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The Next FCPX Update
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[Chris Frantz] “This will be one of the features that people will defend Apple not implementing until they do, and then championing it soon afterwards. “
See also:- A compressed proprietary codec that offers workflow advantages, especially over camera codecs. “Avid DNxHD? Makes no sense!” Then four years later, “PRORES IS AWESOME.” Haha! Avid sucks!”.
- Multicam. Who needs THAT? Certainly not anyone using an Apple NLE. Too specialized. EXCEPT (how many years later?) LOOK HOW AWESOME IT IS.”
See also:
- Phones with big screens. “Who would carry a phone THAT big? It’s ridiculous. I’d NEVER do that. EXCEPT LOOK AT THIS BIG NEW IPHONE. IT’S AWESOME.”
- Phones with high resolution screens. “Your eyes can’t even tell the difference! Except Look At MY AWESOME RETINA SCREEN ™! What? Yours still has higher resolution? YOUR EYES CAN’T EVEN TELL THE DIFFERENCE.”
Sorry, couldn’t resist. Well, I could have, but what fun would THAT be? LOL
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I’m sorry Bill- but I think your handwaving of media management is misplaced. And I say that as someone who’s NEVER dealt heavily with Managed Media backups.
Besides the LTO issues that have already been brought up….
As easy as you can say that someone is being backwards about wanting to be able to trim media because drive space is cheap, I could just as easily say you’re not looking to the future, where it will be more feasible to transfer media files online between collaborating members of a production. And here again we’ll be back to constraints of bandwidth speeds and file sizes- and where the difference between 1.2TB of untrimmed media and 250GB of Managed Media will make A LOT of difference.
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[Bill Davis] ”
I still don’t get it.Archiving is a snap with X no matter how complex your cut. Because it’s ALL metadata. If you learn to work with referenced media – everything from a snapshot to an XML export is a snap.
As to transfer to an online house, Mike Matzdorff never said it was any kind of issue on Focus when he was working with Lightiron in LA.
Do you have a link to the article where Mike talks about the offline/online process for Focus? You can certainly send a single QT file plus XML or EDL for color grading but sending a trimmed project with handles is easier and more flexible in my experience. It’s certainly my preferred method of working (both when I’m an editor handing off a project and when I’m coloring and receiving someone else’s project).
Honestly, “media with handles” sounds like what I was doing back when my largest hard drive was 500 megs. Not something particularly relevant in a world where I can carry 4TB in a drive the size of a paperback book – AND I have a tool like X where since everything is built in metadata references and there’s no penalty of working across differently razzed sizes of matched media pools – I can cut in one rez and just switch the pointers to original media with a click.
“Not everyone has the same needs as you do Bill. Trust me, if you were working on projects that routinely shot hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of footage, or round tripped media between you and colorists or VFX artists, you’d have a different mindset. Not to mention media has gotten larger in size too.
In 2006/2007 I started working at web company and they had 4TBs of shared storage. At the time I thought it was huge and most of their media was DV25 so 4TB went a long way. Once HD came around they started doing more in DVCProHD (and later ProRes) and sudden 4TB wasn’t nearly as big. By the the time I left in 2010/2011 they generated 1-2TB a week of new media, had 60TB of online storage (not Cloud storage, but an xSan of active storage used by the editors), 25TB of nearline storage (an older, slower xSan) and about 100TB of offline storage (mirrored HDDs and later mirrored LTO). The offline storage was for archived, media managed projects. Media managing the projects typically reduced their footprint by a factor of 10 (if not more) so, yeah, even new-media web companies can benefit from something as old and archaic as trimming a project down to just media used.
I recently used Avid’s consolidate function (same as FCP Legend’s Media Manger) so I could hand off a copy of my timeline to a producer so she could work on a timing sheet for all the archival footage we used. Certainly much easier to hand off a few hundred gigs of media vs 6TB.
I could go on, but suffice it to say I don’t see now *not* having this functionality is superior to having this functionality.
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Herb,
With the rate of development in storage capacity and speed, I just don’t understand the necessity. Any modern NLE should allow an editor to open a working copy of the entire projects assets in reduced rez for revisions, then apply those changes to the original Rez source files for finishing. To my thinking, restricting an editor to a cut with nothing but “handles” is a poor old workflow born of an era when storage and throughput was a challenge.Cut on ProRez or even Proxy with access to the entire pool of source material – and just swap pointers to the original media for master output just makes more sense. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that in a lab somewhere some storage engineer is close to something that’s going to make LTO look like 8track car audio soon.
The wealth transfer potential for the companies that crack this is just too great to allow otherwise. Heck, I’m just an microorganism in the scale of this industry, and right now I have the capacity to store maybe half a dozen uncompressed feature length films shot in 6k with maybe a 20:1 shooting ratio in my personal studio.
And, the Costco down the street has enough retail data storage on its shelves to store 100 feature shoots.
And there are 100 similar stores in every medium sized town in the world.This is no longer the era of digital storage scarcity.
No, I’m NOT suggesting that Hollywood start archiving via Costco, just saying that the storage landscape has and continues to change tremendously. So workflows that relied on 15 year old techniques are fair game to question.
That’s all.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Look,
I’m trying to extrapolate from the changes I’ve seen over the past 15 years ahead another 5. I’ve just seen WAY too many production processes that I depended upon – and that we’re mission critical for my work – fade into irrelevance when I wasn’t looking. Particularly in regards to project backup and aeprchiving.
And I’ve got the Zip drives, SyQuest drives, DC2000 tapes and about 300 each 3.5″ “floppies” and another 300 DVCAM 120s to show for it. Archives of media “with handles” will be important until the moment they join the rest of that old stuff. And i believe the handwriting is on the wall for that way of “scarcity thinking” of digital assets.
Time will tell if I’m crazy or just a slightly better extrapolator in this.
Heck, just this morning I was reading a Facebook feed link to a heavily footnoted artical where some very rational sounding guy was arguing that driverless, automated Google powered Über cars would seriously start killing off the taxicab industry in the next FIVE years.
Extrapolate that!
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Bill Davis] “And i believe the handwriting is on the wall for that way of “scarcity thinking” of digital assets.”
I keep trying to pass this off as Soyka’s Law: “Expectations rise at the same rate as capabilities.”
Maybe someday it will catch on!
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Indeed. HD space may be getting cheaper, but frame sizes, frame rates, and data rates are going up.
And as I said, digital distribution of media assets will take all this stuff back to zero, especially in places like the US where bandwidth isn’t cheap and hardly ever unlimited.
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[Walter Soyka] “I keep trying to pass this off as Soyka’s Law: “Expectations rise at the same rate as capabilities.””
lol – I might argue that expectations seem to rise slightly faster than capabilities. I call this the “Can’t you just” request. 🙂
Shawn
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[Bill Davis] “The wealth transfer potential for the companies that crack this is just too great to allow otherwise. Heck, I’m just an microorganism in the scale of this industry, and right now I have the capacity to store maybe half a dozen uncompressed feature length films shot in 6k with maybe a 20:1 shooting ratio in my personal studio.”
Math isn’t my strong suit so someone feel free to correct me if I misplaced a decimal point or something.
According to the AJA Data Calc app (which only goes up to 4k) an hour of 10bit RGB 4k footage (full 4k, not UHD) at 23.98fps will eat up about 4.5TB of space. A 90 minute long movie with a 20:1 shooting ratio is 30hrs of footage so that’s 132TB and times 6 makes it 792TB total. Keeping in mind how manufacturers calculate space (i.e. a 1TB drive doesn’t really hold 1TB of data) and that you need head room to keep the storage from slowing down I’ll just round up and say 1PB of space is required to store maybe half a dozen uncompressed feature length films shot in 4k (not 6k, just lowly 4k) with maybe a 20:1 shooting ratio.
This jives with the numbers Michael Cioni shared when talking about Light Iron doing the online for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. They used DPX sequences for the online and the 2hr38min film came in at about 9.7TB in size. The RED RAW footage (of which there was over 400hrs shot during the production) came in at 40MB per SECOND where as the DPX files were 45MB per FRAME or a little more than 1gig per second. Yikes.
https://www.lightiron.com/about/news/creative-cow-4k-di-girl-dragon-tattoo[Bill Davis] “I’m trying to extrapolate from the changes I’ve seen over the past 15 years ahead another 5. I’ve just seen WAY too many production processes that I depended upon – and that we’re mission critical for my work – fade into irrelevance when I wasn’t looking. Particularly in regards to project backup and aeprchiving. “
I get that Bill, I’m just trying to understand why handing off a trimmed sequence with handles to the colorist or the VFX team is an *inferior solution* compared to handing off a sequence with full length clips of all the media in said sequence. What does handing over a bunch of extraneous media do other than slow down the process? Sure computers are getting faster and drives are getting bigger but codecs are getting more processor intensive and frame sizes, frame rates and shooting ratios are getting bigger.
On a related note, when someone cutting in X sends and OMF/AAF out to to get mixed does the audio have handles on it?
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[Bill Davis] ” I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that in a lab somewhere some storage engineer is close to something that’s going to make LTO look like 8track car audio soon.”
The argument that X shouldn’t bother to figure out how to do this because it probably won’t be necessary 3 years from now does nothing for someone who has deliverables today. Of course it would be better to archive ALL of the material, but sometimes it’s still impractical for a given budget and workflow. Your arguing from the myopia of your own workflow – you don’t need it, ipso facto it’s not essential. It was your same reasoning about the whole topic of exporting EDLs. Given the business model Apple has constructed around X it wouldn’t surprise me to see a third party solution, as this seems to be their method for handling these kind things.
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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