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what is editing speed ?
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[Simon Ubsdell] “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?”
At the risk of spending too much time on this – I’ll just note that you’ve selected an example of the type of project where keyboarding AS ITS EXPRESSED IN X – is insanely apt.
The “toolbar tags” Favorite, Reject and Unrate take the PRECISE Scenario you envision and turn it into childspay.
You sit down with a cup of coffee. Load your first clip. IMMEDIATELY put an IN point on the FIRST FRAME.
Then – depending on the “density” of your footage, you can either JKL or use the skimmer to browse ahead. At the moment you see something potentially useful, you just stop. Hit OUT and keystroke the REJECT tag onto everything useless you just sped/scrubbed over. Tap I to set a new IN. Watch the content. When you reach the END of whatever you decide is potentially MORE interesting – hit OUT and make a binary decision. If you LOVE what you’ve just saw – Hit F to Favorite it. If you’re Unsure – Just hit I again to re-set your range select in point. And plunge ahead to REJECT more footage.
I’d expect to get 16 hours properly sorted into REJECT, UNRATED and FAVORITE in maybe 45 minutes depending on the content.
Invoke the Hide Rejects filter and what do I now have?
A visual field of ONLY MY favorites – and my unrated scenes with potential. Everything else is out of sight out of mind unless I specifically re-show my Rejects.
In Xt this happens EXCLUSIVE of using a single custom keyword.
But what I CAN do is pull up my Favorites – OR favorites PLUS unrated maybes (With the dreck of those Rejects now hidden) and apply keywords ONLY to useful footage. Or not.
Is this NOT how you use the database in X?
There are plenty of occasions where REJECT or FAVORITE is ALL I use for a project where the goal is just to cherry pick scenes.
The custom keyword process is IN ADDITION to this and entirely optional.
This is part of why depending on markers and stringouts seems so old fashioned to me now.
The Menu Bar Tags (Reject, Unrated, Favorite) Filter is the Deciding WHAT to work with. The keyword stage is the second. BUT – invoking either lets me instantly drill to what I’m interested in – it SHOWS me the parameters of the actual footage I’ve marked. It lets me see, hear, scrub, and add or delete additional layers of tags at will – but it FORCES me to do NONE of that if none of that fits my workflow.
Again, it’s inconceivable to me that I’d want to sit down with 16 hours or footage and NOT have a range based Favorate/Reject keyword driven database at my finger tips. The inability to REJECT and Hide Reject ALONE would condemn me to have to VIEW all the crap over and over again (which describes far too much of my FCP 7 life for more than a decade!)
IF I’ve rejected a thing – why would I want to even look at it again under normal circumstances? This is the sense of range-reject in X. And sorry, but you just can’t do the same thing with markers. Unless they’ve VERY much changed them in the last 4 years.
Do you understand this and just elected not to use this function on your project?
I’m honestly baffled that you had a tool to do precisely what you describe seeing to do – and describe a workflow where you don’t describe using it.
Yes, we all have preferred workflows. But when the WHOLE POINT is to get rid of LOTS of chaff and work only with the wheat – AND you have a tool that does EXACTLY this super efficiently – and work throough three separate NLES trying to get things done fast – well – it just seems like something in your workflow is VERY much mis-understood.
But of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the ability to preciselly carve huge swaths of unusable footage out of your 16 hours wan’t the point. But it sure SEEMS like it would have been.
Happy Holidays to your corner of the world, regardless.
Oh, And I’ll review the rules on when berg and burg are more apt to be applied when I’m writing off the top of my head. Getting the spellings of proper nouns wrong is totally bush league, I admit. But these days nobody’s paying for a copy editor for me when I sit down to muse on things. And so typos are inevitable.
And so it goes.
; )Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Steve Connor] “Yes they did, they designed it for Bill”
It will surprise you, but if they’d done that – it would be VERY different.
And unfathomably lame.
Heck my editing thinking was forged on my first little Sony EVO 9700. It was the first box *I* got to control myself. Before that I put in some years sitting behind the guys (almost exclusively male back then) sitting at the CMX and Sony and Grass Valley controls of machines WAY to expensive to allow punks like me to fiddle with.
The thing is I’ve never demanded software that works the way I think.
I’m interested in software that challenges me to consider NEW thinking.
That way lies challenge, interest, and growth.
; )
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “I think this is a really important observation and “mental squirrel holes” is a great metaphor which very aptly describes how the editing mind works.”
In a number of these discussions, including a few over at FCPco, there seems to be an attempt to equate efficiency with creativity. Therefore better organization begets greater efficiency and, therefore, more creative editing. FCPX is clearly focused on efficiency and a workflow from ingest to a finished (single) end result – the “project”. So folks who love X read interviews with A-list film editors describing what may seem like antiquated methods of organization and opine that if they only used X….
In my opinion, X is largely designed around a fairly restricted way of working. This makes it easier to teach to newbies. Obviously, something like Media Composer can seem daunting to a newbie, because there are quite a number of options. Therefore, it’s harder to teach and takes longer to get comfortable with. However, those options let editors tackle creative challenges in many different ways.
For example, the ability to move clips around in the frame view of a bin like a lightbox lets some editors pick their selects by moving them to the top row of the bin. This instantly let them see the selects. It’s things like that, which help creative minds flow in very oddball ways, that becomes very hard to program into an application.
Ironically in the Apple world, Logic Pro X is probably the most convoluted app that Apple sells. It’s very powerful and easy to use once you learn it, but it certainly doesn’t follow the rest of the current Apple design ethos.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “In a number of these discussions, including a few over at FCPco, there seems to be an attempt to equate efficiency with creativity. ”
Creativity and economic rationalism are not commonly linked concepts. That is why I find the speed argument pointless (apart from the difficulty in measuring it). What real value in saying speed is better when our work is to be judged by people who have no actual interest in the economics of the job, just the craft.
If it were really about speed for both economic and creative reasons then the greatest demand would be placed on powerful hardware, better controllers and ergonomics. Instead I see arguments about getting the best performance from laptops and editing by the pool which suggests the whole point should be about fun not speed. So often the arguments for or against software actually reflect the system that makes the long solitary hours more fun and may not be about speed or efficiency at all. I suspect the need to invoke speed as a superior feature is our inner business manager trying to justify the decision.
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Or it may be that there’s a range of “task aesthetics” that we subconsciously assign to the processes we MUST perform in order to get our programs completed.
Something like the time spent inside the mechanical process of retrieving the perfect clip to go HERE has a lower value to me than being allowed more time to imagine which direction to send the program towards. So I put WAY more value on a system that lets me mark up clip ranges and retrieve them with agility – over a system where I’m forced to dig around inside singular folders to retrieve a clip I just remembered I have, but didn’t think enough of earlier to include in my string-out.
Folder mining late in my assemblies searching for unused but viable candidate clips – is something I spent quite a lot of time doing in the old days. It’s now gone.And Oliver, it’s trivial the push clips to the top of a visual stack in X since the program could care less how many keywords one clip has. Temp create a tag from (space A) and dump your specials in it and boom – it sorts up top of the group instantly. X is the storage/sort/retrieve of infinite buckets. Limited only by your imagination.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Herb Sevush] “While I think any objective speed comparison for NLE’s is a fools errand, I think it’s an important aspect of an NLE that the editor “feels” like its fast. I take it as a very good sign for FCPX that so many who use it “think” it makes their work go faster – this subjective experience need not be quantifiable to be acknowledged, as long as it’s understood for what it is. If it feels 50% faster, well that’s a good thing, even if that whole notion is undefinable as fact.”
This is an important observation. The emotional penalty for friction in a creative application is certainly high. But I wonder if disruption to flow [link] may be a very real speed-killer. In that case, it’s not just about the speed of a set of tasks, but the slowness of the human in the process to get back up to speed after an interruption.
Separately, I seem to recall Craig Slattery quantified a 20% schedule reduction after adopting FCPX on the Culture Show. Weren’t they completing work that used to take them a week in 4 days?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Bill Davis] “You sit down with a cup of coffee. Load your first clip. IMMEDIATELY put an IN point on the FIRST FRAME.
Then – depending on the “density” of your footage, you can either JKL or use the skimmer to browse ahead. At the moment you see something potentially useful, you just stop. Hit OUT and keystroke the REJECT tag onto everything useless you just sped/scrubbed over. Tap I to set a new IN. Watch the content. When you reach the END of whatever you decide is potentially MORE interesting – hit OUT and make a binary decision. If you LOVE what you’ve just saw – Hit F to Favorite it. If you’re Unsure – Just hit I again to re-set your range select in point. And plunge ahead to REJECT more footage. “
Because I’ve got a bit of time on my hands, I thought it would be useful to count keystrokes – and fallacies. Let’s start with:
IMMEDIATELY put an IN point on the FIRST FRAME.
You don’t seem to know how FCP X works here. You absolutely don’t need to set an IN on the first frame – you can simply set an OUT when you arrive at the end of the section you want to reject. Try to get out of this habit of yours and you will certainly save a lot of time.
But let’s keep that in there for now so we can count the stages in your method.
(1) Load Clip; (2) Set IN; (3) Skim or JKL; (4) Set OUT; (5) Hit Reject; (6) Skim or JKL (you missed this); (7) Set an IN; (8) Watch the content; (9) Set OUT; (10) Hit F or don’t hit F; Hit IN … rinse and repeat.
Not forgetting, which you did, the need to (11) load up each new clip before carrying out this process.
And also not forgetting (12) that your selected clips will at some point need to be added to a timeline. Not least if you want to review them in a continuous fashion, as you absolutely should.
Compare my method – using FCPX, which I also like to do. (Did I mention that I use FCP X all the time and find it very useful for some projects, less so for others?)
(1) Load all clips into the timeline; (2) Skim or JKL; (3) Set an OUT where you want your first selection to start; (4) Delete; (5) Skim or JKL; (6) set an IN where you want your selection to end …
Start again at (2)
I’m not convinced that your method is quicker … in fact, I my limited maths skills tell me that your method is TWICE AS SLOW as mine. And in FCP X itself at that.
That’s TWICE AS SLOW.
But really, as I’ve tried to make clear, it’s not about keystrokes ultimately, it’s about the value of the result you are left with at the end of each process. I really don’t think there is as much value in your result – for the purposes of the project we have been talking about – as there is in mine.
This isn’t about whether or not I like FCP X – it’s about your oft-promoted concept of editing in the Browser, which I believe has undesirable limitations in certain circumstances, including this one.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “The emotional penalty for friction in a creative application is certainly high.”
That’s a really great line!!!
[Walter Soyka] “But I wonder if disruption to flow [link] may be a very real speed-killer.”
A really good point, yes. Flow is certainly hard to put quantifiable values on, but has to be a huge component of the editing experience.
Almost all applications that I know of, however good, have noticeable speed bumps at certain points which seem to break the flow.
Which things will be speed bumps will depend a lot on really subjective factors though. You might glide smoothly over my speed bumps and vice versa.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “[Aindreas Gallagher] “I have lots of problems with X, but I mostly reject the lack of available constructed mental squirrel holes. You need string out tabs to scan, sometimes you need scattered floating bins at the edge, and pancake timelines – while oversold, can be serious business sometimes. Each case is very real, they all have worth, and none are available to you in X. They all represent messy opportunities for critical lateral decisions, which is a speed of its own at the business end when you’re scrabbling. ”
I think this is a really important observation and “mental squirrel holes” is a great metaphor which very aptly describes how the editing mind works.
It really helps to have quick access to a whole range of editing modalities, either permanently, semi-permanently, or temporarily enabled and configured.
As you suggest, editing workspaces are mental maps that don’t just assist with the organisation of material in the strict library sense, but they can also be used creatively to free up the way you look at the material.
it’s extremely valuable to be able to as it were hold up a prism to your material and view it from different perspectives and in different lights (not what you actually do with a prism, but you get the general idea). Sometimes one type of view will work, sometimes you need to refresh your thinking with another.”
What’s weird to me is that I used to work nearly exclusively with string outs and a version of pancake timelines with FCP7. It was the most logical way to work given the bin and sequence system. It was the easiest way to group shots, and to have an easy way to scan selects or pre-selected material.
This way of working is still available in X, minus the pancakes, and minus the tabs, but it still works. I still do some version of stringouts, mostly to save having a timeline thats 45 hours long, or whatever, but I still use Projects for string outs and then move those selects over to an edit timeline, and use the Project arrows to move back and forth between Projects.
But I do this much less in FCPX. I find being able to save clips or portions of clips is so easy in X, that I save those clips to an area (like a keyword range, or favorite, or compound clip, or whatever), and it is so easy to go back and find it, rather than trying to go through 25 timelines of string outs. The FCPX timeline, with it’s secondary storylines, and available Audition clips, allow me to store more decisions and selects (active or inactive) in one singular timeline than ever before. “Healing” the timeline between the different and separate edit decisions/scenes/chapters, whatever, is much faster in X, at least I find it to be for me, and that may not be true for everyone.
I guess X works much more like I think. If I see something I l know I will use, I can put it in some sort of tagged area, and then retrieve it when I need it. With string outs, I have to either copy and paste that information to the end of a working timeline, or note the time and sequence to which I need to come back to, or worse yet, try and remember where it is in a mountain of 50 hours of media.
Plus skimming is not to be underrated here. Even when I’m not watching footage in real time, I am always watching the footage when skimming. I know there are other versions of this in other NLEs, but having two playheads (skimmer and playback) on the timeline in X is really really useful for me.
Speed, for me, equates to being able to access material quickly to make creative decisions. It doesn’t have to do with how “fast” I am editing, it has to do with how fast I can access the material that is in my head and put that idea down in a timeline and use it, but this doesn’t mean that I am spending less overall time on any task. It might take me longer to achieve the desired outcome, it might take longer than if I were editing with string outs and bins, but knowing where the footage is when I need it is speed, and being able to store clips or sections of clips for easy access now or later, also equates to speed.
In Simon’s case, I would have done the same thing. Sometimes you have to our everything in front of you and start slicing. Fcpx has some pretty great top and tail keystrokes that make this quick as well.
Another thing I like about fcpx that I use all the time when using a strong out is selecting the library in the Browser, sorting by unused, and being able to skim everything that I have deleted out of the timeline to make sure I didn’t miss anything. From there, I can favorite any potential missed material and then sort the library by favorites and have those juicy leftovers available for further review.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Plus skimming is not to be underrated here. Even when I’m not watching footage in real time, I am always watching the footage when skimming. I know there are other versions of this in other NLEs, but having two playheads (skimmer and playback) on the timeline in X is really really useful for me.”
For me the skimmer is the reason I keep coming back to FCPX, “hover scrub” in premiere is no match for it
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