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Steve Kanter: What FCPX CAN Do
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“Breaking out of conventional thought avoids mundanity. It’s probably also why I see FCPX as an asset because the tool opens one to working a little differently.”
So would editing FCP7 upside down with my pants on fire, plus I could still have a viewer window.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Herb Sevush] “So would editing FCP7 upside down with my pants on fire, plus I could still have a viewer window.”
Yes. You should try it some time. I should introduce you to some of my past clients (and facilities I’ve worked at). There’s nothing like editing with smoke billowing into the room from a facility kitchen fire and you’re on deadline.
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Been there, done that. Finished a major piece for one client as the firemen were coming up the stairs. Does wonders for quick decision making.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Herb Sevush] “Been there, done that. Finished a major piece for one client as the firemen were coming up the stairs. Does wonders for quick decision making.”
And now you have those thrills built right in to FCPX.
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[David Roth Weiss] “You need to find better material to work on Craig, it’s just that simple.”
Sometimes you get what the client hands you and you have to make it interesting. Sometimes you find an approach the client didn’t see.
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Life is thrilling enough without inviting some chaos in for a visit. That’s why I never understood thrill seekers — you want a thrill, go raise a kid, that’s enough adventure for a lifetime.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Gary Huff] “Apple’s “perfectionist streak” is merely an urban myth. FCPX being a point in that example.”
Really? Almost all the complaints I see about FCPX are either about features that weren’t implemented, or about features that were changed (particularly ones where the changes are perceived as dumbing down the fature for consumers). I see few (if any) complaints that features were implemented badly.
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[Chris Upchurch] “I see few (if any) complaints that features were implemented badly.”
Audio dissolves spring to mind. I’ve seen a lot of complaints about that. Marking In and Out on a source clip then selecting something else – they disappear. Poor design there. Read in this forum about Dual Mono sound. Seems to be an issue.
Apple failed to fix huge issues with FCP7. Gamma issues? Pulldown when mixing frame rates in the timeline? There are plenty of examples of issues users were clamoring to have fixed, but they didn’t.
Saying they failed to implement certain features because they weren’t “good enough” for Apple QC standards doesn’t make sense when you consider their previous software. There are too many examples of things being poorly done before. Or do they really care this time to get everything right, all the time?
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
[Me] “FCPX needs more data about the edit that is available in the FCP7 timeline in order to make the magnetic timeline work. If FCPX were to open an FCP7 timeline, it would have to lose storylines, clip connections, and trackless magic.”
[Gary Huff] “What is this mysterious data that FCPX would need? What about an FCP7 timeline would cause an import into FCPX to lose all of these above? Will you care to elaborate?”
Gladly.
The timelines — how the NLE models and stores editorial decisions — of FCP7 and FCPX are superficially similar, but upon further study, they are really very different.
FCP7’s timeline places clips in absolute time. As far as FCP7 is concerned, the clips are held in place only by their relationship to the sequence’s master clock. They are not related to each other. Stepping outside of the NLE and speaking in terms of story, the clips do have a relationship, but in FCP7, it’s entirely implicit in their arrangement in time. FCP7 has no way of directly tracking or encoding that relationship.
FCPX, on the other hand, has the relationship between clips built into its fundamental design. FCPX’s timeline places clips relative to each other. FCPX is stores and manages information about the relationships between clips (not so much between clips and absolute time) in primary storylines, secondary storylines, and clip connections. This is the basis for the magnetic timeline. Without the information about how the clips are connected to each other, the magnetic timeline cannot work.
FCPX has its editorial model (connected clips) built into the application. It’s simply not built to handle clips that relate only to time, not each other.
The problem I see with importing legacy projects is that no other application encodes any information about the relationship between clips. They are all references to absolute time, and FCPX just doesn’t think this way.
I’m suggesting that the design decisions that make the magnetic timeline possible make legacy import nearly inconceivable without some major changes in how the timeline is implemented. David Lawrence and Oliver Peters have discussed this in other contexts elsewhere, too — that Apple may have painted themselves into a corner with some of the early design decisions in FCPX.
For a whole lot more on this, you could go back through this forum and read David Lawrence’s posts on the magnetic timeline. He carefully points out the logical differences between the FCP7 timeline and the FCPX timeline. You could also go back and read some of my discussions with Aindreas Gallagher, where we discuss how FCP7 was open and flexible in terms of editing methodology, but FCPX was built around a single methodology.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Paul Dickin] “I think its OS X that’s going to be handling the XML, straight into CoreData…
Does OS X ‘understand ‘editing’? There will have to be some sort of utility to turn random bits of QT FCP Legacy timeline XML into AV Foundation mutable gubbins. Then CoreData might have an inkling of what its supposed to be doing. And Walter S. will say “that doesn’t make any sense”. Which it doesn’t…. But that’s because Apple are doing ‘something’ we so far haven’t ‘understood’.”Paul, you know me so well! That really doesn’t make any sense!
I don’t think it’s because Apple has done something that we just haven’t understood yet — I think they simply chose to pursue a new editorial paradigm that needs more information to represent an edit than can be derived from legacy systems without reconsidering the magnetic timeline implementation.
[Paul Dickin] “I guess that what SJ actually said was something along the lines of “Randy be sure to throw out all that legacy stuff, because where Apple’s headed nothing from the Apple Computers Inc era is going to remain. After Lion, zilch! OS XX Alto-Stratus (Cumulo-Nimbus?) won’t have a file system, won’t have a Finder, keyboard or mouse…” And Walter S. will say “that doesn’t make any sense”. Which it doesn’t. Yet…: -(“
Well, Paul, maybe you don’t know me as well as I thought. I was rooting for BeOS to beat out NeXT as the basis for OS X. If BeOS had won, we’d all be rocking relational database filesystems today, instead of the hierarchical system we’re saddled with now.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events
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