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The Mother of All NLE Demos
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Who doesn’t setup Roles when using FCPX? It’s so easy?”
Sure, but sometimes you just want to get in and edit. Far worse, is when you’ve inherited a project midstream. Then it’s a different story. This is made worse by the fact that changing roles in the browser does not ripple forward to the same clips once they’ve already been editing into the sequence.
Furthermore, roles are less useful if you don’t intend to export multichannel masters. If you change your mind later, it’s extra work, because that step was skipped at the beginning.
So to answer your question, most folks I encounter working with X do not bother with roles. Not best practices, of course, but reality.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “The trick to staying organized is starting organized.”
LOL. Have you seen how some people edit??!!
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] ”
So to answer your question, most folks I encounter working with X do not bother with roles. Not best practices, of course, but reality.”So we can agree that this is not a shortcoming of the software. The same thing can happen with sloppy editors and tracks. The nice thing about X is that you can select clips, and groups of clips, in the timeline index and reassign Roles very easily. This is much harder when you have to shift select little mini clips in tacks and need to shift them up or down, especially when there’s clips above and below. Pr will literally destroy audio when doing this, so be careful!
There is no shifting in X when assigning output channels to clips in the Project, but rather a simple reassign of data.
It takes a while to figure this out, and flearn how it might be a strength instead of a drawback. That is also a reality.
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[Oliver Peters] “LOL. Have you seen how some people edit??!!”
Yes. Some editors aren’t organized.
This is one of the nicest things about X. You can import the footage, tell people to assign extremely basic Roles to all the clips they just imported, even if it’s something like SOT, or Music, or Effects, and they will never have to organize the audio again. Ever. They can get to work and focus on what they are good at.
If they turned off the wrong audio channel, all you have to do is turn it back on. You don’t have to go back and find the source clip and add that channel of audio to a full timeline, and reexport or reshuffle the tracks to get the desired output. You simply hit a check box in X to add the audio channel back to the timeline, and you are done. So easy, so fast, so convenient, and in this case, far better than tracks.
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[Jeff Markgraf] “I think Bill’s point is that “I like working this way/I’ve always worked this way” is absolutely NOT equivalent to “I MUST work this way.” If we stay focused on the result, rather than the process, we can evaluate and perhaps adopt new and different ways of working. “
I agree and I tried to mention something like this before but I think it was too little, too late and it got lost in the shuffle.
When transitioning from one program to another (whether it’s FCP Legend to Avid or PPro to X) you absolutely need to talk about things in terms of what is the desired end result and not step-by-step process because the step-by-step process is almost always going to be different between apps. But, due to differences between the different NLEs, achieving a similar end result could require more effort and may not even be possible. Ultimately it’s up to the user to weigh the pros and cons and make the decision that they think is best for them and their workflow.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “So we can agree that this is not a shortcoming of the software.”
Sure, I agree with that. I’d love to see roles expanded along the lines of bussing.
FWIW – PPro has its own set of audio gotchas. If you don’t correctly assign channel configuration of source clips BEFORE anything is edited to the timeline, operator errors occur. Usually this means dual-mono (2 mics) camera tracks are edited to the PPro timeline as stereo. There, you can’t change it after the fact, but you can make both left and right be one channel/mic or the other. For that sort of stuff, I prefer FCP 7 or MC over PPro.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “My guess is that if you developed a truly metadata centric workflow with FCPX, it wouldn’t be near as daunting or limiting as it seems to be.”
I don’t find the idea daunting, just not as good as the color coding and track assignments approach I took for this one specific project I’m referencing. What can I say, I really like using color coding as an organization tool. Also, I assume you mean keyword-centric workflow as things like track assignments and color coding are metadata too.
With all that being said, I would’ve much rather used X, PPro or, hell, even FCP 7 for that gig instead of Avid because we used so….many… stills and Avid is just horrible with stills. So painful. So, utterly painful…
[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t know why I have to answer for Carsten.”
I didn’t mean to imply that you did. I was just pointing out the NLEs having different pros/cons is the crux of the issue that spun this thread off into a tangent.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “You can import the footage, tell people to assign extremely basic Roles to all the clips they just imported, even if it’s something like SOT, or Music, or Effects, and they will never have to organize the audio again. Ever. They can get to work and focus on what they are good at.”
My point before was that people would be more likely to do this, if those settings options were part of the import window. Seems like a very easy addition by Apple.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeff Markgraf] “On the one hand, [Herb Sevush] “I don’t think there’s anything that X can’t do.”
On the other hand, [Herb Sevush] “the difference is that the structure of a tracked NLE allows for this possibility.”
The logical inverse of this statement, to me, is that “the structure of a non-tracked NLE does not allow for this possibility.””When I said there’s nothing X can’t do I was referring to the finished editorial object – there’s no type of project that X can’t do. Workflows are somewhat malleable, there are many different way to produce the same deliverables. I’ve cut the same series I’m working on now with 3 different NLE’s – *edit, FCP and now Ppro. Ppro, because of it’s track mixer, is the easiest to work with, but I had no unworkable problems with the other 2 before now. I’m quite sure I could cut this series with X or Avid as well.
The question is which NLE makes the most overall sense for me to work with at this time. My answer, for this moment, is Ppro.
[Jeff Markgraf] “Yes, in its current development state, X doesn’t do some of the track-based techniques that are important to some workflows (like yours). But I don’t see any evidence that X’s “trackless” mode prohibits the implementation of these techniques. Apple’s philosophy may prohibit such functions, but that’s a whole different thing.”
I’ll grant you that you could create a trackless system that would be as effective – roles based mixer, color coded roles, single keystroke assigning of roles to a clip in the timeline the same way that multicam assigns a video angle with a single keystroke.
At the same time you must also grant that a tracked system could be created that avoids clip collisions – in fact the very first digital NLE (EMC) did just that.
I don’t think the current batch of NLE’s have exhausted the possibilities in any way.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Walter Soyka] “There’s no roles mixer in FCPX today, but that doesn’t mean that a trackless system can never bus and/or mix. A track can only accommodate a single element at a specific time in Premiere Pro today, but that doesn’t mean that a tracked system can never avoid clip collisions.”
Perfectly stated.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf
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