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what is editing speed ?
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Yeah. It’s not for me. Unless I end up working somewhere where its de jure, then–oh, well–its for me. But no, its not for me.
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Agree with you 100%, Simon. Even as a single editor working on short-form projects for non-profits, I find I am at my fastest and most creative when I can see the road map laid out in front of me. That means being able to lay things out on a timeline and drag them around – like puzzle pieces – to see how things will flow and fit together. One of my recent pieces for a non-profit that ended up looking like this:
Started like this:
I can’t imagine having been able to arrive at this level of complexity (as quickly as I did) by depending upon keywords to get me there. But maybe that’s just me. 😉
The finished video is here if anyone is interested:
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Regarding the first video:
I’m not really sure how marking ranges to drop them on a timeline later is any faster than marking an in/out and dropping it on the timeline right away in any other NLE. Different workflow(s). Same result.
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Simon.
There is not a single statement in your post that I do not heartily appreciate and commend.
We all get “tetchy” about issues. (I am certainly am as guilty of that as anyone here!)
I greatly appreciate the tone and tenor of your post. And pledge to try to meet it’s spirit with less push and more pull in these discussions.
I will carefully examine your Motion tutorials with relish. I know far less about that software than I should and find myself needing it more and more. That you have taken the time to share your expertise is excellent.
The very BEST part of constructive debate is the part when the parties on both sides, having argued vigorously, put down the talking points and shake hands.
It would please me greatly if we have reached that stage in this.
Honestly, happy holidays – however you observe them.
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] “Clips in the browser have no added meaning. Clips in the timeline have massively enhanced meaning. That very simply is what editing is all about.”
Might gently disagree with the first part of this only – since I have found ways to attach added meaning to browser clips via keyboarding and “unique to X” visual clues at the browser stage – but it certainly IS a distinct and different language. And I concur with the spirit of the comment. In actual editing – you can’t experience meaning without juxtaposition.
And will point out that it so nice that in X in particular, it’s so easy to EDIT this meaning using magnetic tools in the storyline itself, removing friction from that juxtapositional evolution.
It’s how I see things now. Your mileage will CERTAINLY vary.
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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Phil,
Honestly and gently I suspect it IS your misimpression about X.
Two weeks ago I went from this….
to this….
In the same fashion. (sorry, I had to turn off the shot icons before uploading as I don’t have formal permission to publish the content).
I’m interested in what you think you can “see” on your timeline that I somehow can’t see just as easily on my storyline?
What keywords allow me to do is pre-trim, tag, sort and retrieve my clips with greater speed and efficiency than I could before I learned X. It’s a preparation construct. When I talk about pre-editing – it’s merely that if I KNOW how a trim needs to be done prior to my edit – I do that in the Event rather than on the Timeline – pretty much exactly as a traditional editor can subclip. It’s only that my “subclips” are managed by an active database, rather than in folders and string-out timelines – which, while perfectly useful and an industry standard – have only part of the utility of storing metadata in an actual database. (something we could debate at length, I’m sure.)
Once you’re building a storyline, it gives you almost exactly the same ability to “see” your edit as any other NLE.
An X editor then has what many of us see as an additional bonus capability which is how it lets us create vertical magnetic relationships between assets and shuffle those “asset stacks” as units – not with cut and paste risking over-write, but with simple drag and drop – with clip collision avoidance insuring that we can’t inadvertently kill the work we’ve already done.
But I can’t see how the actual visual representations in your examples are much different than mine aside from the fact that in traditional editing, the video and audio MUST adhere to an arbitrary rule that they have to be separated, all the video must go above the line and all the audio must go below it irrespective of any relationship they have to each other.
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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An X editor then has what many of us see as an additional bonus capability which is how it lets us create vertical magnetic relationships between assets and shuffle those “asset stacks” as units – not with cut and paste risking over-write, but with simple drag and drop – with clip collision avoidance insuring that we can’t inadvertently kill the work we’ve already done.
I’ve never had an issue inadvertently killing work I’ve already done in Avid, especially since you can’t arbitrarily drag things around – snapped or otherwise – until you enter one of two “segment modes”, which, at that point, means there’s nothing “inadvertent” about what you’re doing.
Once you’re building a storyline, it gives you almost exactly the same ability to “see” your edit as any other NLE.
Until that point, though, an X user is “tagging”, “keywording” or whatever it is X users do to simply get to the point of making a timeline. That was the point of your video, yes? Sorry. I like to get my material to the timeline as fast as I can and start “playing” with it to see how it’s all going to fit and flow together. I get no idea of “flow” by keywording something.
Obviously, your mileage varies.
in traditional editing, the video and audio MUST adhere to an arbitrary rule that they have to be separated, all the video must go above the line and all the audio must go below it irrespective of any relationship they have to each other.
You see that as a limitation. I don’t. But had I learned FCPX 21 years ago, and had used it almost exclusively for those same 21 years, I might feel the same way about it you do. Substitute Avid for FCPX in the preceding sentence, and you will understand my POV.
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Editing speed? Coffee. 🙂
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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
[Phil Lowe] “Until that point, though, an X user is “tagging”, “keywording” or whatever it is X users do to simply get to the point of making a timeline. That was the point of your video, yes? Sorry. I like to get my material to the timeline as fast as I can and start “playing” with it to see how it’s all going to fit and flow together. I get no idea of “flow” by keywording something. “
Just to be clear, Keywords and assigning favorites are entirely optional steps. You can proceed in FCPX pretty much in the same manner as any other NLE. That is, cutting right from your clips to the timeline and then working from there.
Forgive me if this next part is something you already know. Generally when I cut in X, I typically create keyword collections in more or less the same manner as I would create bins in PPro or MC. For example, bring in all my footage into an Event called Footage and then create Keyword Collections for Interview, B-Roll, etc.
In other NLEs I would drag the clips into their various bins. In X, I can drag a clip to a Keyword Collection or I can assign a hot key with the name of the Keyword Collection. Then as I go through the footage I can use the hotkey to automatically send that clip to the designated Keyword Collection. The latter is what is getting called “tagging” in this thread.
The big difference in X versus other NLEs, is that clips and/or section of clips can appear in multiple Keyword Collections, so the process is a bit like creating a subclip in another NLE and the dragging the subclips to a bin. I hope that helps.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Just to be clear, Keywords and assigning favorites are entirely optional steps. You can proceed in FCPX pretty much in the same manner as any other NLE. That is, cutting right from your clips to the timeline and then working from there.
Well then I must be really confused about FCPX then, Oliver (and thank you for your reply) because everything I’ve read on these fora (mostly from Bill) indicates that you’re not really fast with it unless you use FCPX as it was meant to be used, that is by keywording every clip and range.
On the other hand, for the example I cited above, I created several bins:
Royalty-Free Music
B-Roll (further identified by date and subject)
SOTs (further identified by date and subject)
Stills & Graphics (including titles)
FX (keys, color correction, etc.)
Sequences (and finally)
Finsihed ProgramMy organizational workflow was to put all of the daily B-Roll into its own bin, then sequence it, and place that sequence into the “Sequences” bin, identified by shooting date and subject. Likewise, Music and SOTs were placed onto their own sequences and placed in the sequence bin. This allowed me to close the bins containing the raw material I didn’t need, leaving only the FX, Sequences, and Graphics bins open, as I would be using and adding to these as work on the finished program proceeded.
The piece I cut for this particular church was a compilation of individual “stories” shot over about a 5-week period. The keyed SOTs in the piece were all shot the same day, and were the very first element I had to work with (that was the rough cut seen in my second image). As the events the pastor described came up over the course of those 5 weeks, I edited each story, fully completed, on its own timeline, after which I loaded that sequence as a “clip” and dropped it onto the “Finished Program” timeline.
Simple descriptive name and date attributes on the raw sequences were enough to let me access all of the b-roll for a given event in a single bin quickly and easily, and I was able to scrub very quickly through each of these sequences to find the shot I wanted.
So yes, there is some organizational work that must be done – when dealing with massive amounts of data – in order to make the final edit go smoothly. That’s absolutely true of any NLE. What I find off-putting is this insistence – by some – that it must be done for every type of edit.
I also work in news and, for daily news packages and vo-sots, such organization is completely unnecessary and a waste of time, regardless of the software. In this regard, I think Simon’s point (if I read it correctly) is spot-on: how you organize an edit depends on the type of edit you’re doing.
For news in Detroit (using an Avid Interplay system), all of our stories were sequenced automatically upon ingest, and it was, by far, the fastest way we worked. I’ve been told “keywording” is the fastest way to work in FCPX but this was a completely unnecessary step in our Avid news workflow!
I’ll only add, in the church example I posted above, dropping all the pastor’s interview bites on that rough cut timeline, then trimming them there, gave me a sense for what I needed to shoot as events came up. I’ll also add that when I was approached for this project, the original idea was presented to me as 5 bullet points on a piece of paper. Everything else was what I brought to the piece.
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