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walter murch, bee dancing, and blinking
i made one of an endless series of arsey points about editing there a while back, and I ended up blabbing:
“are there valid historical truths to editing; does it have a memory as a craft, or is editing instead a malleable expression of something outside of itself such that the practise of it can be completely reformulated by time and technology?”
I am truly, courtesy of apple, confused on this point. We are extrapolated, as software based editing practitioners, from the physical processes, and the practitioners, that beget us. On a personal level, I am disturbed, I think, by the radicalism of Apple’s new editing vernacular. I am not speaking to the relational databases, the metadata, or the tagging.Rather, I am disturbed by the incredibly forceful, and reductive, vernacular and methodology Apple have chosen to impose on the basic editing processes themselves. Vernacular which they intend to gain wide, overwhelming audience.
Ultimately: Is a forensically absolute, intellectually disinterested timeline, shorn of pre-baked methodology, an anachronism?
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
23 Replies
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Can you just go back to ranting like a lunatic?
I need a thesaurus, a dictionary, and Google on 3 tabs in my browser to get through this and I still don’t know what you are talking about.
My head hurts.
Cheers.
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@Aindreas – you sir, are a poet. 🙂
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Ultimately: Is a forensically absolute, intellectually disinterested timeline, shorn of pre-baked methodology, an anachronism?”
I certainly hope not!
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
[John Pale] “I need a thesaurus, a dictionary, and Google on 3 tabs in my browser to get through this and I still don’t know what you are talking about.”
Just like FCP X, there is no way in or out of Aindreas’s world full of FCP X rants. You need to buy a 3rd party plug-in which will then translate his post back in to english language. Then you can successfully import the post in your brain. 😉
Sohrab
2.66 GHz 8-core, ATI Radeon HD 4870,
FCS 3, AJA Kona Lhi“The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.” — Carl Ally
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You keep them coming Aindreas. A lot of us aren’t as articulate as you but feel your continued pain.
Alan
FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
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G5,MBP,Vista64,XP -
An Irish poet…they seem to grow with the moss there. I met my first at the Winter games in Grenoble in ’68. He had been sent by Guinness as a goodwill ambassador to the local pubs. Now that was corporate benevolence at its finest.
@Aindreas – please continue to delight and entertain.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Great post, Aindreas!
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Ultimately: Is a forensically absolute, intellectually disinterested timeline, shorn of pre-baked methodology, an anachronism?”
I’ll try to expand on this point a little bit and connect it back to David Lawrence’s earlier post. I will need way more words than Aindreas did.
FCP’s timeline was totally open and didn’t have an opinion on how editing was to be done — “forensically absolute, intellectually disinterested.” You simply placed time-based media at specific points in absolute time, with immense (and occasionally dangerous) freedom over their arrangement and re-arrangement.
FCPX is a far more specialized tool. Craig Seeman has made the good point a few times that Apple has likely studied how people used editorial UIs for FCPX — I think we’re taking that idea a step further here. Apple has studied how people edit, and then incorporated the most common methodology directly into FCPX’s design. It’s even there in the language: primary storyline, secondary storyline, clip connections.
It seems the vast majority of all our work follows the same schema: edited A-roll to advance the story with edited B-roll to fill in either conceptual or technical gaps. This was possible in FCP, because the timeline itself imposed no specific order on the editor; it’s practically mandated in FCPX with the primary storyline anchoring the timeline, instead of linear time. This is FCPX’s “pre-baked methodology.”
I generally try to avoid car analogies — car analogies always fail — but please indulge a superficial comparison.
FCP was like a car. It’s pretty fast, and you can take it nearly anywhere you want to go. FCPX is like a mag-lev train. It’s inconceivably fast, but the route is fixed. The train needs its rails for speed, and gives up open flexibility to get it.
So Aindreas asks this — do all the places we need to go have train stations?
Most of them do, but I can immediately think of one that doesn’t: multicam. I think Aindreas’s point about building an editing methodology into the software, taken with David Lawrence’s points about time on the storyline, is the root of the conceptual problem for multicam in FCPX.
In a single-cam edit, there is no common time linking the A-roll and the B-roll. They both get separated from their own real times, chopped into pieces, laid onto the timeline, and related to each other. Clip connections make sense, because there’s nothing else tying them together.
In a multi-cam edit, you are not chopping the media’s real time into pieces. There is a common, continuous real time that connects all the media. B-roll happens in the same real time that A-roll happens in. In FCPX’s language, it’s all primary storyline, whether the shot is conceptually A-roll or B-roll. FCPX may not be built for unedited time.
Are there other scenarios, or is nearly all editorial built on the same methodology that’s built into FCPX?
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 -
that’s what I meant to say.
Everyone else started making intelligent points, so I thought I’d crack out the big words dictionary for Andy – but walter has it there: is pre-determined methodology – (even one that covers many use cases) burned right into the timeline itself, an issue for the art and craft of editing?
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
ah cheers lads – like I say, I figure I had to lay off the ranting as the conversation was generally getting more coherent..
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
You guys are all crazy 🙂
There is absolutely nothing you can do in the FCP7 timeline that you can’t do in X. Not always the same way but that is pretty obvious, isn’t it.
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[Carsten Orlt] “You guys are all crazy :-)”
That may be!
But FCPX is undeniably a huge foundational change. Don’t let the superficial similarities of the FCP and FCPX timelines mask what a big change FCPX brings in the way we work.
FCPX has challenged our assumptions about what an NLE is and what an NLE does. It’s uprooted decades of thought on the editorial process, and invited us to re-examine things we took for granted before.
This is not the sort of reading you usually see on a web forum, but I think conversations about the design principles behind the tools or the philosophy of the craft itself is just as valid as the conversations we’re used to about technique.
[Carsten Orlt] “There is absolutely nothing you can do in the FCP7 timeline that you can’t do in X. Not always the same way but that is pretty obvious, isn’t it.”
FCP was a general-purpose tool for arranging audio and visual media in time and within the constraints of video playback devices. We all used it for editorial, and nearly all of us used it in a very specific editorial model.
FCPX is built with a specific editorial model in mind.
The tools may accomplish the same tasks, but the distinction is real — and I for one think that Aindreas is wise to ask if it will have unintended consequences on how we think about editing.
I’ll bust out the Marshall McLuhan quote again: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, then our tools shape us.” Now that we’ve reshaped our tools, Aindreas is asking what will happen as our tools shape us.
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
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