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The Mother of All NLE Demos
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Great to see this David. I just wanted to know how much the Fairlight CMI or the Synclavier influenced the layout and the tracks concept.
When I went to the meeting at Fairlight around this same time to discuss a version for film & video post, I asked why the horizontal layout. Why not vertical tracks like a dubbing chart and a mixing desk. They said the layout had been developed by software people in the UK and based on musical notation so horizontal stacking of tracks.
So I knew that at a similar time to your developments Fairlight were also embarking on R&D for what would be one of the first DAWs.
Laser disks! wow and 8meg of RAM. A bit of screen lag but hey we still have that all these years later with amazing drive speed and processing power.
What was the music? Sounded a bit like Jan Garbarek.
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[Michael Gissing] “Why not vertical tracks like a dubbing chart and a mixing desk”
Of course, analog multitrack tapes would have been horizontal by nature. OTOH, Quantel’s Harry, also one of the first NLEs, first tried a vertical layout, much like filmstrips.
[Michael Gissing] “A bit of screen lag but hey we still have that all these years later with amazing drive speed and processing power.”
Ironically, almost less lag than X today. 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters]”Of course, analog multitrack tapes would have been horizontal by nature. OTOH, Quantel’s Harry, also one of the first NLEs, first tried a vertical layout, much like filmstrips.”
Yes the idea of horizontal movement past a play head goes back to flatbeds for the film industry so it wasn’t a foreign concept. Vertical preceded that with Moviola and indeed projectors. The fact that mixers have vertical alignments to represent mix tracks made my question a matter of what the film industry might prefer as those early meetings at Fairlight were about the MFX which was aimed at film & video not music.I was thinking dubbing charts.But because DAW and NLE development followed the earlier music devices the idea of a music notation layout made sense.
Another Australian company, Digiteyes, made an NLE based on their Shotlister software that used vertical tracks. I did influence their decision to use vertical tracks and display useful things like relative and absolute offset so I could use an editors EDL to display a program like a dubbing chart. It even chased timecode so I could use it when mixing off multi track.I still use Shotlister to display edit change lists as blocks to help reversioning.
I also remember the Harry!
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David et all,
Not taking away from the compliments for this groundbreaking work at the time, but why do most of you so desperately cling to the past, trying everything to find justification why tracks are better or nicer or more ‘you’.
The only reason FCP X got rid of ‘rigid’ tracks (because when you think of it it still uses the same basic horizontal layout) is because it tries to save you work that a ‘rigid’ track NLE has to do: Track assignment, Maintain Sync, keep Video-Audio pairs together. Relatively easy of course when you know how, but such a waste of time where you should be rather thinking about how to tell a story! If none of that bothers you than of course a ‘rigid’ track system suits ‘you’ better.
Here is my experience: Learned on Avid right at the start of its invention, switched to FCP because of cost right from the go but appreciated the many improvements in handling, Learned FCP X over a longer period and start to really like it a lot. Then I did a job recently on Avid after 10 years not using it and it showed me how truly amazing FCP X really is and how useless tracks are. They do not add anything to telling a story but only justify the inner nerd to look organised. There is nothing in the FCP X timeline that you can’t do because of not having ‘rigid’ tracks but so much more exactly because you don’t have them.
You can still edit a beautiful movie on the Moviola but I’m really glad that the development of editing tools hasn’t stopped with just one clever system wether it is Moviola, Steenbeck, MSP, Avid or FCP Legacy or FCP X (I do not count Premiere because it doesn’t break ground but just adopts 100% of the basic old NLE philosophy).
I for one don’t subscribe to the apologetic notion of ‘Well they are all good NLE’s and all have their place’. I think it’s a cop out for people who like FCP X and can’t say the rest of the NLE’s are not working and a cop out for people who don’t like FCP X because they can’t say that it is not working or non-professional.
FCP X is a genius piece of software that shows that you don’t need ‘rigid’ tracks to work comfortably and in actual fact gain functionality that wasn’t there before.
Happy editing
Carsten -
I’d like more insight into the laser disk portion of MPS and the later laser Edit systems. Instead of hard drives, you had the footage transferred to a laser disk and the NLE generated an EDL based on the codes from the laser disks. Fine. But then what was the *output* stage process, to get that final video mastered out to one-inch or whatever? And how long did it take to make the laser disks for the sources?
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[Carsten Orlt] ” There is nothing in the FCP X timeline that you can’t do because of not having ‘rigid’ tracks but so much more exactly because you don’t have them.”
With Ppro which has both “rigid” tracks and a track mixer I have one track with specific eq and compression for sync dialogue and one track with different compression and eq for location effects. When cutting a show the nature of my audio often changes – what was once sync now becomes effects and then sometimes back again. I can accomplish this in Ppro by simply moving a given audio clip from one track to another. This is a constant with me as I refine a show, something I do dozens of times a day. How would you handle that with FCPX?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
OMG!!! I am so sorry for having a different point of view on the debate forum, I should have known better.
BTW Carsten, while those of us who prefer audio tracks may be old, ignorant, Luddites, we are nonetheless vastly superior in terms of sheer numbers, and you my enlightened friend, whether you’re ultimately proven right or wrong, are just part of a very tiny minority for now. And, until the majority embraces your belief system, should probably learn to expect and respect opinions that are different from your own.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I have a feeling storing those LP sized discs was fun. I still own a player and various movies. Back in the day a great format, to be sure but listening to the player switch to the other side was mildly annoying. Thought the machine was posessed the first time.
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Tossing in the argument that tracks are somehow old and no longer valid and that those people are “clinging to the past” is exactly the sort of unproductive thing said here, that most FCP X-enthusiasts deny ever saying. This video is a very cool peek into where technology was at a point in time and it’s part of the heritage that got Apple to FCP X.
There are plenty of things that X is not well-suited for, just as there are things that tracks are not well-suited for. Rehashing this blind obedience to some concept that X is the most brilliant way forward seems pretty closed minded – just as much as adhering to tracks without recognizing the value of other approaches.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Carsten Orlt] “I for one don’t subscribe to the apologetic notion of ‘Well they are all good NLE’s and all have their place’. I think it’s a cop out for people who like FCP X and can’t say the rest of the NLE’s are not working and a cop out for people who don’t like FCP X because they can’t say that it is not working or non-professional.”
Wild guess here, but in your opinion, is X the best NLE regardless of the situation?
I’m note sure what’s apologetic about reality because all the NLEs have different pros and cons. In the past 15yrs I’ve worked at a lot of places on a lot of projects in a lot of different situations (big budget, small budget, single editor, multi-editor, one-off projects, TV stations, post houses, web, theatrical, cable, corporate, weddings. broadcast, news/same-day-edits, staff, freelance, tech-savvy editors, tech-stupid editors, etc.,) and I’ve yet to run into an NLE that’s the best for every user, every workflow and every situation. That’s the great thing about the increasing NLE competition these days is people can hopefully find the NLE that best suits their needs as opposed to an inherently poor fitting one-size-fits-all approach.
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