’m old fashioned. Using connected clips in X feels a lot like going back to the Cube, even with the connected audio on the b-roll track!
I generally use just one monitor to edit, except for Avid which really wants two monitors. Having the “viewer” and/or picture monitor switch between “source” and “record” is just like the linear bays worked. 1 edit monitor and 1 picture monitor is just fine.
It occurs to me that old folks (such as myself) may have an easier time adapting to X than those who learned on an Avid or FCP Classic.
Jeff M.
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I still live and breath “reels”. Like the old reels of film – or resl of tape – it makes life (for me) so much easier and the spacial relationship recall is easier.
Our workflow with that “newfangled” file based media? — We gather clips from each card/xdcam disk/hard drive record….arrange it by timecode or order shot – and place it in a timeline.
That timeline then becomes a virtual reel. TL1 TL2 = Real 1 Reel 2…
We log everything on each real – soundbites – nat sound – shots etc…create a database of material we can either print or search with
MovieLogger https://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/movielogger – one of the fastest manual loggers around — it exports verbatim logs and XML files so you rapidly find any clip you need and even search in FCP for the exact word you’re looking for in a soundbite or shot descriptionWrite the piece using logs – or create a paper edit
Then go to to town with our timeline/virtual reels
Having logged and reviewed everything that “spacial” relationship – one shot to the next in each reel – is already imprinted in our noggins.
Scrubbing for the right shot or sound (or just typing in the timecode) is a breeze and makes life so much easier than hunting through bins – individual clips or even keywords when you already know the flow of what you’ve shot
FCP7 made virtual clip reals easy – OPTION DOUBLE CLICK to open the virtual reel as a viewer — add in and out points — CMD drag to timeline to edit only the original underlying clip into a new timeline.
Not sure if this is possible in FCP X — Hope they are working on that work flow in Adobe Premiere.
Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852
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