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Woah. This time it’s not me. It’s the filmmaking team from Focus…
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I get worked up when people tell me things that are not quantifiable.
Tim
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This whole Focus business has really brought out the judgmental side on this forum. Haven’t seen this kind of heat in a year, at least.
The thing is, none of us knows the director in question, and none of us knows his skill level on Avid. He may be a relative Avid newbie, or maybe he just doesn’t feel comfortable on Avid. So for him, he may feel that he’s editing much faster on X. Absent any real evidence, why not take his word for it?
That being said, yes, the Apple marketing piece is just that – marketing. I personally find “2 to 3 times faster” a bit much, but whatever.
Still, I know I feel much more productive on many of my projects on X than on Avid, and I’ve used Avid since the 90s. I’d be willing to equate productive with fast in an overall sense. I’m pretty fast on Avid, but I’m kind of over it for most of what I do.
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[Jeff Markgraf] “This whole Focus business has really brought out the judgmental side on this forum. Haven’t seen this kind of heat in a year, at least.”
6 months at the longest. 😉 The thread about the editor of Gravity (from late last year) started out as judgmental and never changed tone, and a few months before that there was a thread about the edit workflow on Sharknado 2 and that thread was pretty much nothing but bickering too.
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Who cares! If anyone on this forum is cutting major studio release features or TV, you’re likely using Avid. Because everyone else is, mainly. If you’re cutting commercials, high-end, again it’s likely Avid. If you’re an indie fiction or doc person, a sole proprietor, an educator, or most of the rest of us who are not walking up to the podium to collect a gold statuette … we can cut on anything we want, and the result will not reveal our preference.
Meanwhile I have a friend who is a corporate pharma shooter, and he says the staffers use Avid. Why? I’ll give you a hint: the same reason we used to rent a Panaflex camera to shoot an industrial film 40 years ago. Because it made us feel like the “the big boys.” Like we were shooting a Hollywood feature!
The real “FCPX or Not: The Debate” remains, in my opinion, the missing features and odd behaviors that sometimes trip up some of us, usually during a very specific workflow. The kind of thing Oliver Peters, who is pretty familiar with most of the NLEs, will post — e.g. his audio is acting weird when he tries to export it out of X, and so on. If you need to do that specific workflow, and it’s acting quirky or falling short, use PPro. I don’t mind, really.
Most of the time, my moderate-to-low end docu work goes along nicely in X, so I like it. I only use Legacy when I dip into an older project, and don’t really need to convert to X.
If I get a job that stumps my abilities in X … it will probably be a complex enough project that I’m hiring a better editor anyway, and I’m the producer.
So he or she can cut on anything she pleases!
Doug D
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[Neil Goodman] “I hear this quite a bit – its faster, its faster, its faster..
No one ever says specifically what made it faster ?”
Keep in mind this is a director, not the editor. So undoubtedly speed advantages would be less so with an editor that knows either product in and out. But…
Here is the full quote, and I think it’s fairly clear what he’s saying:
“That’s when we noticed that it was designed to cut digital video from the ground up, not just made to emulate the film experience, it was really appealing. And then when we found how easy it was, it was amazing, I could cut at least twice as fast if not three times as fast on Final Cut Pro X as I could on Avid. There was so much less thinking and less clicking than that flatbed emulation.”
On a more general note, I’ve outlined probably at least 5 to 10 times on this board what makes FCP X faster for my workflows. There have been hundreds of posts from others about this. So it simply is not true that no one ever says what makes it faster.
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[Neil Goodman] “No one ever says specifically what made it faster ?
Was it all the front end prep, was it the the actual timeline? What specifically? “
I think primary difference remains selection. In track based editing you must select things individually each time to move them. The app cannot read your mind. It has no idea what you want to move until you select it.
X assumes that you want the audio from the interview to go along with the video, and the majority of the time I do.
The video below shows exactly what I’m talking about. People get caught up in the “rippling’.
It’s the connections more than anything. Keeping things in sync is just a bonus of that.If you had to select 10 items that’s 10 clicks. With items connected you are moving 10 things all at once.
It’s just like when I go to the store. I don’t want to move 20 items to my car individually, I want them in one bag.
I’m going to work hockey tonight and we will put a bunch of stuff on one cart and move it all at once.
We move a bunch of stuff at once every day in life. To me it’s consistent with what I always do.It’s not consistent with how I used to edit but I can get past that.
Couple that with all the other things like that skimmer and I just prefer it. I prefer not dragging the playhead around the timeline anymore.
Apple! Get that skimmer in Motion. STAT
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[Brett Sherman] “So it simply is not true that no one ever says what makes it faster.”
I would think that people might trust the word of the many experienced Editors who post on here rather than the usual scepticism.
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To me, a big element is what Bill brought up, which is the “team” aspect of this. A director/teacher friend of mine is fond of saying that “filmmaking is team art”. I think that’s very applicable in how Ficarra, Requa, Kovac and the assistants approached this film. Not to say it couldn’t have been done with something else, nor that others don’t also do it. Nevertheless, there’s an interesting style and that’s fascinating in this discussion. That collaborative side of X is something that I hope Apple expands upon.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Steve Connor] “I would think that people might trust the word of the many experienced Editors who post on here rather than the usual scepticism.”
I still think big numbers deserve skepticism. I have no trouble believing that many editorial tasks are 2x-3x faster (or more), but it’s not clear what exactly is said to be so much faster — the whole process?
If FCPX really lets you cut “two if not three times as fast,” then presumably FCPX editors have seen either their earnings or their output double or triple, or they have cut their workweeks down to two days.
If this is the case, I’ll bet you can convert some holdouts right here in this thread. If this is not the case, then we need to approach the question of efficiency improvements with more granularity.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
As usual… leave it to Oliver Peters to say something smart.
Honestly, if there was one brilliant thing that was done as a part of the Focus process, it was bringing the departments (editorial, vfx, sound) closer together, and having them all working together under the same roof until it came time to close the show.
THAT IS THE REAL INNOVATION. You don’t need a million people working in a million places to get something done.
Get your core team in a room, talk to each other, collaborate, tell your story, move forward. Edit, sound, color, VFX can all be done in the same place and in the same workgroup if you plan it out properly… and you can do it in a shared environment.
If nothing else, Focus will hopefully signal the end of the bureaucracy that currently plagues high end storytelling. The amount of work that a few competent people can get done in a room together has never been higher… regardless of what editing platform you choose.
On a side note… if you want to see the cage match that is FCPX Or Not: The Debate turned into a live setting… you should come hang out at the FCPWORKS Suite at NAB (we’re going to have a bit of a special panel… and this is almost confirmed). Same goes for if you want to know more about the who, what, why, and how of Focus. Mike Matzdorff and I will be there talking about that as well.
Lot’s of cool stuff coming down the pike. It’s an exciting time to be in post production.
Sam Mestman
Workflow Architect – FCPWORKS
http://www.fcpworks.com
http://www.wemakemovies.org
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