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weird shoes, FCPX, and the sheep barn.
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[Walter Soyka] “I’d be very interested to hear more about your flow-of-work interruptions — maybe I can help.”
Some of this I am sure, we (specifically you and I), have talked about before, and if I’m wrong, I know it’s been discussed elsewhere.
With this current project, it’s basically green screen, mattes, and color correction, and all of the crap that goes with it.
In that process I track, roto, key, paint, color correct, position, opaquify, make some fake cast shadows with fake 3D lights and really convoluted fake floor transfer modes and 3D-ish things, and then try and marry all of that together to fool the audience that these disparate shots are really one thing. It’s not easy to begin with as the green screen footage was shot by our team, backgrounds were not shot by our team, and those teams didn’t have what we shot in mind when they were shooting their footage, because they were shooting stock footage. I obfuscated that on purpose. Bascially, I am taking our green screen and marrying it to different stock shots. Even though the green screen was shot on the same stage, with the same lights, on the same day, with the same camera, every single green screen key presents it’s own little challenge.
But, what I like about FCPX is a lot of those basic controls, transfer modes, color correct, shades of grey correction as well as any effects I add from the effect browser, are all in the same place (inspector), and a lot of the really basic controls are on every single clip in the program. After Effects has a lot of these controls on each layer in the timeline and each layer is in a different place, , and you have to select those layers with a click, and then the effects are in their own panel, and you have to search for effects and apply it, every time, and then bounce back to the timeline and adjust those parameters, and then bounce two timeline layers deep into a pre comp, hit that effect window, hit those timeline parameters, have to toggle switches and modes to luma matte, and then back out to the main comp. Look, I know it’s all complicated stuff, and you are exactly right that it will be clicky as their are so many controls, but I still feel like it could be just a bit more streamlined. A perfect example, in the first Ae CC Cloud only version you could tell Ae to automatically trim a newly created pre comp to the selected layer length. I wish we could do that with lights, solids, adjustment, basically anything that creates a new layer.
It would be awesome if working in pre comps could simply be easier. Being able to step in to pre comps without leaving the overall timeline, or not having to lock the comp viewer, or start a new one, would help me out a lot. I know Adobe is aware of this kind of thing.
I’d like to make a screen capture for FCPX where I start with a timeline with a multi clip and a viewer, I open the angle viewer for the timeline, I open the angle viewer for the browser (or source), I open the effect controls, then the color corrector, make adjustments, then I close them all up one by one to get back to where I started without having to touch the mouse once to get any of those open, only to adjust parameters. I have to find the time to do it.
I’m definitely not saying that Ae/Pr can be this way, or even needs to be this way, but there is a lot more to the X interface than “FCPX doesn’t have a customizable UI, so phooey.” It actually is customizable, and the parameter adjustments are usually in the same place, no matter what clip, layer, or browser you’re working on. There is something very simple and right about that.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “It is a limited use case editing system.”
This is just hilarious. Have fun on Premiere!
I have yet to hit that limitation yet on X.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Walter Soyka] “You can undock panels, and there are quite a few panels/windows that you can open and close with a keystroke.”
Walter,
I prefer the flexibility that Adobe allows in their approach to layout and panels (or panes) in workspaces. However, there are problems which demonstrate this functionality hasn’t really been thought through.
If panes are separated into separate windows then there are some oddities. (All of this from experience in Premiere, and an older version.)
For one thing, it seems to keep one window as a “master window” of sorts. Closing other windows simply closes those panels or panes. If you happen to close the “Master Window” you end up quitting Premiere Pro – this is true, even if by some shuffling, all you have in the “master window” is the timecode display (for example). There is no indication of which window is the “master” at any given time.
But it’s also impossible to bring windows and panes forward from underneath one another – so if you have some tools in one window, they might be forever relegated to be “behind” another window (and therefor unusable) as you can’t shift the layering at all.
So undockable windows is a nice idea; it seems nobody has thought about all its implications.
Franz.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “But, what I like about FCPX is a lot of those basic controls, transfer modes, color correct, shades of grey correction as well as any effects I add from the effect browser, are all in the same place (inspector), and a lot of the really basic controls are on every single clip in the program. After Effects has a lot of these controls on each layer in the timeline and each layer is in a different place, , and you have to select those layers with a click, and then the effects are in their own panel, and you have to search for effects and apply it, every time, and then bounce back to the timeline and adjust those parameters,”
I don’t really understand how this is so different in Ae versus FCP X. Aren’t you still fundamentally selecting something in one place and making a change in another?
I go back and forth myself on whether I think an inspector in Ae is a good idea. I really like that an inspector gathers things together in one place — great for muscle memory — but I also really like that the Ae timeline lets me isolate specific (and possibly different) properties of multiple items and adjust them in context.
For example, with an inspector, if I want to tweak a couple properties on multiple layers, I have to click to select the layer, then move over into the inspector and make my change, then move back to select another layer, then back to the inspector to make a change…
In Ae, I just reveal the properties I want to change for multiple layers and I can hot-scrub them right from the timeline, without the select/tweak inspector dance.
I’m also not sure that I’d want a single global inspector. Instead, maybe I want multiple filterable inspectors, so I can keep all of one kind of property in one physical place on the screen (i.e., a transform inspector, a Colorista inspector, etc.).
[Jeremy Garchow] “It would be awesome if working in pre comps could simply be easier. Being able to step in to pre comps without leaving the overall timeline, or not having to lock the comp viewer, or start a new one, would help me out a lot. I know Adobe is aware of this kind of thing.”
I know everybody else wants it, but I am not a fan of the uber-twirl idea. It sounds good on paper, and it’ll be useful in some cases, but it’ll break some other really good things in Ae. Think of uber-twirl like PIOPs, but this time, I’m on the other side of the argument.
There are two main cases for precomping: organizational (these items all logically belong in a single unit) and render-pipeline-required (because effects see other layers pre-effect, not post-effect).
In the first case, I think that rigging/publishing (an idea that has been floating around the Ae community for longer than FCPX/M5 has been around under different names) is the better solution. This lets a precomp be instanced in and controlled by the main comp. It’s a lot more flexible and possibly less prone to user error where changing a nested precomp in one place messes it up horribly in another.
In the second case, I’d like to see the Ae render pipeline become a little more malleable, with the user having the option (via checkbox or maybe a little render flow diagram) whether an effect sees a layer pre- or post-effects processing.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I’m definitely not saying that Ae/Pr can be this way, or even needs to be this way, but there is a lot more to the X interface than “FCPX doesn’t have a customizable UI, so phooey.” It actually is customizable, and the parameter adjustments are usually in the same place, no matter what clip, layer, or browser you’re working on. There is something very simple and right about that.”
Smoke and Flame have fixed UIs which artists love.
A fixed UI gives you muscle memory. It’s very fast, but at the expense of flexibility.
FCP X with its expanded intrinsic properties and fixed render pipeline (like the color corrector, which makes a ton of sense in an NLE but probably not so much in a compositor) reminds me a lot of the old Smoke SoftFX system (which Autodesk is now moving away from in favor of Batch everywhere).
I think that some of these ideas could be added to Ae and still be consistent with the overall design of the program, but I also think there’s a lot of value in the current system which presents a pretty large amount of information in relatively little screen space.
Each system has strengths and weaknesses, and some way to use them in parallel would be fantastic.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Franz Bieberkopf] “If panes are separated into separate windows then there are some oddities. (All of this from experience in Premiere, and an older version.)”
[Franz Bieberkopf] “For one thing, it seems to keep one window as a “master window” of sorts. Closing other windows simply closes those panels or panes. If you happen to close the “Master Window” you end up quitting Premiere Pro – this is true, even if by some shuffling, all you have in the “master window” is the timecode display (for example). There is no indication of which window is the “master” at any given time.”
This isn’t true now. You can close all the windows except for the main application frame without closing the app.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “But it’s also impossible to bring windows and panes forward from underneath one another – so if you have some tools in one window, they might be forever relegated to be “behind” another window (and therefor unusable) as you can’t shift the layering at all.”
I’m not sure I understand. Floating windows always float over panes, but floating windows can overlap with the focused window coming to the top.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “So undockable windows is a nice idea; it seems nobody has thought about all its implications.”
I know Adobe has done a good bit of UI work, and I’m not sure what version you were referring to above, but unless I misunderstand, I think it’s been fixed.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Adobe apps, in general, are a really big click fest. I want the tools we use most, like levels, curves, some sort of real honest to goodness color correction even, to be easy to get to and understand. “
Hi jeremy,
Hope the keying is going OK 😉
I do wonder whether you’re not underestimating how many tools you have a your disposal in Ae versus the relatively vastly smaller toolset in FCP X? Editing just needs far fewer tools than mograph or compositing.
I can testify from trying to write plug-ins for it that the Inspector in X is very hard to deal with. You very, very quickly run out of space and while there are a few space savings gizmos (twirl-downs and hidden menus) that you can deploy with some more advanced UI-building trickery, it still isn’t easy to make something complex that doesn’t feel cluttered and cumbersome.
And the fact that the space is horizontally fixed is a real issue for the naming of parameters and so on – you have to keep them short, which is sometimes quite unhelpful.
The exact same plug-in in Ae or Pr seems to luxuriate in huge amounts of space – and of course you can always very easily as the end-user make that space as large as you’d like.
And let’s not forget that X has its own slightly tiresome sub-menu system just where you don’t want one and that’s in the Color Board. You absolutely should not have to tab between those separate spaces while grading – Color, Saturation and Exposure really should be accessible on a single panel. Of course you can get used to it but it’s far from ideal and I’d suggest it’s only the constrictive demands of the Inspector that mean this tabbed model was a necessary economy.
I do agree that once you’re used to the space, X “feels” pretty good and quick to get around – but it’s a long way from being an ideal model. On balance, I do prefer the (historical) mess of Ae where you can at least customise it to the way you like working even if imperfectly.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
well ok yes, but that’s still a rather cool screengrab.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Walter Soyka] “I don’t really understand how this is so different in Ae versus FCP X. Aren’t you still fundamentally selecting something in one place and making a change in another?”
In Ae, I have to adjust certain parameters in the timeline (opacity for example), and certain parameters in the effects window (levels, for example). There is some cross over, but I feel like I bounce between them a lot.
In FCPX, all those parameters are in the inspector. To me, it makes a big difference.
In Ae, if I need to adjust levels and composite mode, it’s in two (or more) different places, in FCPX, it’s in the same place on the screen.
[Walter Soyka] “I go back and forth myself on whether I think an inspector in Ae is a good idea. I really like that an inspector gathers things together in one place — great for muscle memory — but I also really like that the Ae timeline lets me isolate specific (and possibly different) properties of multiple items and adjust them in context.”
Yes, it’s a bit of a conundrum. I like what FCPX is doing, and I can get to color, compositing effects, audio, special fx, metadata, almost any parameter I need to do adjust on a clip in the inspector by hitting command-4 to open it, and command-4 to close it. I don’t think Ae has this kind of functionality without a whole lot of setup and even then, I don’t think it could ever be as streamlined as X in it’s current state.
[Walter Soyka] “For example, with an inspector, if I want to tweak a couple properties on multiple layers, I have to click to select the layer, then move over into the inspector and make my change, then move back to select another layer, then back to the inspector to make a change…”
It depends on what you need to change, but you can change multiple clips parameters in FCPX globally. In Ae, you can reveal the parameters you want to tweak, then you have to select those parameters one by one, and then you can adjust. With X, I select a few layers, open the inspector and make the change.
Also, if you need to tweak each layer parameter separately, selecting clips in X with the C key makes things a lot less clicky, and more pointy. Pointy is much more fluid then clicky.
[Walter Soyka] “In the first case, I think that rigging/publishing (an idea that has been floating around the Ae community for longer than FCPX/M5 has been around under different names) is the better solution. This lets a precomp be instanced in and controlled by the main comp. It’s a lot more flexible and possibly less prone to user error where changing a nested precomp in one place messes it up horribly in another.
In the second case, I’d like to see the Ae render pipeline become a little more malleable, with the user having the option (via checkbox or maybe a little render flow diagram) whether an effect sees a layer pre- or post-effects processing.”
Sure. Whatever makes it easier to try and do what I am trying to do. 🙂 I don’t use pre comps as organization too much (remember, I am just on ‘OK’ compositor), but I have to use them for some mattes and composites, and then there’s the hard-to-undersrtand notion of some things working on 3D layers, and some don’t, and trying to keep all of that untied (or tie certain effects together via “3d” and others not). This is when precomping gets to be a real big PIA as I can’t control (very easily) what gets effected and what doesn’t. Maybe it’s just a hard process that I can’t grasp and I am whining too much.
It’s hard for me to grasp what is happening when I make a pre comp a 3D layer because I want to light it or match a camera move, and then collapse the transformation (because I need to for quality purposes or whatever) and things go askew.
[Walter Soyka] “I think that some of these ideas could be added to Ae and still be consistent with the overall design of the program, but I also think there’s a lot of value in the current system which presents a pretty large amount of information in relatively little screen space. “
And that’s really all I could hope for. Ae shouldn’t change too much, it’s a stalwart, but the little things you do repetitively every day (like make a precomp to layer boundaries) make things go much faster, especially for the “ok” users like me.
Jeremy
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I would be really interested to what you’re working on, Jeremy. Is it going to be public at some point?
Shawn
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Hope the keying is going OK ;-)”
The keying is going great! The compositing?…mehhh.
[Simon Ubsdell] “I do wonder whether you’re not underestimating how many tools you have a your disposal in Ae versus the relatively vastly smaller toolset in FCP X? Editing just needs far fewer tools than mograph or compositing.”
Completely. I do get it, honestly.
Let’s put FCPX away for a second (Aindreas will be happy about that) and ask ourselves can the Ae/Pr interface be more efficient? I think we could all agree on “yes”. While the panels let you customize to your hearts content, how much of that customization is wasted space?
[Simon Ubsdell] “I do agree that once you’re used to the space, X “feels” pretty good and quick to get around – but it’s a long way from being an ideal model. On balance, I do prefer the (historical) mess of Ae where you can at least customise it to the way you like working even if imperfectly.”
I’m not sure if there is an ideal model, but allowing keyboard controls to everything is a pretty good model.
Bring FCPX back out again (sorry Aindreas), and using the color board as an example, I can open the color board (command-6), choose exposure (command-control-e), page up and down to the pucks, and use arrows to adjust the pucks. I then go to color (command-control-c), bounce to the puck I want, and go. Command-4 zips all that back up. All of this is without selecting anything, or constructing a new panel diagram to bounce between.
X’s method is far form perfect, but there is an efficiency to it that I appreciate, and the keyboard customization interface, in my personal opinion, is pretty sublime.
Jeremy
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