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What would it take?
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[Walter Soyka] “I think your zones idea is brilliant, with the same flexibility as clip layering but more consistency with FCPX’s design, and I hope you send Apple this feature request.”
Yes, I will give it a whirl. I will probably send something more generic like, “…it would be great if we could have a bit more visual organization control of our audio clips below the primary storyline.”
Fingers crossed.
THanks for the comment, by the way. Brilliance is in the eye of the beholder, or something like that. 🙂
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Yes, I will give it a whirl. I will probably send something more generic like, “…it would be great if we could have a bit more visual organization control of our audio clips below the primary storyline.””
I’d have to agree that your zones idea is a cracker – hopefully they’ll think the same in Cupertino!
Thinking about this whole issue of organizing your audio visually, I have been coming round to the conclusion that for now one of the better ways of doing this would be the judicious use of secondary storylines.
There could be a numnber of benefits to working more in this way.
First of all, while editing audio in the primary storyline is pretty straightforward, it is definitely compromised when trying to edit audio within the realm of connected clips. Obviously, in the most basic scenarios the primary storyline will take care of most of your audio editing needs but outside the simplest cases there is a clear need to edit audio efficiently outside that single realm. Music editing is obviously going to be the prime example here, where speed and finesse are critical.
Trying to edit audio down among the connected clips has slightly the feel of trying to juggle with eels – in time you could become a skilled eel juggler but it doesn’t feel like a skill worth devoting too much time to if there’s another way. In particular as far as I am concerned, the inability to simply overwrite one clip with another in this realm is a tiresome drawback. Editing music for example usually requires the ability to slide one clip against another, overwriting or extending around the edit point as required with a single action. If you try moving connected clips against each other for the same effect, you’ll get one clip slipping out of the way precisely to avoid its getting eaten up by the clip you are moving – or conversely, moving it apart will open up a gap. Either way you will have to “repair” the edit by trimming or extending. OK, so it’s only a few extra actions but who wants more actions? We are always hunting for ways of using fewer.
Another way for me is to group the audio that I’m currently working on into a secondary storyline (not a compound clip where its inner workings are going to be hidden away from the main timeline, which is too much of a disadvantage for me). In the secondary storyline, most of the advantages of the primary storyline are restored and you can indeed go back to sliding your clips against each other in the traditional way. And you get the advantage of being able to ripple edit without affecting anything anywhere else – again great for music editing.
What would be great for me is if secondary storylines had all the functionality of the primary storyline and none of the restrictions that currently with them. It would be great for instance to be able to connect clips within the secondary – and not have to Open in Timeline to do so (nesting behaviours, though useful, are really not good for editing generally because they require you to edit “out-of-context”).
What secondaries also give you is a measure of visual control that is otherwise lacking among connected clips (as you’ve been discussing), so that for example I can keep all the clips that belong in one music edit (there could be several within the one cue) together in one place.
There is a sense in which secondaries are already virtual tracks, more so in fact in relation to audio than video. They can also be broken apart as necessary so you never need to be locked into one organizational system if you don’t want. (It would be really helpful if you could have an Overwrite to Secondary Storyline command, as well as the Lift from Secondary Storyline – but I can see how this might be complicated in practice.)
I think expanding the capabilities of secondaries, or rather implementing a system where the secondaries share all the characteristics of the primary would really open a lot of possibilities and reduce some of the limitations.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “What would be great for me is if secondary storylines had all the functionality of the primary storyline and none of the restrictions that currently with them.”
I completely agree, but isn’t that what a “track” is?
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I completely agree, but isn’t that what a “track” is?”
Exactly! I don’t think we ever quite realized what brilliant organizational tools tracks actually are until Apple opened our eyes to it by taking them away 😉
I suppose I’m just looking at secondaries as a way of getting back some of their benefits in some form …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Nice work, Simon.
[Simon Ubsdell] “Thinking about this whole issue of organizing your audio visually, I have been coming round to the conclusion that for now one of the better ways of doing this would be the judicious use of secondary storylines.”
Completely, look here at this pic. They aren’t tracks, but you can see what’s going on, and this is too simple of an example, but I think people can get the idea:
The problem is, if you start extending secondaries out for long distances, they won’t follow the clips above them, which could be a problem.
[Simon Ubsdell] “There is a sense in which secondaries are already virtual tracks, more so in fact in relation to audio than video. They can also be broken apart as necessary so you never need to be locked into one organizational system if you don’t want. (It would be really helpful if you could have an Overwrite to Secondary Storyline command, as well as the Lift from Secondary Storyline – but I can see how this might be complicated in practice.)”
Just curious as why the “replace” functions won’t work as overwrite for you? I also think your lift from Secondary is cool, and would also fit the Craig’s “connect to something else besides the primary” idea.
Good show,
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] ”
Just curious as why the “replace” functions won’t work as overwrite for you?”It would be nice to be able to restore or add a group of connected clips to a secondary in the same way that you can Lift them from the secondary.
Actually it would be nice to be able to use Overwrite to Primary Storyline with audio clips and not just video – why can’t you “Lift from” but not “Overwrite to”?. Not sure why this isn’t already implemented …
As for Replace, I’m not a big fan of the options – I’d far sooner have a traditional Replace edit option (sync to playhead) than what we’ve got. Replace from Start/End seem to me to have limited value compared to this (there just basic 3-point edit options really), and the notion that the default Replace behaviour is to ripple the clip to the duration of the new one strikes me as very eccentric, though I can see how it might have the occasional use.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “As for Replace, I’m not a big fan of the options – I’d far sooner have a traditional Replace edit option (sync to playhead) than what we’ve got.”
I miss the playhead replace too. I see what they want us to do in the current implementation, but it’d be nice to just be able to replace “from this frame”, “at that frame” and know what would happen with the rest of the clip. I think a “replace from playhead” feature is completely necessary.
I find just the “Replace” function to be an overwrite of sorts, but doesn’t destroy the rest of the timeline. I do agree that we need some sort of “target” system to that the Primary controls will work in secondaries as they do in primary. Maybe there’s a good reason they don’t and I’m just missing it.
More feedback to Apple! 🙂
Jeremy
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In my experience, out of memory errors are 99% of the time due to a still with either the x or y dimension in the 4000 pixel range. With clients supplying 12+ megapixel jpegs it happens more frequently than ever.
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[Bret Williams] “99% of the time due to a still”
That’s not the only case. I hit it quite a lot with various ProRes, ProResHQ and ProRes4444 sequences. No stills. Generally it’s when you have multiple sequences open. FCP 7 has simply been exceeded by the types of media we throw at it these days. It seems to have gotten worse with more recent OS updates.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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