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The Next FCPX Update
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[Andrew Kimerey] “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?”
Honestly I can’t understand anyone who works in a collaborative workflow not seeing the advantage of media management and sending new truncated versions with handles to either sound post or grade. Data transfer and drive speed and capacity have not increased as fast as is needed to obviate media management and as we are now pumping out 4k, it now takes longer to get media files onto an external drive for grading at another facility.
Andrew is right. X2Pro media manages and sends truncated audio files with handles. It would be stupid to send original video and audio files to sound post. A typical AAF or OMF would have about 2-3 gigs of audio. Unmanaged that would balloon to many TBs of drive space to shift a tiny amount of audio. As I receive OMFs via the internet it would take a week to send the audio if it wasn’t media managed by X2Pro. Impractical and stupid. If a third party can MM audio from X then why can’t X??
The fact that FCPX doesn’t have proper media management is still a big minus for most of the editors I work with. I can imagine Bill would change his tune the first time he works collaboratively on a long form 100:1 ratio documentary with audio post in another city and a grader in another country. These are common workflows and an NLE that ignores such basic function continues to fail the needs of many in our industry.
Ironically FCP7 never really got media management right but it is simply lazy of Apple to not give such basic functionality in the vain hope that one day we might not need it. It is very much needed now and the lack of it still limits X’s inroads into FCP Legend, regardless of whether it is more fun to cut with.
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[Michael Gissing] “The fact that FCPX doesn’t have proper media management is still a big minus for most of the editors I work with. I can imagine Bill would change his tune the first time he works collaboratively on a long form 100:1 ratio documentary with audio post in another city and a grader in another country. These are common workflows and an NLE that ignores such basic function continues to fail the needs of many in our industry. “
It’s funny you mention that. As I was sitting in traffic on my way home today I was thinking about a documentary I did a few years ago where we had about 50 interviewees and the average interview was about an hour long. Without trimmed media that would’ve been a 50 hours of footage just for the interviews alone. Toss in the broll and it probably could’ve doubled that amount. So, approximately 100 hours of media to pass off to the colorist for a 1 hour long documentary? That seems reasonable. 😉
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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. “
There certainly are. There a lot of brilliant stuff going on in labs all over the world. 3D printing. Virtual reality. Advances in medicine.
The big problem with stuff in the lab though is that it’s in the lab. Things in the lab probably have 5-10 years before they become commercial (if they ever become commercial) and even then it’s a few more years to see if they become integrated, battle tested and financially successful. I remember reading about InPhase Technologies and their holographic storage (which sounded awesome in 2006) but they were never able to get anything of substance out the door and they filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Meanwhile this archaic, spinning disk HDD technology just keeps on getting better, faster and cheaper.
What may or may not happen in the next 5-15 years doesn’t really solve the problems of today.
The great thing about LTO is it works now and the tech is designed to be three generations forward/backward compatible. It’s been around long enough (and trusted enough) that it’s not going to be a flash-in-the-pan solution like Jaz drives.
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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.””
What happens when capabilities fragment in to different levels of expectation?
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[Shawn Miller] “lol – I might argue that expectations seem to rise slightly faster than capabilities. I call this the “Can’t you just” request. :-)”
Shawn, Soyka’s Law does not stipulate that expectation must be less than or equal to capability; just that advances in capability are met with equal advances in expectation.
Sounds like there’s room in here for Miller’s Corollary.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Jeremy Garchow] “What happens when capabilities fragment in to different levels of expectation?”
I think that my statement is true at both macro and micro levels, but it’s apples and oranges to consider macro capabilities and micro expectations together.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Insert Cool Hand Luke quote here.
Nobody’s suggesting anyones going to be sending all 15 takes of scene 123 to audio or a grader for gosh sakes. How about Just the material IN THE PIECE BEING GRADED. Which, unless I’m sorely confused does not require anyone consider the shooting ratio at all. IIRC, the reason for “handles” in the first place was to allow transitions between two streams of content and minor re-trimming.
Nowadays the editor, working in a referential modern NLE has a digital descriptions of not just the transition, but the individual component streams invilved in said transition as well. You’re sending off a metadata file and the matching original media – of the movie. Not of the whole shoot for heavens sake.
All but 5% stays in the producers or editors vault. And likely 80% of that is gonna get tossed when the producer gets tired of paying to store the outtakes. As always, right? So what’s the big deal?
It just seems to me that the “handles” are now all just metadata. So the command you need today is Include the “original media” for every frame in the program. Adding 5 second arbitrary “handles” just somehow seems old- imprecise. But who am I to say. I don’t do movies. And maybe there is an actual “non-historical” reason someone needs 120 extra seemingly useless extra frames tacked oto each side of every cut, because that’s the way it’s done. If so, fine. Just seems kinda weird in a universe where we can be precise to the 48,000th of a Hertz.
That’s all.
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[Bill Davis] “All but 5% stays in the producers or editors vault. And likely 80% of that is gonna get tossed when the producer gets tired of paying to store the outtakes. As always, right? So what’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that you CAN NOT DO THIS IN FCP X!!!! You teach FCP? is that right? Teach me how to do this in X? How do I get my movie down to the 5% that is actually in my timeline. With or without handles. Forget the handles and why effects teams require them… Just get me to a condensed timeline that I can send — with CONDENSED MEDIA.
-DM
2013 MacPro 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 64BG Ram
LG 31MU97 4K Display
2013 MacBookPro Retina -
[Bill Davis]”You’re sending off a metadata file and the matching original media – of the movie. Not of the whole shoot for heavens sake. ”
You really need to do a big job with a collaborative workflow to understand that even if that were easily possible with X it still isn’t enough media management.
So often Bill, you make sweeping claims about workflows you just don’t use or get. It is OK to recognise a short fall in X when it is deserved.
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[Bill Davis] “Nobody’s suggesting anyones going to be sending all 15 takes of scene 123 to audio or a grader for gosh sakes. How about Just the material IN THE PIECE BEING GRADED. “
How do you do that without a media trim function? If my master clip from an interview is 60 minutes long, but only 30 seconds is used in the edit, how do I send *just* the 30 seconds used in in the edit w/o a media trim function? I can’t. The whole 60min master clip goes with it even though I just need 30 seconds.
Sure, I can export a QT movie of the finished timeline and an EDL or XML for the colorist but that’s not nearly as convenient or easy to work with as a media managed sequence with handles.
[Bill Davis] ” And maybe there is an actual “non-historical” reason someone needs 120 extra seemingly useless extra frames tacked oto each side of every cut, because that’s the way it’s done. If so, fine. Just seems kinda weird in a universe where we can be precise to the 48,000th of a Hertz.”
In my experience audio mixers like fat handles because it gives them plenty of room to grab nat sound, room tone, etc., to use in the mix. It also gives them wiggle room to adjust for changes that will inevitably happen (because as we all know calling an edit “locked” is a misnomer).
[Bill Davis] “It just seems to me that the “handles” are now all just metadata. “
No, handles are media. I’m sending a copy of media to someone else so they can work with my media and handles control how much of my media I’m sending to them. If there isn’t a trim function them I’m sending a whole lot of extraneous material because, as previously stated, I can’t just send them the 30 second portion of the hour long clip I used in the edit ,I have to send the whole hour long clip.
[Michael Gissing] “You really need to do a big job with a collaborative workflow to understand that even if that were easily possible with X it still isn’t enough media management.”
It doesn’t even have to be a big job but just a collaborative job. I’ve worked on tiny web projects and the editor gave me media managed copy of his FCP 7 sequence to color.
Or just look at something as simple as making a highlight reel to handoff to someone else. Put your selects in a timeline, consolidate/media manage the timeline (probably w/o handles since you are pulling selects), and, boom, you have a nice selects reel for someone with media that has source timecode and source media name.
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