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The Magnetic Timeline – What’s The Paradigm?
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[Chris Kenny] “Tracks do allow for some of this, but arrangement in a flat 2D space is a pretty crude approach. For something like tagging audio roles, color coding would provide more flexibility.”
I’ve given this some more thought, and and I can’t figure out how color coding is more flexible.
Color coding uses the design principle of contrast, which is better for showing which things are different than which things are the same.
Think about a bowl of M&Ms. It’s easy for you to tell at a glance that different M&Ms are mixed together, but it’s much, much harder to look at the bowl and mentally group all the red ones together.
Now imagine rearranging those M&Ms in a grid by color. Using 2D space (the principles of alignment and proximity), you can see both the groupings and the separations at a single glance.
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] “Of course, the magnetic timeline uses arrangement in 2D space to convey information — but it essentially ignores the principle of alignment as a tool for showing relationships. A tracked timeline can use alignment for visually grouping items, but a trackless timeline can’t.”
Well, it could. It presently doesn’t in FCP X.
[Walter Soyka] “You can add color-coding to a trackless timeline to convey meaning, but you could use color-coding in a tracked timeline, too — so a trackless timeline is still one dimension down.”
But using the vertical axis to categorize clips and associate them with each other (via overlapping) and convey their vertical stacking order for compositing purposes is overloading things a bit too much for clarity, I think.
I run into this all the time doing online edit work. I’ll tell the offline editor something like “Hey, it would be really helpful if you’d put all your Red-originated footage on V1, all your DLSR footage on V2, and all of your VFX shots on V3, because they all need to be handled differently in the online”. Well, first off, this is probably extra work for the editor, because they might have Red-originated footage used in cutaways on V2, that now have to be collapsed onto V1. And secondly, maybe there’s a composite somewhere in the edit, that requires Red-originated footage on V2, because it’s overlaid with 50% opacity on top of Red-originated footage on V1. So now V2 is all DSLR footage, except for this one random Red clip that absolutely needs to be there. I could ask for a track of buffer between each type of footage, not sometimes you need to stack three clips to get a particular effect, etc.
There’s quite a lot of awkwardness caused by trying to use tracks for too many things at once.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “I’ve given this some more thought, and and I can’t figure out how color coding is more flexible.”
It’s more flexible because it allows for an arbitrary number of overlapping clips, vs. “effects go on tracks 5 & 6”, which allows for no more than two overlapping effects clips. It also enables magnetic timeline collision behaviors to function sensibly. With tracks that have rigid meanings, pushing a colliding clip to another track is a terrible idea, because for all the NLE knows it’s reclassifying a dialogue clip as music in the process.
Yes, you could solve these problems by adopting the DAW trick mentioned earlier of overlapping clips on the same track, but that’s not without its own pitfalls in terms of clarify of visual presentation, and it’s not clear to me that it generalizes well to video (I have three overlapping video clips — how do I define which one is visually on top?), which you’d probably want for consistency’s sake in an NLE.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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What exactly does a trackless timeline do that you can’t do with a tracked timeline? Clips still have a vertical relationship don’t they, essentially giving them a tracked status of sorts? If you want all Red footage grouped for an online but you need some Red footage composited over some DSLR footage don’t you run into the same problem as a tracked timeline? I honestly don’t see the issue with tracks and I guess I don’t know what problem they represent that trackless fixes. There’s been a lot of great discussion about the concepts of tracked vs. trackless but can anyone give a realworld example of a problem a tracked timeline has that can only be solved via a trackless one?
For example, if dialogue is on 1 and 2 but it turns out i need a 3rd track of dialogue, insert a track. Then everything else is still on dedicated tracks but the track number has increased by one. Is it because you might end up with 30 tracks?
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
Other than as an anthropomorphic metaphor, software does not “understand.” It does not reason. It does not design. If a computer program is ‘intuitive’ at all, it means that it acts as we would expect it to act due to the software designer’s use of well-crafted, ergonomic, metaphoric interface. If you design media-creation-software to produce pre-patterned outcomes based on common usage/consensus, reason, and design, you have in essence dummied it down. Computer software designers are not the only ones doing this to the arts. How-to-‘write’-books have been guilty of this as well. And equally destructive to the creative process. Thus we have unnatural plot twists at predetermined IN points/marks/page numbers in order to heighten the tension in a standardized way, bring us to orgasm in a standardized way, and resolve all conflict in a predictably crowd pleasing way, and in a timely manner. A flat unexciting orgasm/resolution that satisfies a typical audience member. Not a problem – in post, you can jack the sound, quicken the rhythm, employ hypnotic quick edits that work subliminally and forcefully to get the heart pounding. Neurologically stimulating even when completely brain-dead.
More often than not, with predetermined patterns, like templates, everyone’s product will begin to feel the same. They often do anyway because fashion dictates. But in the analog world or the digital one that uses the analog as a model, a different drummer and therefore drumbeat comes to light. It’s one thing to choose a preset, or use a professionally designed template; it’s quite another to make the use of these the default and the unique a workaround. If the nuts and bolts of a system are themselves mini-templates/meta-templates, you will ease editors toward certain editorial patterns. This will assure a quicker/easier route to an acceptable product, but not necessarily the best or most creative, and certainly not the most individualized.
Pre-designing not only is a very bad model to follow in a profession application, but I would argue in an educational application as well.
I’m not predicting this will be the result of wide adoption of FCP X, but it was exactly my fear when I first looked at the new Imovie. And I do think there are more than just hints of the new Imovie in FCP X.
For FCP X to use industry standard (and even common usage) vocabulary (such as ‘project’) and have it mean something completely different than in every other NLE including FCP 1-7 is counterproductive and anti-metaphoric. Metaphor is helpful when based on historical reference. To cut ties with your own history and those of your current user base is not only counterintuitive, it is a denial of the past. If I have 10 different timelines of a show I am editing – different lengths, different endings, different formats, different compositions, I am not working on 10 different ‘projects’. If someone asks me what ‘project’ am I working on now – they mean what subject, what video, what event, what film … not what version/sequence.
OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz
; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A. -
[Chris Kenny] “I don’t agree with this at all. If I arrange shots A, B, and C, what’s important about shot C is that it comes after shot B, not that it starts 316 frames into the program, or whatever. Editing is almost entirely about relationships between shots.”
This sounds like a reductionist description of what editing is that misses some essentials.
Editing is as much about rhythm – a temporal account of the relationships between events – as it is about Shot C following shot B. Hence it does actually signify that shot C starts 316 frames in, in the sense of the meaning and impact of having shot C occur where it does rather than earlier or later. The flow of time is not accurately perceived by the viewer, it is true, because editing as we know can significantly compress or expand the perception of clock time, but the sense of narrative “chronology” (in the sense of when events are perceived to occur in relationship to each other as measured by time) is fundamental to what editing is about except at the most crude level.
It seems to me that what you are describing is “assembly” rather than “editing” – and it’s not being pretentious to suggest there a difference between those two things.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I agree with you, but I don’t think this software is designed particularly for users who do versioning, rather for people who simply put together a project and output it. One time and out. That’s this product’s audience.
All the best,
Tom
Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2011 “Complete Training for FCPX”
and “Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press -
[Simon Ubsdell] “Editing is as much about rhythm – a temporal account of the relationships between events – as it is about Shot C following shot B. Hence it does actually signify that shot C starts 316 frames in, in the sense of the meaning and impact of having shot C occur where it does rather than earlier or later. The flow of time is not accurately perceived by the viewer, it is true, because editing as we know can significantly compress or expand the perception of clock time, but the sense of narrative “chronology” (in the sense of when events are perceived to occur in relationship to each other as measured by time) is fundamental to what editing is about except at the most crude level.”
I bolded some text there. I don’t think we really disagree about anything here.
Less abstractly: in most of the cases where you drop a shot on V2 in a conventional multitrack editor, that shot is linked to whatever is happening on V1. That’s not to say there’s literally no occasion on which you want to leave that shot in the same absolute position on V2 and change what’s happening on V1, and obviously FCP X lets you do that. But its default behavior is to act as if these shots have some meaningful connection between them, because usually they do.
Most of the new magnetic timeline behaviors are like this. They’re simply about having more reasonable defaults.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Alan] “Other than as an anthropomorphic metaphor, software does not “understand.”
It “understands” in the sense that when data is structured in certain ways, computer software can manipulate that data in ways that are meaningful to humans.
[Craig Alan] “Pre-designing not only is a very bad model to follow in a profession application, but I would argue in an educational application as well.”
Err… I’m not sure what aspect of FCP X this critique is referring to.
[Craig Alan] “If I have 10 different timelines of a show I am editing – different lengths, different endings, different formats, different compositions, I am not working on 10 different ‘projects’. If someone asks me what ‘project’ am I working on now – they mean what subject, what video, what event, what film … not what version/sequence.”
I agree that FCP X should file off all instances of the word “Project” and replace them with “Sequence” or “Timeline”. But I think you’re reading a little too much into Apple’s word choices.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Hancock] “What exactly does a trackless timeline do that you can’t do with a tracked timeline? Clips still have a vertical relationship don’t they, essentially giving them a tracked status of sorts?”
Clips have a stacking order, but it’s local, and it’s not used for categorization the way tracks sometimes are.
[Michael Hancock] “If you want all Red footage grouped for an online but you need some Red footage composited over some DSLR footage don’t you run into the same problem as a tracked timeline?”
No, because in this hypothetical you’re now using metadata to separate different types of footage, not their vertical position.
Of course you could use metadata to do this with a track-based system as well, but the argument was that tracks were better because they allowed categorization based on position within a 2D space; if you have to fall back on metadata anyway, tracks can no longer claim that advantage.
[Michael Hancock] “For example, if dialogue is on 1 and 2 but it turns out i need a 3rd track of dialogue, insert a track. Then everything else is still on dedicated tracks but the track number has increased by one. Is it because you might end up with 30 tracks?”
One of the other benefits being touted for tracks is that sometimes deliverables requirements ask for certain elements on certain tracks. If you’re working to such specs, you can’t just add tracks like that.
It seems like FCP X is going to address this problem by using metadata to identify different types of audio clips, and then mapping them to tracks only on export, presumably mixing things down as necessary.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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