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Steve Kanter: What FCPX CAN Do
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Walter –
I’ll now propose a translation algorithm.
Video
FCP7 Track 1 = Main Storyline
Track 2 = Secondary Storyline
Track 3 = Connected Clip (this holds for all tracks above 2)Audio
Any clip becomes connected to the first clip it is in sync with. I don’t know how to arrange the rest of the audio in a trackless universe, but perhaps some automatic metadata tagging, labeling clips for their original FCP7 tracks would be the answer.It wouldn’t matter if the FCPX relationships were wrong, obviously the editor would have to go through it and re-assign relationships, all the X guru’s keep pointing out how easy and flexible it is. This way, however, all the data would come across. I don’t see why something like this couldn’t work? (then again I’m often described as being dumber than a stone.)
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Gary Huff] “You are totally over-thinking this. The magnetic timeline is nothing more than a “gimmick.” A series of “If” “then” and “elses” that automatically groups clips together in a way that it thinks will be helpful to the editor. While FCPX may try to do its damnedest to hide time from the end user, it still has to relate to time at some point.”
It’s certainly possible that I’m over-thinking it — but I think you’re glossing over the differences between how the FCP7 and FCPX timelines work.
The magnetic timeline may be a gimmick, but I think one of two things are true: the magnetic timeline was either the goal of FCPX’s new editorial system (in which case the designers added clip relationships to make it work), or it was an easy by-product of the new editorial system (in which FCPX tracks the clip relationships).
You’re right that clips in FCPX ultimately relate to time, but they only do so indirectly, via the primary storyline. This is what makes export possible.
By relating clips to each other, FCPX has added a large amount of abstraction in the editorial process versus previous NLEs, but requires more information about how the edit is assembled. I’ll argue below that assembling the edit from scratch in FCPX gives the application the context for each edit that it needs for the magnetic timeline.
[Gary Huff] “How does FCPX know to connect clips when you first drag raw footage into it? It makes a guess, and then you have to turn it off or select another option, so I fail to see how playing by the default rules that FCPX already has to do would be any different.”
It’s different because when editing a clip into FCPX, the application only has to guess one new relationship. Even a straightforward finished timeline can have hundreds of edits and clip relationships. When importing a project, FCPX would have to reverse-engineer all those interconnected relationships en masse, which is a significantly harder problem than guessing relationships one at time by noting how the editor cuts clips into the project.
Think about it like IKEA furniture. It’s relatively easy to assemble when you follow the directions, but once assembled, it’s quite a bit harder to look at the finished product and derive the exact installation instructions.
If that example isn’t hard enough, change “IKEA furniture” to “mechanical watch” or “modern jetliner.”
[Gary Huff] “Video starts at 32sec 12frames and the audio must come in at 32sec 22frames in order to match the onscreen action. How could FCPX NOT know how to handle this?”
The point I was making with connected clips is that they do not always connect on the first frame. If a connected clip sits over an edit, connecting it via the first frame will yield a different result than connecting it via the last frame if you try to insert material in between them. There’s no way to know from an imported timeline which frames are supposed to be linked.
[Gary Huff] “You have, more than once, referred to FCPX needing to know things that, frankly, make it sound like it has some kind of Artificial Intelligence engine. It does not. FCPX is based on a programmers idea of how to group things in order to “second guess” the editor and do some stuff automatically. When the guess is right, it’s great and saves time. When it’s wrong, you have to fix things. Considering it does this just from a brand new project, why don’t you think it can be done in a project importer?”
I see how the language I’ve used would lead you to think that I think FCPX has artificial intelligence. I apologize for my imprecision and the confusion it’s causing.
I don’t think that FCPX literally “knows” anything about the edit, but I do think it does use the relationships between clips (rather than their position in absolute time) to hold its timeline together. No NLE has ever done this before, and it’s why I think the translation problem is harder than it seems at first glance.
As I mentioned above, I think assembling a new project, editing in one clip at a time, is a totally different process than reading an imported timeline from left to right, because it allows FCPX to relate individual clips to each other as they’re added to the edit. This isn’t about letting FCPX form a literal understanding of the edit, but rather building the clip relationships that are the basis for FCPX’s project organization and the magnetic timeline.
[Gary Huff] “There are exceptions, but I would say that most edits have the meat of the footage in track 1 anyway. You can always move it down into the primary if it’s meant to be more than a “master clip,” there’s no reason why “accidentally” putting video tracks 2-infinity into secondary storylines would break anything. It’s all layers.”
I guess this is the part of the problem that I’m not articulating well at all. I think that because of the differences between FCP7 and FCPX, an imported, auto-magnetized timeline wouldn’t “feel” like a native FCPX timeline.
Primary storylines, secondary storylines, and connected clips have organizational meaning to the editor in FCPX. Unless you can correctly guess what each clip should be and how it relates to the others, an imported timeline would be gibberish, and FCPX would feel very hard to use.
I think that’s why Apple has resisted import — because you can go from the relative FCPX timeline back to a standard absolute timeline for export, but you can’t automatically go from a standard absolute timeline to a relative FCPX timeline.
I don’t think that’s a good thing, and I’m not trying to defend Apple for leaving project import — a critical feature for many — out of FCPX. I do think that if import were as easy as you’re suggesting, Apple would have had good reason to do it. By not including import, Apple has removed FCPX’s legacy format lock-in advantage, and placed FCPX on equal footing with other NLEs among FCP7 users, because any application change will be a migration.
I’ve said before that I’d be willing to hand-magnetize a timeline if it meant we could have project import — it can’t be worse than eye-matching an online.
David mentioned roundtripping to Color, and that might be a great place to start. A good Color workflow means spending some time in FCP7 first to clean up the timeline before import. Perhaps someone could devise a workflow from FCP7 to FCPX where track assignments in FCP7 drive whether clips are placed in primary storylines, secondary storylines, or held as connected clips. Perhaps markers could be used to denote connection points. I don’t think this problem is unsolvable, but I don’t think we’ll see an easy automatic solution that makes an FCP7 project feel right in FCPX.
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 -
Herb — great minds think alike! I just suggested something similar in a post that hit a couple seconds after yours.
Perhaps I should clarify my position on legacy import a little bit:
- I do think it’s very important that FCPX be able to import FCP projects, XML, and EDL.
- I don’t think it’s theoretically impossible to get an FCP7 timeline into FCPX.
- I do think it’s tremendously difficult for a computer to do, automatically, with any real meaning.
- I do think that Apple is avoiding project import because the design of FCPX’s editorial model is so different from that of traditional NLEs that translation is a non-trivial problem, and a poorly-translated import would be difficult to work with in FCPX.
- I do think it’s much simpler for a human editor to guide this translation, and prepping the timeline in FCP7 as you and I have suggested might be the easiest way in.
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 -
Bill, thank you for your kind words and thoughtful consideration!
Reading this post, I think we largely agree.
[Bill Davis] “This debate, largely driven by a palpable cloud of anger, loss and fear – (all reasonable emotions in anyone who sees a critical tool that feeds them in “jeopardy.”) has been way more about the LOSS of 7 than about the reality of X. And I simply think that misses WAY too much of what’s going on here. “
A dear friend of mine likes to explain things both positively and negatively. He consistently defines concepts in terms of anchors on either side of the concept. For example, in describing a design, he might say “it’s clean, but not sterile.”
I agree with you the discussion on FCPX has been largely negatively anchored. There’s been a lot of heated rhetoric on what FCPX is not, and quite a bit less discussion about what it is (though there have been a few very, very interested threads recently which show more of this balance — many thanks to David Lawrence and Aindreas Gallagher for starting some of my favorites).
[Bill Davis] “I don’t presume to know the answers to these questions, myself. I just know that FCP-X is a big bet. That bet is that the game is changing. I think that’s correct. The game is changing BIG TIME. And once you acknowledge that, the REAL game is to try and figure out what the new game will be and how you can position yourself to best capitalize on it.”
I agree that the game is changing, and I think it’s important that we remember that Apple is playing a different game than we are. When I think about the business of creative work, I see a funnel which pours out to clients. Moving up the funnel, you have all the agencies, production companies, and freelancers who produce client work.
Any one of these constituents may serve only a handful of all the available clients. You know who serves all these clients, indirectly? Adobe. Apple. Autodesk. Avid. We market our services to our clients at the bottom of the funnel, while the toolmakers market their products to us at the top.
It’s very easy to forget just how broad the spectrum of creative work is. What you do most certainly differs from what I do, and what I do most certainly differs from the next poster here, etc. Companies like the four As have a large challenge in developing tools to fit into these widely divergent needs. If nothing else, FCPX has shown how we must be aware of our own needs and occasionally re-evaluate the way we do our jobs.
Thanks again, and cheers for the discourse.
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 -
[Walter Soyka]I do think it’s tremendously difficult for a computer to do, automatically, with any real meaning.
I think Herb’s idea works just fine. You really need to explain how this would be any different than how FCPX derives “meaning” from just your plain ‘ole basic everyday footage that has no hooks into any kind of FCPX database whatsoever. To re-iterate, FCPX gets “meaning” from where you place your footage on the timeline. Whether you are placing your footage in real time within the program, or did it in FCP7 and are now importing an old project, FCPX can still get “meaning” either way. And if the meaning is wrong, you can fix it.
a poorly-translated import would be difficult to work with in FCPX.
How? Is FCPX easy to work in or not? It cannot be both ways. Either it’s easy to make changes or not. Can you describe a specific example of a poorly-translated FCP7 project that would be difficult to work with under FCPX?
Effects plugins are a far bigger hurdle than the timeline itself (which is really a non-issue) and would be where I suspect the biggest problem would lie. They are quite different under FCPX, and translating values over to a brand-new filter that doesn’t work quite the same way (if it has anything analogues in FCPX to begin with) would be quite a difficult project. That’s to say nothing of third-party plugins that, by and large, don’t even exist for FCPX yet.
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“Effects plugins are a far bigger hurdle than the timeline itself”
Effects Plug-In rule #1:
Except for re-timing filters, no other filters or plug-ins will be translated.
Now it’s no longer a hurdle.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
I agree, Herb. But that is far more damaging to your edit than that magnetic timeline would be. That was my point, sorry if it wasn’t clear.
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[Gary Huff] “To re-iterate, FCPX gets “meaning” from where you place your footage on the timeline. Whether you are placing your footage in real time within the program, or did it in FCP7 and are now importing an old project, FCPX can still get “meaning” either way.”
That’s where we disagree. You’re arguing that the FCPX timeline is logically the same as the FCP7 timeline, but with different window dressing. I’m arguing that there’s information stored in an FCPX timeline that cannot be derived solely from an FCP7 project or EDL without massive operator intervention.
As the edit becomes more involved, I think sorting out the clip relationships becomes more complicated.
Yes, FCPX gets “meaning” from where you place your footage, but it gets that meaning at the time the footage is placed. Since clip relationships are important in FCPX, and clip relationships are by definition relative, I’m arguing that in addition to their placement in time, the order in which clips are edited into the timeline and the fact that they are edited one at a time makes it easier to capture the editor’s intent for a specific clip and its relationships, because the edit is made in context. I don’t think that same context is present when reading a traditional timeline left to right.
Whether FCPX guesses your intent on an edit decision correctly or incorrectly, it guesses right in front of you as you’re making your edit, and you have the immediate opportunity to correct a wrong guess. With an imported project with hundreds of guesses, you’d have to pre-flight the entire edit before you can expect the FCPX timeline to work as it’s intended.
[Gary Huff] “How? Is FCPX easy to work in or not? It cannot be both ways. Either it’s easy to make changes or not. Can you describe a specific example of a poorly-translated FCP7 project that would be difficult to work with under FCPX?”
An imported project with hundreds of wrong guesses about where clips belong or how they’re connected wouldn’t behave the way the same exact project would if it were built from scratch in FCPX.
FCPX has an editing methodology built in, but FCP7 just let you arrange time-based media in absolute time within a video raster. FCPX may work easily when you observe its methodology, but I think if you diverge from it, you’ll end up fighting the way the app is built to work.
I agree with Herb that prepping a timeline in FCP7 would mitigate some of the translation challenges, and I posted a very similar idea at the same time he did in the post that you’re responding to.
Gary, we may just disagree on this. You think I’m over-thinking, and I think you haven’t thought it through. I want legacy import, so I sincerely hope that you are right and I am wrong. I’m afraid that the differences between an FCP7 edit and an FCPX edit are more than skin deep, though, and I think this makes translation a more difficult problem than it seems.
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 -
[Walter Soyka]With an imported project with hundreds of guesses, you’d have to pre-flight the entire edit before you can expect the FCPX timeline to work as it’s intended.
How would this be the case? Video tracks are essentially layers, so any video on track 1 will be ignored when there is a video on track 2 at the same time, and so forth and so on. That is what is required to make the edit work as intended: to respect the layers. Same thing for audio. I have no idea why you think it is so overly complicated, or that FCPX does not actually deal in time. Of course it does, it has to, there is simply NO WAY around it.
Like this:
Video 3]_____________________<---------->________________
Video 2]___________________<------->_________<------->___
Video 1]<------------------------------------------------>
Audio 1]<------------------------------------------------>
Audio 2]_____________<-->___________<-->___<-->_________
Audio 3]_________________<-------->______________________This is a representation of a typically basic timeline. Now each of these elements is arranged in a layer. Video 2 will overwrite the video on Video 1 because it is on top and so fourth. Audio is different because it will play everything on every track simultaneously if you let it. Now, what keeps Audio 2 from playing at the beginning of the clip or right in the middle of the track at Audio 3? Time. It doesn’t matter how much fancy metadata you have, or what is linked to what or anything. That only matters when you move stuff around. What matters is that at a specific moment in time, the track in audio 2 will play and then stop. Then at a further moment in time, the process will repeat. Further from that, the track in Audio 3 will also play, and so on. Same with the video, except whatever is on top of another Video track will be shown and not underneath.
Now HOW exactly would importing this timeline into FCPX mess up? I can understand clip connections and so forth and so on, but there should be absolutely NO reason why you couldn’t import a project from FCP7 and it actually play “correctly” as per the basic edit itself. There won’t be Video 3 clips playing underneath Video 2 clips in the like. The only possible problem would arise when you start to move things, and then you might possibly have to fix relationships, but I don’t think that would be that big of a deal, especially if you switch to the position tool.
FCPX has an editing methodology built in, but FCP7 just let you arrange time-based media in absolute time within a video raster. FCPX may work easily when you observe its methodology, but I think if you diverge from it, you’ll end up fighting the way the app is built to work.
Again, you are making this far more complicated than it actually is. FCPX is really not doing anything different than FCP7. If you had the source code to FCP7, you could very easily duplicate the magnetic timeline just by adding in a bunch of “If” “then” “else” statements that see how elements are being added to the timeline and then grouping them together automatically. You can duplicate all the magnetic timeline stuff yourself in FCP7, you just have to make the clip connections manually.
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Gary, it’s clear that you’ve put a lot of thought and effort into trying to explain your point of view to me. Thank you for that.
I’ll point you to David Lawrence’s article, The Magnet Timeline — Thoughts on Apple’s New Paradigm [link] for some background on my perspective.
[Gary Huff] “Now HOW exactly would importing this timeline into FCPX mess up? I can understand clip connections and so forth and so on, but there should be absolutely NO reason why you couldn’t import a project from FCP7 and it actually play “correctly” as per the basic edit itself. There won’t be Video 3 clips playing underneath Video 2 clips in the like. The only possible problem would arise when you start to move things, and then you might possibly have to fix relationships, but I don’t think that would be that big of a deal, especially if you switch to the position tool.”
You’ve already written my answer in there. You can get the basic edit in, but once you start trying to move things, the fact that the edit doesn’t conform to FCPX’s editorial model will have you fighting the application all the way. In a complex edit, there will be hundreds of these relationships to sort out.
It will give a terrible user experience, and that’s why I think Apple is dodging import. Not because I think it’s literally impossible to import a timeline, but because FCPX’s tools require information about clip relationships that doesn’t exist in other NLEs to work as they were intended.
I should probably clarify my point of view on this a bit more, but this is what I’ve been trying to say from the beginning here: only knowing the placement of clips in time and not knowing the relationships between clips, FCPX won’t work the same way as it would if the edit had been built from scratch.
It seems that Apple, who places such a high premium on the user experience, would rather not import legacy projects at all than import them poorly and offer a bad user experience with FCPX.
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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