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The Magnetic Timeline – Time, Space and One Clock To Rule Them All
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[Herb Sevush] “and I now have 2 pieces of audio fighting each other. “
Yeah maybe, you might want this you might not. It’s still editing and you still have to edit in FCPx. The difference is everything before or after that edit point stays where you want without sliding everything around to make room for whatever you are trying to add/replace/trim/edit. If you don’t want that audio overlap, you simply trim it, which is fall down simple in FCPx, or use the volume handles, or select the range of the audio clip and adjust the volume (no more hard to find nodes, unless you want them).
[Herb Sevush] “Generally I don’t want the audio sliding to a new track, I want it to either be rippled down the timeline or overwritten entirely.”
You can do that too Instead of trimming the video, you control-s to split a/v in the primary storyline, and use the audio to guide your trim. You would use a roll at that point, or use the clip that needs to be trimmed as the guide.
[Herb Sevush] “I haven’t tried X yet”
I will apologize for my “obtuseness” as well, but it’s kind of obvious. 🙂 There was one of those videos about the death of FCP as we know it that ended with a ripping open of an Avid MC5.5 box. You’ve probably seen it. The funny thing is? The creator of that video, while done very well and certainly had me entertained, hadn’t even used FCPx. Not once. That’s cool if you want to switch, more power to you, but I think you should at least give it a good honest spin. It is different, there’s no question about that and it is certainly a work in progress.
[Herb Sevush] “I still think most rippling, sliding, trimming operations are either too complex or too simple to need this feature”
Maybe they are, I don’t know. I think that would depend on your project. What is handy, everything will stay in sync even if that means I have to trim one more audio and video track to get rid of any overlapping after “the big move”. But seriously, you should try it and see what you think. Auditioning is bad ass for trying different music tracks, OMG, WTF, LOL.
Compound clips can also become an organizational tool, but that’s a different post. I think we are exploring the time space continuum here.
Also, I am not defending FCPx. I am pretty interested in it succeeding, though. There seems to be a lot of thought in it, contrary to what some seem to say. This is not a soccer mom or dad’s NLE. Not to get too squishy, but Apple has a pretty good track record of inventing stuff that actually helps you, while taking some of the complication away.
There’s also the changing of the vocabulary, but that’s also a different post. The more I play, the more the new vocabulary makes sense as it really is a different way to organize a traditional “project”. This brings me to:
Alex Gollner (Alex4d) has been exploring what isn’t turned on or available in FCPx (or perhaps they are already old ideas that were killed). It is fascinating, no matter if you love, hate or indifference FCPx. I highly recommend checking these out, as it might (just maybe) show you something that people haven’t seen or thought of quite yet for FCPx capability:
https://alex4d.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/secret-fcpx-1/
https://alex4d.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/secret-fcpx-2/
https://alex4d.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/secret-fcpx-xml-multi-user-editing/
https://alex4d.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/secret-fcpx-4/
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Jeremy –
Thanks for taking the time to deal with my obtuseness. When Apple wants me back as a customer I’ll take a look. I agree that this is not a product made for Soccer Mom’s only, it’s just that I don’t think it was made for me either. They seem to have gone to a lot of trouble creating a new UI that fixes things that I didn’t have a problem with, and were not very interested in coming up with solutions to problems I already had.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Herb Sevush] “They seem to have gone to a lot of trouble creating a new UI that fixes things that I didn’t have a problem with, “
I see it as they are building a new foundation and we just don’t have the vocabulary yet. Did you read Alex4d’s blog about the “Guard” function? All of a sudden, the story lines might make a little more sense.
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Great post, Andrew. Thanks for your clarification.
[Andrew Richards] “Both offer the option to match the frame rate of the first clip added to their respective timelines. Before any media is added, before any Primary Storyline is created, the FCPX timeline has a “Master Clock”, to borrow your terminology.”
Yes, true.
[Andrew Richards] “The big change is, as you put it, is with “spatial representation and object/space behavior”. This absolutely forces the user to adopt new habits for constructing an edit, but the way time is framed hasn’t changed, just the way it is filled with content.”
Bingo.
[Andrew Richards] “Breaking decades old habits and muscle memory is a shock to any user, and I think that’s a huge reason why so many veteran editors recoil from the way default behavior of FCPX’s timeline.”
I think there’s more going on than just muscle memory habits. A good UI makes the expression of user intent natural and intuitive. My current experience with X is that it often confounds my natural rather than learned expectations in terms of both spatial and object behavior. If a UI is intuitive, changing to it should be easy because it makes intuitive sense. IMHO, the fact that so many experienced editors are having difficulty is a clue that something is off. I’ll get into this more in my next post.
This is not to say that FCPX is wholly unintuitive. We’re seeing many reports of how it makes certain jobs very easy, especially for novice or non-editors. I think it’s highly intuitive and optimized for simple assembly. The question is how does it scale once you want to go beyond that? How does it handle the requirements of a complex production? Is it really more efficient or just different?
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
“Did you read Alex4d’s blog about the “Guard” function? All of a sudden, the story lines might make a little more sense.”
Yes I had read them before. Did you remember the opening disclaimer?
“Inside FCP X there hints of features that have yet to be fully implemented, or have been dropped and never to be made available. There’s no way of knowing which is which…”
I’m not holding my breath waiting for the “Guard” feature to come out. Here I’m going to have to simply disagree with you. I think Apple’s handling of this whole rollout makes a simple statement – we are not interested in the high end market.
Apple is out of that part of the business. They will provide the API hooks and let others try to turn FCPX into a high end tool, but they are no longer in that end of the business. They want to make a great Prius – they’ll let other companies try to modify it for NASCAR if they want to, but Apple is out.
If that’s not the case somebody has to come up with an explanation for their behavior. Lacking that explanation, I’ll take the events to mean what they seem to mean. Otherwise I’m like the girl who says, “yeah, he punched me in the face, but I know, deep down, he did it because he loves me…”
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
My sense is a large number of very disappointed pros jumped on the “it’s crap” bandwagon and didn’t approach this with an open mind. I don’t think it is that hard to figure out. But if you’re expecting a shiny new toy and Santa leaves you something you won’t be allowed to play with as it’s still missing it’s wheels, human nature is to find any reason to hate it. And it seems there are a lot of things to hate.
The non editors I’ve demonstrated it to get it quickly as they have no preconceived idea of how editing is supposed to work. That doesn’t mean they could become top drawer editors anytime soon. But it certainly broadens the appeal of FCPX and I don’t know why that’s a bad thing.
Best,
Geoff -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I see it as they are building a new foundation… Did you read Alex4d’s blog… All of a sudden, the story lines might make a little more sense.”
Hi
Its Yottabyte ready!
With the human brain maxing out at 3.6 x 10∧19 (yottabyte = 10∧24) that means its future-proofed for direct synaptical interfacing with the whole of the workforce at Apple’s new spaceship HQ and then some! 😉 -
[Herb Sevush] “”FCPx takes care of this by simply sliding the clips out of the way, but keeping them in place and the things connected to them in time, not necessarily at the same exact tc mark, but they are still together.”
But once you’ve slid these things out of the way, don’t you then still have to decide what to so with them. If I get it right, in the magnetic timeline if I extend or move a piece of audio, the already existing audio simply slides to a new track, but keep it’s temporal place in the timeline, and I now have 2 pieces of audio fighting each other. “
This is a very important point. FCPX’s default behaviors amount to editorial decisions. When the software automatically resolves a conflict, it’s making default assumptions about my editorial intent. Short of reading my mind, I don’t see how it can ever get this right more often than not.
Clip collisions, etc. are just not a problem for me. No doubt because I’ve internalized TTT and moving things around. But even when I do encounter a collision, conflict or media limit, I consider that an editorial problem. The software can only guess at my intention and it’s as likely to guess wrong as it is to get it right. There comes a point where it’s more efficient to just let me handle it. I stand by my previous analogy.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
“FCPX’s default behaviors amount to editorial decisions. When the software automatically resolves a conflict, it’s making default assumptions about my editorial intent. Short of reading my mind, I don’t see how it can ever get this right more often than not.”
This is one of the 2 conceptual ideas that I have the biggest problem with.
The other is related in a way, but it’s the idea of “connectedness’ as a virtue. It seems like X desperately wants to keep audio and video connected to each other – but that is a very limiting way of working.
The first thing I do after creating an assembly is DISconect everything – I literally hit select all and un-link the audio from the video. Now this habit may have come about because I’m normally working with multi-cam files, but I do this even when working on single camera projects. I think it enables me to be much more free with my approach to the material. And this absolutely goes against the grain of what X is trying to do, for fear inexperienced editors may much up their sync.
It’s not that you can’t do things in X, it’s that it seems to be optimized for the inexperienced.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Herb Sevush] “Did you remember the opening disclaimer?”
Well he’s right. But this being a new platform, I can’t imagine there’s a ton of old code in there. Time will tell. But why, then, did Apple even make FCPx it at all? Why not just keep developing iMovie? Add DSLR support and you’re off.
[Herb Sevush] “I’m not holding my breath waiting for the “Guard” feature to come out. Here I’m going to have to simply disagree with you. I think Apple’s handling of this whole rollout makes a simple statement – we are not interested in the high end market. “
That’s cool. For you it’s half empty. I guess for me it’s half full-ish. Either way, both valid. I can’t use FCPx now, but that doesn’t bother me. I have gone out on a limb to say this rollout is smart. There are very few times you get to throw out a legacy, especially in the video business. The opportunity presented itself and Apple took it. If they would have thrown everything and the kitchen sink in there and say “have at it” it would have been even more of a disaster. Just because it doesn’t export an OMF doesn’t mean it’s not built for “pros”. Using your NASCAR analogy, you have to build a strong frame first, or else the power of the engine will rip the car to shreds at the first green flag. That would be pointless. Apple always rolls brand new things out very slowly. I wish they could have gotten rid of fractional frame rates since we are throwing out legacies.
I think having the project and events separated at the Finder level is awesome. This will allow further collaboration that was never possible with FCP Classic due to everything being locked in an FCP project. You have to open the project to get a timeline out of it, now I can drag an event (the organization) or FCPx timeline (the editing) to another computer without having to open FCPx. Pretty convenient.
Also, Apple as a company has given a lot of power to the developer. They have built a platform and allow people to develop on top of it. I see this same way of thinking in FCPx. Buy what you need, don’t buy what you don’t need. This also allows developers to write support for FCPx rather than wait for Apple to write in support for them. This is a highly flexible model.
FCP Classic was never in the high end market when it first started. And there’s a lot of trickery that needs to happen to currently get it in to the “high end” market today. It is this cottage industry that Adobe and now even more so, Avid are trying to catch up to today. If Avid would have partnered with 3rd parties 4 or 5 years ago, perhaps they wouldn’t have needed this boost to get them off of death row.
[Herb Sevush] “Otherwise I’m like the girl who says, “yeah, he punched me in the face, but I know, deep down, he did it because he loves me…””
Wow.
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