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What Ever Happened to Metadata?
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As I read this thread, I had the same thoughts as you. I was thinking of it as a question: at what point are we actually editing? Editing is sorting and sifting.
I can definitely see how this is going to help me, though, in a documentary I’m trying to launch, about college wrestlers (same weight class, same conference; there can only be one champ)– all that footage all season long. whew. 10 athletes in 10 cities. Wow.
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Keywords and roles aren’t containers, but I’d say events are. In Jeremys words, they keep things separate. Clips only exist in one event at a time.
I’m not sure why we don’t have role collections. I import everything by dragging to a keyword collection. If rather drag to a role collection since that’s more important. Then I’d apply keywords second.
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[Oliver Peters] “Most – many all – NLEs (other than FCP Classic) have no way to actually inject metadata into the media file itself. So while the FCPX methods are very useful, they also only live within the confines of FCPX itself.
“Haven’t had a chance to read the whole thread, but just wanted to do a quick, drive-by posting. PPro can inject metatdat into the media or it can keep the metadata attached to the project. This depends on what settings you start out with and can have unintended consequences. For example, if you are working collaboratively locally (i.e. everyone sharing the same media on a SAN) then having the metadata injected into the clip is probably the best way to go since you don’t have to share project files to share metadata. On the flip side if people are collaborating in different physical locations, but each have a copy of the footage locally, then having the metadata saved to the project file makes more sense than having it saved to the media.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” It is much more fluid and dynamic than bins, at least the way bins work in FCP7 and even Pr.”
PPro has Search Bins which will allow multiple copies of media/sequences to exist in multiple places based on keywords. I think Resolve has a similar function though I haven’t used it recently so I can’t say for sure.
[Bill Davis] “The real magic of the X approach, IMO is that it uniquely adds and manages range-based metadata as well. “
In my very limited time with X I would agree. Ranges are more elegant than sub-clipping and then tagging the sub-clips. Hopefully though there are people smarter than use that can figure out away to, say, turn a range from X into an extended marker in PPro (for example). It’s obviously not a 1:1 correlation in functionality, but it would at least keep the metadata in place.
Metadata ‘lock in’ is what keeps me more attracted to MAM’s than NLEs for thorough metadata management because my NLE usage is so variable. PPro, Avid, (I think FCP 7 has finally been laid to rest in my world), X and potentially even Resolve (as an up and comer). One large company I work with on occasion uses Fork for all incoming media and exports.
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[Andrew Kimery] “PPro can inject metatdat into the media or it can keep the metadata attached to the project. This depends on what settings you start out with and can have unintended consequences”
Yes, but not the way you could in FCP7. For example, there, you could add Reel ID, TC, and change file name. Plus transcoding. These functions permitted you to use FCP7 as a “media processor” in addition to an NLE.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Bill Davis] “Am I misreading this, or is this approach constrained primarily to clip and camera based metadata?”
Absolutely not, as far as I am concerned. It’s about something much bigger, I think.
There’s an interesting conversation going on lower down about MAMs and the minutiae of how we currently work with metadata given the various tools that are currently on the market. But I was hoping we could also have a discussion about the wider picture of where we can envisage things going into the not so distant future.
What I’m interested in is which kind of models of media access we will be using in a few years time.
Here’s an analogy, cos they always work well around here!
When we go to use Wikipedia, we are not pulling digital volumes off digital shelves. We don’t go to the volume labelled X-Z and hunt through till we get to Z and then flick through till we get to Zuo Zongtang.
Instead we go to the search field and we type ZU … and amazingly our work is done because the entry we are looking for pops up without having to type any more than that.
Out of the untold wealth of information (and misinformation, let’s be fair!) that is contained in Wikipedia, I can find this one tiny nugget with just two keystrokes. If you don’t think that’s amazing, then you’ve probably lost your capacity for wonder!
All of which is to say that there are already better ways of finding things with our computers than hunting through “containers” to find them.
It’s not always easy to see beyond the limitations of the tools we currently use and imagine what tools we might find ourselves using at a later point in time. Some of you may remember that there was a certain resistance to the novel concepts that Apple introduced in FCP X … just for example.
So just because we can’t necessarily imagine how search-based media management would look, it doesn’t mean it’s inherently implausible or impractical.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Jeremy Garchow] “If I search for a clip in FCPX, I can then assign another search parameter to it (like a new keyword or other piece of metadata) and that clip will now show up in multiple places,”
Bingo!
Exactly why I liked the app for sports way back when it was first introduced.
This one clip is:
The Player
The Team
a HR
Post Season
Side Swing and so on.Once you set up your KW short cuts it’s a matter of seconds to put this multiple places.
A time saver also when doing something that has a bunch of family photos where there are multiple people in each photo so it’s tagged with everyone that is in it.
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And of course in the PPro sphere there’s Adobe Bridge, which uses Adobe’s XMP metadata platform, and gives you the ability to create Smart Collections (which have been around since CS4). Here’s a link to an article I wrote for the COW a while back, which touches on XMP Metadata (barely), and using keywords and collections to keep your searches fast and productive:
https://library.creativecow.net/bourke_joseph/magazine_27-Adobe-Bridge/1
As an organizational tool, Bridge is hard to beat! And given its’ customizable interface, you can set it up for many different viewing styles. It has also been detached from the various Adobe packages it used to come with (and the purchase of which was required to get it), so you can do a freestanding install on a machine which doesn’t have other Adobe packages on it. This makes it highly useful for searches by Producers, for example, in a department in which not everyone has a PPro license.
This is not in any way to throw stones at FCPX and its infrastructure of metadata, but to show that there is another way to skin the cat, and manage thousands of media files quickly and efficiently, using another flavor of metadata.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Completely forgot about that one!
Tetris is my favorite video game unless tracks are involved.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “There’s a different style of cataloging software currently in beta called Kyno. It sits on top of the Finder so there’s no library file. It sends to X, 7, and Pr, exports XMLs for all of those, and is worth checking out: https://lesspain.software/kyno“
Thanks very much for this tip, Jeremy. This is exactly the solution I have been looking for for our business.
It’s very fast, very lean, very capable and super simple to use. It does many of the things that KeyFlow Pro offers in terms of what we are talking about here (it works a treat with both FCP X and Premiere), though not at the same level of complexity. But because of its super light weight it does many of them a lot faster and for me that’s a really big consideration.
I don’t know whether it’s a solution for a networked environment which is where KFP seems to excel, but it’s well worth looking at otherwise.
EDIT: From the FAQ however there is this … “Currently we have no support for raw video formats like RED Raw, Arri Raw, or Adobe DNG as produced by Blackmagic Design cameras. Adobe DNG is planned but we have no ETA yet.”
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I don’t know whether it’s a solution for a networked environment which is where KFP seems to excel, but it’s well worth looking at otherwise.”
It’s in active beta, so if you’re interested, knock around on it and send over any bugs/feature requests to the developers. They are looking for people’s experiences with it.
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