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The Magnetic Timeline – Time, Space and One Clock To Rule Them All
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I sort of think this is what the Apple engineers had in mind: Wife puts together a beautiful video of Kid’s 2nd B-Day Party. Titles, cut-aways, photos. A few songs. Beautiful. Husband watches the video and says,”Great, but you need to add in the clip of Aunt Ethal.” Wife drops the clip of Aunt Ethal in after the first two clips. Everything stays together. Video is done.
Dean Isaacs
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[Dean Isaacs] “I sort of think this is what the Apple engineers had in mind: Wife puts together a beautiful video of Kid’s 2nd B-Day Party. Titles, cut-aways, photos. A few songs. Beautiful. Husband watches the video and says,”Great, but you need to add in the clip of Aunt Ethal.” Wife drops the clip of Aunt Ethal in after the first two clips. Everything stays together. Video is done.”
And, they had to very publicly take over the entire Vegas SuperMeet for that???
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’t miss my new tutorial: Prepare for a seamless transition to FCP X and OS X Lion
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/FCP-10-MAC-Lion/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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[Dean Isaacs] “I sort of think this is what the Apple engineers had in mind: Wife puts together a beautiful video of Kid’s 2nd B-Day Party. Titles, cut-aways, photos. A few songs. Beautiful. Husband watches the video and says,”Great, but you need to add in the clip of Aunt Ethal.” Wife drops the clip of Aunt Ethal in after the first two clips. Everything stays together. Video is done.”
Does not compute. That market does not buy $300 software.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “Does not compute. That market does not buy $300 software.”
Agreed. They have iMovie for that.
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I don’t see a distinction between the “open” timeline and the magnetic timeline in terms of time base. Both have a preset frame rate. Both are a linear time scale starting from an origin. In the old FCP timeline, even if there was infinite apparent real estate shown to the right of origin or to the right of the final clip, the playhead stopped playing when it got to the last element. That FCPX doesn’t yet offer a way to set a timecode offset for the timeline is not an indicator that a whole new metaphor for time has been created. There is still a scale at the top of the timeline showing the relative scale, and that scale is always regular and scales linearly just like any traditional timeline.
The big distinction for the magnetic timeline is the default closure of gaps and the lack of defined tracks. I think it was created not to redefine the philosophy of editing, but for a much more pragmatic purpose. I think it just boils down to making a UI that doesn’t require so much fiddling to get a desired result. If you are going to do a lot of editorial work in the timeline, you are more efficient if you don’t have to constantly rearrange objects in space to accommodate your edit decisions. Sure, there are seasoned pros who still maintain the discipline of a linear past that results in fewer timeline edits. But I suspect a very large majority of FCP users, high end pros included, do a great deal of manipulation of complex structures on the timeline. To draw yet another analogy, think of the magnetic timeline as cutting/pasting paragraphs in a word processor versus the traditional timeline which is much more like rearranging blocks of movable type on a press.
Certainly this changes how the user must approach meeting certain editorial goals. The framework of the traditional timeline spawned conventions that matched it’s behavior. Different conventions will evolve to match the behavior of the magnetic timeline. But both the traditional and magnetic timelines express a linear time scale against which media is laid out in sequence, so I don’t think there is a seismic a shift as David’s premise suggests.
Best,
Andy -
David, kudos on another great post.
It was a good read while waiting on an AE render, but now I’m going to have trouble concentrating on work again because I’m sitting here pondering the fact that time can’t be directly measured.
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This is an interesting experiment. I for one don’t find myself rooting for Apple on this one. They’re fixing something that wasn’t broke.
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I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re trying to do.
In FCPX if you insert a clip in the primary storyline, those clips linked to clips after that all move and maintain their relationships to the clips they connect to in the primary storyline. There’s nothing to select or deselect. They all maintain their relationships. If you want to insert a gap it’s Option W. It inserts a gap of three seconds which you can then extend if you’d like. If you want to remove a clip but maintain the relationships to the clips above it you’d just use the delete key (as opposed to the backspace/delete key which is a ripple delete and also deletes all related/connected clips). -
[Walter Soyka] “What challenge was this redesign meant to address?”
That is the 64,000 Dollar Question.
[Walter Soyka] “What benefits (if any) are there to changing the way we think about how the NLE abstracts and represents the edit back to us?”
The 64,000 Dollar Question, Mark II.
Then if you take the answer to those two questions, plus the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, and feed them to Deep Thought, and let him grind on that for seven and a half million years. You will then find out who the target market for FCP X is, and of course 42.
Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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[Chris Jacek] “but the concept of “ripple only” sounds like a real sticking point to me. I can say that I never edit in this manner, and always do “insert” style editing to borrow an old video tape term.”
Right. Wasn’t that the point of the NLE in the first place? To insert footage wherever you want, in a non-linear way?
Ripple is a linear tape function designed to keep your EDL nice and neat, and to make it easier to get match frames. All linear tape editors operate in the constant ripple mode as a default.
Do an edit, the list auto-ripples, so your old out, becomes your new in.
If you want to change an edit in the middle of a project that affects length, then the list would have to ripple from that point, or there would either be a hole, or an overwrite. And least in linear editors you had the choice to not ripple the list if you needed to.
So how is this constant ripple idea some kind of “new paradigm” when it just mimics linear video tape editing standard default mode?
I guess it’s only a new paradigm if you learned to edit in the last ten years or so.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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