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The Magnetic Timeline – What’s The Paradigm?
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[Chris Kenny] “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.”
A precise example of why there are so many, like Kevin Zimmerman who wrote it initially, who hate the so-called magnetic timeline “with the white heat of a thousand suns.”
It seems the people sequestered from the outside world inside their Cupertino campus forgot that WYSIWYG is meaningful to most editors.
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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[Chris Kenny] “Well, it could. It presently doesn’t in FCP X.”
No, it can’t. The self-collapsing trackless timeline inherently prevents you from using the spatial position in the timeline.
By the way, you could mimic all this in FCP7 today. Just constantly collapse your timeline as much as possible and use color-coding. Would anyone really prefer to work this way?
[Chris Kenny] “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 disagree that there’s overloading. Compositing is driven by the layer order, but not the layer position.
As for clarity, I think that most designers would agree that the trackless timeline is deceptive — the alignment of clips on the tiers of the timeline suggests a relationship which doesn’t exist.
[Chris Kenny] “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.”
This is a strawman argument, and a terrible use for tracks for all the reasons you’ve defined. The origin of the footage should be metadata already associated with each file and clip. What the NLE needs is a tool for selecting clips based on that metadata, not to force the editor to double-encode that metadata in the project.
Further, the offline editor’s job is not to make the online editor’s job easier.
Finally, you make the excellent point that there are many ways to use tracks. Why would you take this power and flexibility away from the editor?
[Chris Kenny] “[color coding is] more flexible because it allows for an arbitrary number of overlapping clips”
But it’s far, far less suited for simply conveying information visually. See my M&Ms example.
[Chris Kenny] “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.”
So let’s take the best elements of a tracked timeline (the ability for the editor to use spatial positioning on the timeline, either as scratch tracks as they work, or as way of encoding some sort of metadata), the best elements of a trackless timeline (clip collision avoidance), and the main idea behind Michael Gissing’s DAW suggestion (layered clips in a track).
The timeline now has one track divider, which separates the audio tracks from the video tracks. Let’s add user-definable track dividers, so the editor can separate groups of tracks from each other. The editor could manually move a clip across the dividers, but the software would honor the track dividers in the event of clip collision, adding tracks into the groups defined by the dividers as necessary.
You will give up the notion of a hard-assigned track (V3 may become V4 at some point to avoid a clip collision), but you’ll keep the editor’s ability to manually arrange the clips and make the implicit notion of groups of tracks much more formal.
What’s more, you could collapse and expand groups of tracks, and possibly treat them as compositions or busses (adding power and flexibility and somewhat recovering the lost use of hard-assigned track numbers).
I’m sure there’s room in this idea for some more refinement, but I would really love to have this capability in my NLE today.
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
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[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.”
It’s not about either/or; it’s both/and. The exact moment is at 316 frames into the timeline. And even with non-tape based cameras, it is still at 316 frames in that the light hit the sensor chip.
Ever been at a conference when the TALKING HEAD tells you to find the blue page and on the back look for the section in bold and look for the underlined header BORED TO DEATH? As he assumes everyone has found this, TALKING HEAD begins to read the section out loud as half the group is still fumbling through an increasingly messy stack of pages.
However, if you bind them and get rid of that stupid COMPANY LOGO SLIP COVER FOLDER and number the pages and paragraphs, and the same TALKING HEAD asks you turn to page 52 paragraph 5 sentence 3. Two seconds later, we are all on the same sentence. You can still color code em blue if you like; you can still underline em if you like. Even with PDFs on an Ipad. Type in 52. Press enter. Boom we are on the same page.
316 frames in the timeline is on page 52 Act 2 Scene 3 in the shooting script. The editor changed things up and everyone may not agree with the edits. But at least they are referencing the same point in time when ripping each other’s throats out.
From page through distribution, it’s still all about light sound and time. Now on a metaphysical level, time and space are not constant but relative. And 24 frames per second is not reality. But for our purposes, if you shoot in 24fps, it’s ‘as if’ it is.
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. -
[Walter Soyka] “No, it can’t. The self-collapsing trackless timeline inherently prevents you from using the spatial position in the timeline.”
It stops you from using solely spatial position to categorize things, but given metadata tagging the app could (but, admittedly, probably won’t) offer a spatially arranged view of that metadata.
This is one of the great things about metadata — it allows the software to “understand” enough to present or organize the same data in many different ways.
[Walter Soyka] “By the way, you could mimic all this in FCP7 today. Just constantly collapse your timeline as much as possible and use color-coding. Would anyone really prefer to work this way?”
This is sort of a silly point. The new paradigm is something that all hangs together; the trackless design, the use of metadata, the clip connections. Obviously nobody would want to give up this kind of spatial organization in FCP 7, because it would be more work for the editor to manually collapse everything, the environment does not have a toolset designed with this in mind, and you wouldn’t be getting any of the magnetic timeline’s benefits in the process.
[Walter Soyka] “This is a strawman argument, and a terrible use for tracks for all the reasons you’ve defined. The origin of the footage should be metadata already associated with each file and clip. What the NLE needs is a tool for selecting clips based on that metadata, not to force the editor to double-encode that metadata in the project.”
I thought you were arguing that the use of tracks to arbitrarily categorize footage was on of their benefits.
[Walter Soyka] “Further, the offline editor’s job is not to make the online editor’s job easier.”
In an ideal world the offline editor could do whatever they liked, and the online editor would figure out how to replicate in the online, however long that took. In the real world (of indie film, at least), an offline editor can easily cost the production silly amounts of money by not taking steps to make the online editor’s job easier, and online editors are consulted about how sequences should be delivered, by productions that wish for that to not happen.
[Walter Soyka] “The timeline now has one track divider, which separates the audio tracks from the video tracks. Let’s add user-definable track dividers, so the editor can separate groups of tracks from each other. The editor could manually move a clip across the dividers, but the software would honor the track dividers in the event of clip collision, adding tracks into the groups defined by the dividers as necessary.”
This does solve some of the traditional problems associated with track-based categorization, but to me, anyway, it seems like a lot of complexity to add just so that you have snap things into rigidly defined vertical slots. And it does still have a few issues when it comes to picture. For instance, presumably you’ve got your text track group that’s over your camera footage group. Now there’s one shot in the whole program that requires camera footage to be composited on top of text. You have to create another camera footage track group on top of the text track group, to hold one clip in a two hour long sequence (or whatever).
Another nice (related) bonus of having a freeform timeline + metadata is that metadata can be attached at any time without worrying about changing the edit. Some creative editors aren’t great at organizing things. When it comes time to organize them in preparation for the online, tracks make this a very hazardous process, because when you move something to a different track to (change its categorization), you may be unknowingly changing the picture as well. You have to keep checking. Simply going through and tagging things doesn’t have this problem.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “It seems the people sequestered from the outside world inside their Cupertino campus forgot that WYSIWYG is meaningful to most editors.
“Timelines are never WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG came out of the print world: you make a page look a certain way on screen, and that’s how it looks when it prints. Nothing of the timeline appears in the finished product. The timeline is an abstract symbolic representation.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Come on, Chris. In FCP1-7 you scrub through the timeline as shown in the canvas and pretty perfectly wysiwyg if you play the canvas on a broadcast monitor.
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. -
[Craig Alan] “Come on, Chris. In FCP1-7 you scrub through the timeline as shown in the canvas and pretty perfectly wysiwyg if you play the canvas on a broadcast monitor.”
Yes, the canvas is (mostly) WYSIWYG. The timeline (and, particularly, the track-based aspect of it) is not.
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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] “Timelines are never WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG came out of the print world: you make a page look a certain way on screen, and that’s how it looks when it prints. Nothing of the timeline appears in the finished product. The timeline is an abstract symbolic representation.”
There you go Chris, ignore the context of the thread and try your best confuse the message by making the discussion about semantics and the history of word processing if that’s what it takes to make yourself look and feel knowledgeable.
Okay, feeling good about yourself yet?
The others easily understood my intent, and I don’t think you’re stupid, so what does that say about you?
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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[David Roth Weiss] “There you go Chris, ignore the context of the thread and try your best confuse the message by making the discussion about semantics and the history of word processing if that’s what it takes to make yourself look and feel knowledgeable. “
The thread context was the value (or lack thereof) of using positioning on the vertical axis of the 2D space provided by a traditional multitrack timeline as a way of organizing different types of clips. There is nothing WYSIWYG about ability, because the timeline itself does not show up anywhere in “What You Get”. Calling this WYSIWYG is like calling writing HTML code WYSIWYG, because, hey, I can see the code for a header there, and when the page renders I get a header.
This is not a meaningless semantic distinction. It is critical to be able to control every aspect of the appearance of the final program, because otherwise it can’t reflect the creative intent of the editor. No such concern comes into play with the arrangement of the timeline.
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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] “This is not a meaningless semantic distinction. “
The others had no problem understanding the intent of what I wrote.
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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