what is editing speed ?

[Neil Goodman]

[Bill Davis] “Tag for Aggressive. RATE for Aggressive. Rate for Sad. Where does it show me SAD in your string-out? WHY DOESN”T IT? I have to squint and GUESS which is the most AGGRESSIVE asset. Why? Because only some of those concepts can be as easily attached to a traditional assembly. The same clip CERTAINLY can’t occupy ALL those same tagged folders in a traditional timeline without wasteful duplication.
“

But you can tag and keyword clips in traditional NLES too. Even ones that are on a stringout. Its just not called Keywording or rating but its in there.

Make a marker on a clip in Avid – type your keyword Agressive in. Pull up the marker window – Boom – Keywords are right there. Click on one – its brings you right to the clip.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “The overweening presumption that this is somehow true for all types of editing is insufferable to me.”

THAT’s what we should name this forum. LOL

I’ll take the liberty of offering a crass American restatement of Simon’s more elegant composition.

It’s not Simon. It’s X.

Nobody at Apple thinks X is THE solution for every editor…do they? Which means that there exist insightful editors of good conscience and who look at X, in the full glory of its X-ness, and say, “This is not for me” …
…and a theoretically honest Apple would say, “You are correct. We did not design X for you.”

(“Unless of course you are willing to do things our way just because it’s how we want to do them. We weren’t thinking about you at all, one way or the other.” LOL )
Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe X has achieved Apple’s goal of being the best choice for every editor in every scenario. Anybody think that that’s the case?

Of course not.

Then the following is not under debate. It is a fact. There exist editors for whom X is not the best choice, by Apple’s explicit design. Apple could have made X for them, and chose not to.

Not that this is a criticism. I like X. The only reason it works at all is because Apple made choices about whose needs to meet, and whose not to. That’s the only reason ANYTHING works, from anyone.

To come at it another way, I think that the strengths of a thing and its weaknesses are IDENTICAL. Not related. IDENTICAL. I’m creative. I start a bunch of new projects every day, but I have a hard time finding the time to finish them, because I’ve already moved on to starting a bunch more stuff. IDENTICAL.

So in the real world that people actually live in, the BEST parts of X, the parts most fully approaching the perfection that Apple intended, will be EXACTLY the parts of X that PREVENT it from being useful for me, EVER.

Not because I don’t get X. Not because Apple doesn’t get ME. But because Apple has its priorities, and I have mine, and they’re not the same.

That’s why I have a problem with general statements in this context about “what is speed” or even “what is editing,” which is ultimately what I think Simon is getting at. What is EDITING, because in this context, what Apple prioritizes as “editing” has nothing to do with what Simon and his team prioritizes as “editing.”

(Speaking, a) rhetorically, as a fan of X myself, and b) taking liberties with Simon’s words that I trust that he’ll correct, of course. LOL)

That’s why I think specifics are so important. They’re all that’s true.

cI mean, how’s this for a general statement: the more general a statement is, the less true it can be. LOL But in this context, I absolutely believe it.

I especially appreciate Herb in an earlier post distinguishing between approaches for gazillions of pieces of unrelated, incompatible legacy media for a documentary series vs. unified production of metadata-laden, editing-optimized modern formats on a heavily-scripted narrative feature. There’s only a very small range of insight that one project would have to offer the other.

In practice, it might begin and end with, “You should consider using a better chair.” Perhaps followed by, “You should consider standing up.”

Otherwise, is there be a conclusion to draw about “editing” or “speed” from the fact that Gone Girl was edited with Premiere Pro? I think there is, and it’s worth talking about here.

But even before we begin, we can see the limits of that discussion if we imagine a conversation over a bowl of grass (mooo!) about how much better Focus and Gone Girl might have gone if each team had used the other software! LOL

Or not. LOL Each team, by every account, would have found the other software to create pointless obstacles in exchange for zero advantages.

For that matter, I’ll buy you a real pony if either team spent as much time talking about “editing speed” as it has taken you to read this far in this stupid post. It’s inconceivable to me that either team would have “gone” faster, or “edited” faster, using something than exactly what they chose.

And since I’m not editing features at all, I don’t find necessarily find much that that either of these folks (or Murch) have to say to be PERSUASIVE to ME…but that’s not what I want from stories like this. I want to hear SPECIFICS. Tell me a good story about your stuff, and I don’t care if it applies to me or not.

I still think that user stories from Fincher, Simon, Bill, Aindreas, Murch, the guys on Focus, Alan Bell using Media Composer for Mockingjay(s) (see A Tale of Two Mockingjays), et al aren’t just engaging, they’re IMPORTANT.

But only to the extent that they’re SPECIFIC. To the extent that they’re specific, they can also be useful. What’s NOT useful is trying to extend their examples further than they actually reach.

The ideal scenario for me (speaking strictly as someone who edited for 20+ years and still enjoys talking about it) is that people be as specific as possible about their own experiences, and let me be the one who works out its applicability to me.

(There’s also the matter of entertainment. Tell me a good story about your stuff, and I don’t need it to APPLY to me at all.)

Not that “you’re holding it wrong” isn’t a valid response from somebody else to me in the course of a conversation like this in the COW. (Although, historically speaking, “you’re holding it wrong” didn’t change for a single second that the design was in fact flawed, and subsequently changed.)

But if we’re going to acknowledge that Apple neither intended X to be Everybody’s Everything, nor accidentally achieved it, we have to acknowledge that there are potentially millions of people for whom the response, “It’s not for me” is EXACTLY the ONLY accurate, rational response to X.

Because they’re RIGHT. Apple DIDN’T design X for them. Apple designed X for somebody else.

And not to get too carried away with words like “rational,” or worse, “objective,” “quantifiable,” “benchmark” and the like. Hideous. Awful, awful things to base important decisions on, which is why so few people do.

Speed is speed, editing is editing, and “I don’t like it” can in fact mean “I understand X exactly as Apple intends me to understand it, and I have come to the same conclusion that was Apple’s starting point: Apple did not make X for me.”

And even if they did, me not liking it, or finding it the best choice for any one job, isn’t necessarily a result of my lack of understanding or appreciation of X. On the contrary, it could easily be because I see things exactly as they are.

[Mark Suszko]

Loathe as I am to invoke His name in vain…

Walter Murch doesn’t use FCPX. But I imagine he’d quite possibly like it, and think it was relatively fast, because his process involves a lot of very intense initial examination and contemplation of raw elements, as well as logging and categorizing them, building them into related groups before he starts creating a “spine” on a timeline. And he uses that massive database all along the project, comparing his timeline in relation to what other elements he has available. He did this in his books when he was championing Avid, aka the database with an editor attached to it. I don’t know if he’s still printing out physical boards with keyframes for every raw shot, and papering his walls with those… but I think it can be said, people who work like Walter, build a significant amount of the project “in the air”, that is, in the logging and labeling steps – before a timeline is even formed.

We work in both additive and subtractive modes, depending on a lot of factors, one of which is time available. In additive mode, we build up the story like a sculpture made from adding and shaping globs of clay to an armature. In subtractive mode, the story is a stone and we’re chipping away redundant and unneeded bits, leaving behind the bare minimum target shape.

Nobody I know edits only in one mode or the other, but in a mixture. I tend to start additive, then at some point I think enough is on the timeline that I want to start trimming away the excess. In ENG work for broadcast, where the deadline is king and options are limited, a LOT of the editing is subtractive, cutting to fit the allotted time, before deadline. In long form documentary, it may be a more clay-sculpture additive process until the very end, when the story finally reveals itself and various versionings have to happen to conform it to broadcast or theatrical run times, etc. In hollywood movies, you’re already given the spine: the script, the storyboards – and you’re kind of doing paint-by-numbers for the rough cuts, until you suddenly get a new idea and take things in a different direction that may be additive or subtractive or a hybrid.

I really should have left it to the first two arguments of this thread, which summed up the subject so well. But this thing was getting a bit heated, and I felt reading a TL/DR post of mine would give people time to cool down:-)

[Steve Connor]

[Tim Wilson] “Because they’re RIGHT. Apple DIDN’T design X for them. Apple designed X for somebody else.”

Yes they did, they designed it for Bill

[Steve Connor]

[Bill Davis] “When Tom Carter put the audio tracks UP in the Honda Ad, – it freaked me out. I’d never seen that before. But he’s young. He didn’t know he shouldn’t – so he did it naturally – and won every award in sight because his editing thinking was FAR less constipated than mine. “

So are you saying FCPX can enable people to make better edits?

Should we move the discussion from speed to quality?

[Andrew Kimery]

[Neil Goodman] “Make a marker on a clip in Avid – type your keyword Agressive in. Pull up the marker window – Boom – Keywords are right there. Click on one – its brings you right to the clip.”

In the current version of Avid MC (8.x) markers are searchable using the Find tool so you don’t even need to pull up the Marker window. A while back I worked on a doc and all the important info was generally in the file name, comment field, or marker so I would just type in the name of what I was looking for in the Find tool (i.e. “Bob Smith 1963” or “feet walking”) and get my clips that way. It got to the point where I didn’t need to venture into the bins themselves very often, I just did a keyword search for what I was looking for.

What Avid lacks though (unless this feature was just added) is being able to save your search results to a bin. PPro has this feature called “Search Bins” (you can set search parameters and all results will be copied into the bin) but the search tool needs to be much more robust to really make this feature shine.

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Bill Davis] ”
Don’t worry Simon. It’s impossible to offend me on this. And I’m sorry it’s causing you such Angst. “

Thanks for your reply, Bill.

As you know, we both have a history of spectacularly misunderstanding one another, but this time my argument seems to have whooshed majestically over your head like some space vehicle out of Star Wars.

I thought I’d made it clear what I was saying right at the start of my post, but perhaps I should have used capitals, so here goes again:

THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF EDITING PROJECTS.

I don’t mean there are different workflows, techniques, methods, though of course there a huge variety of these too – what I mean is that different types of editing project have different needs and are suited to different strategies. Not all strategies will work equally well for all types of project – this is the point that you seem to overlook. And it’s a very important one.

Because so much of this can ascend/descend into airy theorising, let’s take a concrete example from a project we worked on for this year’s American Film Market.

We were given sixteen hours of dailies from which to cut a promo and we had just a couple of days to do it. Because we work collaboratively, I volunteered for the enviable job of preselecting from those sixteen hours – and I had only three or four hours in which to do it. Crazy, huh? None of us had seen any of the material before, so had no idea what to expect. However, using the string-out method, I was able to put together a longish selects reel within that ridiculously short space of time. One of my other colleagues spent another couple of hours refining the string-out(s), before handing over to a third colleague who actually cut the promo. Within about 24 hours we had something that the client and film-makers absolutely loved, were bowled over by, couldn’t believe we’d managed to achieve in the time, etc., etc.

This would simply have not been possible without the string-out method, and conversely, the keyword method would have frittered away those precious hours for absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

By working with string-outs we were able to easily pass the project from one editor to another in a way that no amount of the most perfect keywording would have allowed. The previous editor’s intentions and choices were very easy for the next editor to read.

But what would we have done with keywords? What possible use would it have been if I’d tagged the shot of two grumpy men in hats on a beach? 2-SHOT, MEN, BEACH, HATS, GRUMPY – all or any of these would have been pointless, even if I had been the one cutting the final piece. Let’s ignore the time it would take to set those keywords, none of it would be information that would help me with the edit in any way whatsoever. But stringing the shot into a sequence which was already the beginning of an assembly of the scene from which it derived was an entirely self-explanatory system – it required no metadata for my colleagues to understand the logic of the shot and its possible usefulness.

One of the most important considerations for me is that you can sit down and watch a selects reel (string-out) and start to get a very good idea of how the final edit might come together. And that is because you are experiencing your material in real time, sequentially, just as the final result will be experienced. It’s hard to get away from the fact that editing is a sequential process, an unfolding of the material in real time. The string-out process puts that front and centre and works well for that reason.

Of course, there is no doubt that keywording/subclipping/browser organisation is a great boon for many kinds of editing projects – corporates and documentaries are obviously top of the list of types of editing project where this is true, and I speak from experience of both. Sometimes, sifting and sorting clips is a very large part of the editing process, as it clearly is for the work that you do. But to elevate it to a guiding principle that trumps all other ways of working, seems to me to be fundamentally mistaken and not a little short-sighted.

I’ve admitted documentaries to the list of editing project that are well served by the keywording method, but let’s not forget that there is a very distinguished school of thought in documentary film-making where a form of the string-out method has always been central to the creative process. Again, not all documentary editing projects are the same, and lumping them all together is just too crude. And this brings me back to my original point – there are many different types of editing project and it doesn’t make sense to dictate a particular editing strategy (or software solution) as being preferable across the board.

Incidentally, to add further anecdotal colour to my example above, it’s worth mentioning what we used to actually cut the project. As it happens, I began in FCP X .. but gave it up because the import was taking too long. I then moved over to Premiere … but gave it up because the import was taking too long. So I moved over the FCP 7 … where I was up and running in just a few seconds.

And one other point – because we were sharing huge amounts of media and the master material was too big to share conveniently, we “offlined” using the H.264 proxies supplied to us, and then relinked to the master media for the final grade and delivery. FCP7’s outstandingly flexible relinking made this extremely quick and easy, but it would have been simply impossible in FCP X due to its inflexible file handling – far too much differed between the proxies and the master clips for X to have been able to deal with it. Incidentally, the great Ronny Courtens did suggest to me a way around FCP X’s relinking weakness in situations like this, and that was to multiclip the proxy with the master clip and edit from the result and then simply swap the multiclip around at the end of the process. It’s a great tip and it’s worked for me when I’ve had the time to do the preparation. Quite obviously the volume of material and the time constraint in this case meant that this was a total non-starter for us. (I’m so glad that my original intention of cutting in FCP X backfired early on, as I would have roundly cursed the decision later!)

I should finish by saying that FCP X is great and there are several kinds of editing project where I find it a very natural fit and where its particular editing model means I can work much, much faster.

But there are other types of editing project where it just doesn’t fit and its editing model makes for a much slower process – or indeed where its continued lack of key features means that I can’t use it at all, whether it otherwise fits or not.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Bill Davis] “It would like somebody saying Schoenburg was WRONG because he didn’t use a “proper” scale. “

It’s interesting that you invoke Schoenberg (I guess from your spelling of his name that perhaps you’re not as much of an avid devotee of his music as I am).

At a time when totalitarianism was starting to sweep across the world and stamp on the face of difference and freedom, good old Arnold was devising his twelve tone system, also known as serialism, to rigidly codify atonalism and banish conventional tonality from the world forever. (Exaggeration for rhetorical effect BTW).

A hundred years later, despite the undoubted serial masterpieces produced by the Second Viennese School and a very small handful of notable epigones, serialism can be safely said to have died and has had no lasting influence on the history of Western music other than to stifle a lot of the creativity of the 20th century with its doctrinaire certainties.

The moral I think is to always beware totalitarian systems.

I wonder what analogy we could draw from this?

Of course, Schoenberg was a titanic genius – the real harm, such as it was, came from his terrifyingly ardent followers …)

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Neil Goodman]

[Andrew Kimery] “In the current version of Avid MC (8.x) markers are searchable using the Find tool so you don’t even need to pull up the Marker window. A while back I worked on a doc and all the important info was generally in the file name, comment field, or marker so I would just type in the name of what I was looking for in the Find tool (i.e. “Bob Smith 1963” or “feet walking”) and get my clips that way. It got to the point where I didn’t need to venture into the bins themselves very often, I just did a keyword search for what I was looking for.

What Avid lacks though (unless this feature was just added) is being able to save your search results to a bin. PPro has this feature called “Search Bins” (you can set search parameters and all results will be copied into the bin) but the search tool needs to be much more robust to really make this feature shine.”

You can search in bins now and even in the timeline, and yea knew about the find tool.

Just wanted to point out Keywording and rating has been around in Avid for 20 years. Just not called Keywording.

[Andrew Kimery]

I didn’t mean search in bins, but to have your search results from the Find tool appear in a bin. For example, I can use markers to tag portions of multiple clips with the keywords “marching feet” and use the Find tool to find them all, but the results only show up in the Find tool. I’d like a “save results to bin” option so that I don’t have to repeatedly search for “marching feet” every time I need a shot of marching feet.

I agree that the concept of “tagging” footage isn’t new to X, but what is new is an increased ability/useability to organize via metadata as opposed to just the ‘physical’ location of a clip in a bin or in a timeline. PPro added this functionally with Search Bins, but as I mentioned before the search tool needs to be made more robust for he Search Bin feature to shine.