-
The NLE that keeps moving forward?
-
Nice post, Morten. I do appreciate your perspective and hope to hear more about how you’re using FCPX.
I do have a question on the speed claim:
[Morten Carlsen] “Today after many months of getting to know it, I can say that I am able to finish an identical project about 10 times faster in FCPx than any of the other NLEs i had been working with prior…”
10x improvement is a huge number. That means a month-long job is done in 2 days, a week-long project is done around lunchtime on Monday, and a day-long project is done before your morning coffee gets cold.
I am sure that FCPX is faster than FCP7 at many tasks, but are you really seeing an improvement that big? On what kinda of work? Where do you see the biggest time gains?
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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Morten Carlsen] ”
I can cut in any NLE out there and while I cut I care about one thing only, finding the clip I have in mind, immediately. And getting it inside the sequence.
admittedly – this process differs greatly based on which kind of project you are doing; Music Video Style, Documentary or Feature Film… Be that as it may, there is nothing out there which offers better tagging or “Media Transparency” than FCPx. And getting it into the timeline is simply put faster than anything around.One huge part of FCPx’s speed is the ability of compositing and color correcting inside of FCPx… Motion X is basically a plug-in for FCPx.. You can save your whole workflow of grading in motion and load it up inside FCPx as a plug-in.. That made FCPx my new best friend.. I’ve been grading in everything ;tween AMC, Resolve, AE, Speedgrade, colour etc…. Typically my grading involves loads of compositing. All which is totally undoable in any other NLE… FCPx makes it 100% possible.. FCPx is a color grader’s dream come true.. Surely, there are things for which I render a prores 4444 and go to AE…
“I completely agree with all this – I’m picking your stuff comprising ingest, footage interrogation, and colour operation.
it does not go to the fundamental issue of what the actual timeline itself is.
I’ve personally been taking edits into AE since about AE version 4.1, when I was working off an intergraph?
I’ve also graded in a fair bit of stuff (not as much as yourself). The first serious manual I picked up was for flint 5.0 – that was dense. it was four or five manuals?? Although I can say I’ve graded station idents in the free colour finesse that has come with AE for many years. i find it killer. the ability to call cyan in highlights always feels like a dagger stroke to me.I’m on record here saying that FCPX is a clean break/quantum leap in timeline CC operation. I’ve got best in breed vignettes/power masks – a highly wonky CC panel but fine – but in the round it beggars every other editing system in play. It could use an adjustment layer paradigm to drop a minimal magic bullet wash over all mind you.
As to Motion – don’t get me started. the lost opportunities there are mental. I have honestly had the rant before.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/44082
And with all that said – the editing timeline is simply not on. It’s borrowing too many idioms. Do you know? having parent child compositor nodal style locked expressions within an editing timeline makes absolutely no bloody sense.
ask yourself – why do we have locked parent child relationships? this isn’t nuke – look – they aren’t even feeding each other geometrics or CC information – why?
because it would make no sense – that stuff does not map to a moving image timeline.
So then why exactly do we have automatically mapped parent child relationships off the primary? what exactly is that for? given edits change constantly? Its not a situation where we are re-mapping the alpha input on a complex composite?
Do you see what I am getting at?
Isn’t this ridiculously over-engineered?
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
-
[Aindreas Gallagher] “And with all that said – the editing timeline is simply not on. It’s borrowing too many idioms. Do you know? having parent child compositor nodal style locked expressions within an editing timeline makes absolutely no bloody sense.”
What’s weird is a developer the other day on Twitter said that FCPX is a pure AAF concept.
From @woowave1
“xml parser is terrible both in fcp and premiere. the so called magnetic timeline is pure aaf concept”
and I asked pure in what sense?
“in a sense that offsets don’t have to be absolute and values can be relative with child parent like relations.”
it makes sense to someone, I guess.
-
[Aindreas Gallagher] “It could use an adjustment layer paradigm to drop a minimal magic bullet wash over all mind you.”
FCPX can do that. Create a blank title in Motion and publish it to FCPX. Connect a blank title to your timeline over the other clips, add effects, and enjoy your new adjustment layer.
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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
and well hello to that. – I half suspect art of the guillotine RSS popped that up at some point and I didn’t take it in.
I really wouldn’t mind a nightmare – you have to use it FCPX scenario – it does kind of feel lacking.
Impossible to come by mind you,https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
-
[Walter Soyka] “FCPX can do that. Create a blank title in Motion and publish it to FCPX. Connect a blank title to your timeline over the other clips, add effects, and enjoy your new adjustment layer.”
Or, just grab this… 🙂 https://alex4d.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/adjustment-layer-fcpx-effect/
————————————————————-
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
-
[Aindreas Gallagher] “ask yourself – why do we have locked parent child relationships? this isn’t nuke – look – they aren’t even feeding each other geometrics or CC information – why? because it would make no sense – that stuff does not map to a moving image timeline.”
Ok, I’ll play.
Parent/child relationships make sense to me. This hierarchy can actually reflect editorial intent. They may not always be the best way to represent an edit, but that doesn’t mean they’re always the worst.
Sometimes, clip are intended to be intercut relative to other clips. The real structure of an edit like this is hierarchical; we just can’t express that on an open timeline (unless we are using Sony Vegas with its sync link feature [link]). In this case, doesn’t the open timeline actually fail to reflect editorial intent? Why would these same two clips, proximal in absolute time but lacking a formal relationship on an open timeline, better reflect the edit?
The relationships are not locked. You can move stuff in and out of the primary in FCPX as easily as you can move it up or down a track in FCP7.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “So then why exactly do we have automatically mapped parent child relationships off the primary? what exactly is that for? given edits change constantly? Its not a situation where we are re-mapping the alpha input on a complex composite?”
They’re not automatically mapped, at least not in the sense that the application decides for you. FCPX creates exactly the relationship that you tell it to.
FCPX lets you explicitly manipulate the relationships between clips. FCP7 lets you implicitly manipulate the relationship between clips by explicitly manipulating their relative positions in time. In both, you have to do some timeline jujitsu to make the right thing happen. In FCPX, you may have to move something into or out of the primary. In FCP7, you may have to select some edit points but not others before spacing the edit out.
Is remapping the story structure in the face of a changing edit really any different than remapping nodes in the face of a changing composite?
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Isn’t this ridiculously over-engineered?”
Of course you may recall that I do have an issue or two with the magnetic timeline, and I think there are ways it could be vastly improved… but consider this: the FCPX timeline model could contain the FCP7 timeline model (consider Giberti tracks or the erstwhile Lawrence multiple primaries) — but the reverse is not true today in any implementation other than Vegas.
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
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “Is remapping the story structure in the face of a changing edit really any different than remapping nodes in the face of a changing composite?”
come on. you’re joking right?
given that FCPX is actually collapsing those two propositions into one unwieldy mess?
Do you not see the difficulty?
say an edit – its component parts, with the director, the client, the design elements – is more than complex enough.
the idea that the edit should independently start to declare expression linked relationships, continuously, as objects enter the timeline –
that is just ludicrous walter.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
-
[Walter Soyka] “Sometimes, clip are intended to be intercut relative to other clips. The real structure of an edit like this is hierarchical;”
How so? The relationship between clips on a timeline is always temporal. Locking a fixed temporal relationship between clips doesn’t require hierarchy, it requires grouping.
[Walter Soyka] “we just can’t express that on an open timeline (unless we are using Sony Vegas with its sync link feature [link]).”
When I group clips in Pr, how is this not expressing/preserving the desired clip sync relationship? Isn’t that all that matters? Vegas has some nice tools for manipulating individual clips in groups but I don’t find its parent/child paradigm very useful.
I think all that matters is a simple way to make groups and when desired, a simple way to move individual clips without breaking the group. I think this could be done with better grouping tools and would give track-based NLEs most of the advantages of the magnetic timeline without the drawbacks.
I agree with Aindreas, hierarchy is meaningless in an editorial timeline. But if we buy into the FCPX paradigm of parent/child relationships defining the edit, the problem with the FCPX timeline isn’t hierarchy itself, it’s that Apple engineers got the top level parent wrong. The top level parent needs to be absolute, external time; not V1.
_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
[David Lawrence] “the problem with the FCPX timeline isn’t hierarchy itself, it’s that Apple engineers got the top level parent wrong. The top level parent needs to be absolute, external time; not V1.”
The way i use it, that’s exactly how it works. Primary Storyline contains a chunk of gap the length of the spot/trailer/whatever. (actually usually longer so I can store random bits at the end.) Everything is connected to that “time track”. If I want canned transitions or want to use trim mode I make secondary storylines with whatever clips I choose. I can put all my “timeline markers” on the gap. And I can drag stuff around free form just like I’m used to doing but using all the magnetic goodness that X provides. FCPX is ridiculously flexible, contrary to popular misconceptions. 🙂
————————————————————-
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up