Why is there a project library?

[Bill Davis]

I’m glad this resonated with you.

I’ve become super sensitive to the fact that the more experienced an editor is, the more difficult it can be to adapt to X, since the really good cutter has had to build a complex and detailed process structure in their mind in order to excel at their craft. The more detailed and strong that structure is (which is a way of saying the BETTER an existing editor is!), the more difficult it can be to see something different and NOT try to conceptualize it inside the strong and rich “problem solving” language they’ve built and depend on for their very success.

(Maybe the reason I’ve had so much success with X is because I’m not as clever as many other editors – and I just find it way too easy to forget my past conditioning and start things afresh. Heck, after 18 months in X, I’m finding that I have to really force myself to remember how things worked in Legacy, even tho I spent a decade working in it! Maybe because I was constantly mentally switching between editing, writing, producing and running a business, so dumping one thinking process and adopting another is pretty much something I do all the time.

(wow, reading that last line, it’s kinda the definition of “scatterbrained?”- yikes!)

Oh well.

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.

[Marcus Moore]

So if it had been there from the start, would the concept still be seen as flawed?

I don’t think there’s ANY operation to which there aren’t exceptions.

Unfortunately, we’ll never know which added features fall into the category of “improvements” or simply “not done when launched”.

Considering that some estimates have them starting to put together FCPX only about a year before that first professional preview in February of 2011- I find it amazing they were able to get done what they did.

[Jim Giberti]

[Bill Davis] “I sometimes wonder about the workflows I read about here that seem to try to make X work a bit more like legacy, trying to compound and re-store “edits” in the EB, because to me, that seems to work around what I see as the essential flow of X. “

No more than people wonder about your approach I’m sure Bill.

I like FCPX and use it exclusively in our shop. But it has presented many frustrating moments for me in different production scenarios. Not because, as I see you often suggest, that I am resistant to the new way of doing things. No, not at all. It’s because there are simply some things that, in my and many other professional’s opinions, could be done better than the way it was initially designed. Obviously Apple agrees with us because every upgrade moves closer to our concepts of how it should have worked initially.

That’s all. I Love the program and use most if not all it’s strengths, but you shouldn’t mistake thoughtful approaches to “dams” and “striving for familiarity.” Sometimes people just do smart things that really work better for them and that don’t require a constant assessment of their motives or loyalty to an approach.

[Oliver Peters]

[Bill Davis] “Maybe the reason I’ve had so much success with X is because I’m not as clever as many other editors – and I just find it way too easy to forget my past conditioning and start things afresh. “

Or are you simply using FCP X in a very limited and structured fashion that “stays within the lines”? In other words, are you actually missing some of the flexibility FCP X offers?

😉

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jim Giberti]

[Marcus Moore] “So if it had been there from the start, would the concept still be seen as flawed?
“

Well for starters, I don’t know of any technical concepts that aren’t flawed in some ways.
But yes, if Apple had made this obvious and important function part of the initial design then it would have been much more on target as a flexible editor.

Those of us that have been working with X since the fist days and asking for logical and sorely needed fixes to make it a professional tool are being rewarded one way or the other. I think debating what was planned and what is being fixed is a dead end exercise.

But from a simple, definitive standpoint, in very essential ways like these two we’re discussing, the program is moving toward what many of us wanted it to be initially. And the changes most definitely seem responsive at the conceptual level to me, and not part of a “roll-out” of unfinished features.

[Marcus Moore]

I agree with you completely. Since we’ll never know, there’ little point in arguing what the FCPX dev team might or might not have had up on a whiteboard in 2010.

And I’m entirely comfortable with the idea that some of the concepts FCPX proposes may ultimately not work and have to be reversed. There’s enough that’s different about some of the ideas in FCPX that it would have been impossible to tell what problems could arise once it got out into the wild. In some cases that may be things like the tilde key, augmenting or improving functionality, or we may see them reverse course on something somewhere down the line.

I personally don’t think they’re completely off-base with anything they’ve done. Especially at this stage when it’s obvious some ideas haven’t been fully implemented yet (Roles).

I think the real indicator of where FCPX HAS struck paydirt in a new concept or operation is where we see that functionality adopted by the other players, like the skimmable thumbnails in Premier.

[Jim Giberti]

[Marcus Moore] “I personally don’t think they’re completely off-base with anything they’ve done. Especially at this stage when it’s obvious some ideas haven’t been fully implemented yet (Roles).”

Obviously I don’t think they were anything like completely off-base either. I’ve produced every film and TV spot we’ve done in the past year+ in FCPX. But I made the commitment to switch to it well aware of it’s flaws and hopeful that they would be addressed through community feedback. Any of the improvements that were actually part of the initial plan get my big thumbs up as well.

But going back to Oliver’s initial question. I definitely don’t see this as part of the initial plan. I do see it as an avenue they’ve opened that does put the “Project Library” concept at a disadvantage in many respects to this different way of managing projects and media through the new CC innovation in 1.0.6

It does, in fact, make the Event Browser a single source of both media and “projects” making it both faster and simpler to access assembled edits or raw media than working through the Project Library. And when you consider the resources that the Project Library requires, the idea of replacing it with a simple browser window looks a lot less CPU intensive, faster and more intuitive as well as improving on the over all paradigm of a self contained environment.

[Douglas K. dempsey]

But haven’t we read on this forum in the past, that nested compound within compound clips become a problem at some point? I seem to recall someone using that workflow who hit a wall of non-performance, and the fix was that he had to spread things out sideways into Projects, not layer compounds within compounds?

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

National Library Week coming in April. Let’s say something nice on behalf of libraries everywhere! 🙂

Doug D

[Oliver Peters]

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “But haven’t we read on this forum in the past, that nested compound within compound clips become a problem at some point? “

I think that behavior changed with 10.0.6. In any case though, if you use a compound clip as simply another sequence, without using it as a nest within other sequences, the dynamics change.

In my example, I have no intention of using the compound as a nest. When I go for the final version of these spots, I’ll edit the compound to the project and break it apart. Or I’ll simply copy & paste clips from one timeline to the other.

Nests are inherently evil in a collaborative editing environment. I have to pass off my sequence to a mixer using ProTools and a colorist on Davinci. Nests are a no-no in these situations. I will have to send my final sequence to FCP7 (via Xto7) in order to generate OMF and EDL files. (FWIW – neither X2Pro or XML list files are an option.)

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com