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The Magnetic Timeline – Time, Space and One Clock To Rule Them All
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Walter, I understand that many are still trying to understand. I’m not sure there’s much more to discover. This software wasn’t written in collusion with Walter Murch and the Coen bros. In fact, I have yet to hear of one industry insider that can say he contributed to what was released last month.
We do know the Jobs loved iMovie 8. And now we have FCP X for $300.
That’s why I poked a little fun at studying a child’s writings that is assumed to be e. e. cummmings. Yes, we’re hoping to find insight, but there may not be any. It might be as simple as “Steve made me do this.”I enjoy everything David L writes. I wish he’d been at Apple when all this was going on. We’d still be lighting firecrackers and dousing lawn fires with champagne if he had been part of the production – no doubt about it. But he wasn’t.
So while his questions are intriguing, and his observations are educational, I can’t help but think he is also privately digging around the ruins of FCP, like an archeologist, hoping to find consolation for its sudden demise. -
Perhaps the central problem you – and MANY other “professionals” are having is that for you – editing is EXCLUSIVELY the kind of editing you do.
We are ALL wedded to an individual experience model. And it’s incredibly easy to fall into the trap of “video editing is what my experience tells me it is.” – I personally fall into that trap all the time. But I’m trying to change my thinking.
I still remember a guy asking me some years back for help on problems he was having doing a commercial – and I started preaching the gospel of 29 and a half seconds – only to discover he wasn’t doing broadcast at all, but rather doing a WEB commercial and actually needed something that could run anywhere from 20 seconds to 2 MINUTES!
He was getting paid for his work the same way I was – but NOT working under the same traditional standards I’ve spent decades thinking were absolute.
In FCP’s early days, I had the great fortune to spend time talking to Apple Product evangelists, early users group leaders and even a few people at Apple itself (including a couple of very brief chances to talk directly to Randy U. and Brian the product manager. One thing I always made it a point to note is that for every editor like Walter Murch or The Coens, there are dozens, hundreds or now thousands who are NOT like them at all. Most of us who edit video for business purposes do very, VERY different work than “Hollywood style” movie cutting. We work on corporate presentations, business videos, demo reels, presentation embeds, infomercials, and a host of other “non-movie” tasks. Personally, I’ve edited more than 300 corporate videos and I’ve NEVER cut a movie – and have absolutely no desire to do so.
“Movie-making” is the visible and important tip of the spear – and drives a lot of acceptance for the brand – but the maybe 10,000 Sundance submissions PALE in comparison to the thousands of corporate communications pieces done each and every day around the world with FCP.
FCP-X and it’s new way of thinking about content over time might create major difficulties for some types of work in these early days. But if you can’t open your brain up to the new possibilities of what it MIGHT do very much better – I suspect you’re going to miss something.
And if it DOES offer speed and data base flexibility and superior “agility” in the long run, I suspect many of the issues that it has today will fall pretty rapidly over it’s development cycle.
If apple has truly developed a new “engine” here – while it makes perfect sense to debut it in something akin to a sports car – if that engine approach is fundamentally efficient and powerful and durable – I suspect it will eventually end up in both motorcycles and long haul trucks.
We’ll see.
Great discussion, btw. I’m delighted so see the knees stop jerking and some rational discussion of the underpinnings here. THIS is far more useful than the chicken little stuff from the first weeks.
Bravo, all.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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Or…
I’m getting very well paid to do the monthly corporate video report.
This month the CEO’s script requires 8 minutes instead of his usual 3. The other 4 area reports are also all over the time map…
Also, the art department finished all the new logos and wants them replaced throughout the piece so I’d like to manipulate the meta-data to tag them as the new standard graphics and have them repopulate all their respective occurances – full screen, insets, in composites, and in title screen – automatically – project wide. Finally, I’d like to confirm that the numbers in all the embedded charts that we use for each show are updated when accounting gets them done…Since a lot of this stuff is time flexible – I don’t want to waste my time opening 25 holes in my timeline, pasting new clips, dragging all the titles and stuff into alignment and then closing up all the gaps I’ve just created everywhere – that seems inefficient and kinda stupid…
Wouldn’t it be SWEET to have a video editing app with a super-flexible timeline that also understands DATA naturally? Rather than just a linear stack of fixed state picture clips and unconnected layer clips that have to be re-built, relayed, and re-timed endlessly in order to do the same basic construction each month?
Oh, yeah, and I can use it do do Mom’s birthday movie every bit as well.
Works for me.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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Well, at least it’s slightly more graspable than “space/time can be folded in on itself.”
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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[Walter Soyka] ” The AVMutableComposition class that everyone keeps pointing to as the essence of an FCPX project does not provide any tools for clip connections, which are the foundation of the magnetic timeline, or for primary and secondary storylines. I think AV Foundation naturally models timelines the old-fashioned way.”
Hi
The linked document is dated 5th May 2010. A year is a long time in s/w development 😉The AVF complex clips must be defined in essence in their own database structure. Wouldn’t it be possible in a ‘relational database’ context for the designers of AVF to have added hooks to the individual elements of the AVMutableComposition – to link to other AVMCs (via the database ‘hooks’) to form even more complex AVMC entities?
In other words, since FCPX doesn’t have a ‘project’ in the old way, the databased interaction of AVF and CoreData (= the OS) define the Project (= Sequence). The FCPX GUI designers have worked to service that ‘engine’…
That would be my guess. 😉 -
[Bill Davis] ” …if you can’t open your brain up to the new possibilities… “
Hi
Good post Bill.
When I ‘retired’ from broadcast TV in 1993 I determined that I should boldly go into what was then a buzz word on the distant horizon – Interactive Television.The prototyping tool of choice at the time (for an individual unsubsidised enthusiast like I was) was Macromedia Director. Director had an inflexibly timeline-based workflow with lots of ‘goto’ moments. In essence clunky and inelegant.
In the late 90s a new program called mTropolis was born – OS 9 only 🙁 (It was later bought out and killed by Quark!!!)
This had an extremely elegant and powerful node-based object-oriented workflow, one which allowed the essentially linear viewer experience of watching the ‘media’, but allowing very cool presentation in an ‘interactive multi-‘ way.I think interactive television as a paradigm floundered because it neither gave the navigational freedom that say the Web does, nor the high-fascination (totally linear) experience that a good move or television programme provides.
BUT. The editing assembly process an editor goes through to aggregate his cut-together clips to eventually achieve the finely crafted finished movie or TV show is, at a lot of stages in its gestation, very much like the juggling-of-building-blocks that went on with Director or mTropolis.
At that stage of the editing process a Node-Based interface paradigm could be totally appropriate (and productive), in my view.
A question to David L.:
How much time have you spent using Shake or the node-based part of Color? -
[Chris Kenny] “Does not compute. That market does not buy $300 software.”
Why not? That market buys $2,000 Macs and $1,000 DSLR kits.
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] “Wouldn’t it be possible in a ‘relational database’ context for the designers of AVF to have added hooks to the individual elements of the AVMutableComposition – to link to other AVMCs (via the database ‘hooks’) to form even more complex AVMC entities?
Why assume that this all goes back to AV Foundation? That’s just the framework for reading and writing media — FCPX is free to “think” about the timeline however it likes, then make AV Foundation calls to read the edited clips in and write the rendered timeline out. Applications build on frameworks; they are not constrained by them. The new timeline model was a choice, and now we’re trying to analyze it. The development internals shouldn’t matter in this context.
[Paul Dickin] “The FCPX GUI designers have worked to service that ‘engine’…”
This issue is broader than GUI design. It’s not just how we interact with the surface of the editorial app that’s changed — how the app itself “thinks” has changed.
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] “…how the app itself “thinks” has changed.”
Hi
Reversing your reply:
How the app itself “thinks” has changed. The new timeline model was a choice. Why (not) assume that this all goes back to AV Foundation?I’m not saying that that was a ‘good’ choice. Just that that may be part of a simple explanation.
Until the OS’s CoreData functions have full XML I/O APIs FCPX can’t have any external interchange options.
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[Craig Seeman] “I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re trying to do.”
I’ll try to expalin it another way because I think the example exposes a fundamental limitation in the efficiency of the magnetic timeline:
Say you have ten layers of video and ten layers of audio. At a single point in time you wish to create a gap, say to insert a new clip. But all the clips at that point overlap with some cuts and transitions happening to the left and some to the right of your insert point. The gap you want to create is not a vertical hole, a cut all tracks and ripple. Rather it’s going to maintain that overlapping nature. But which clips will move to the right and which won’t are editorial decisions.
I’ve found the most efficient way to do this is in non-ripple mode…to select all clips that intersect my insert point in time plus all those that lie to the right of them. (I can do that in Premiere Pro with a single macro-enabled mouse click, otherwise it’s 3 operations) Then I de-select the clips that I don’t want to move, and move the entire selection rightward. This leaves me with the overlapping gaps that I want. I then insert the new clip and extend whatever layers of sound and video that I decide are required to close up the newly created gaps on their various tracks.
This operation is necessary in some form or other in all complex timelines of any length. I will do it hundreds of times in my projects. And I’m sure there are alternative ways of doing it in all NLEs. The point is though, that it requires a lot of editorial decisions about individual elements, stuff that couldn’t possibly be done in ripple mode without the software reading my mind. And it seems to me that it will always be done more efficiently in non-ripple mode with a traditional vertical timeline.
The magnetic timeline appears to be designed to be better at automating simple tasks of assembly where it doesn’t require much built in ripple intelligence. Go beyond a few layers of overlapping video and audio and it’s efficiency will have rapidly diminishing returns. It’s clear that it was designed to be efficient at less complex forms of editing and thus appeal to a less demanding market. But unless the underpinnings of the interface will allow Apple to provide the alternative of a traditional multi-tracked timeline at some point in the future, I think using X for any complex editing task will be done more for the sake of proving that it’s possible rather than it provides a clear advantage.
As far as multi-layered audio the idea of designating tracks by metadata looks like an inherently clumsy workaround compared to the visually intuitive track based vertical timeline.
David
AllinOneFilms.com
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