Working with material on existing projects

[Bret Williams]

You’re either high or misunderstanding the question. Or I am! 🙂

Someone has a chunk of a timeline – could be 40 layers and a thousand edits. They need to put that chunk into another timeline and your answer is to break it all apart into clips and keywords and re edit them into another timeline? I don’t get it.

[Bill Davis]

[alice barci] “Bill, it seems to me that what you are describing is what fcp used to be able to do with the “make independent clip” option. What I would have formerly done was select the sections I wanted to use, turn them into independent clips and store them in folders in the browser (WITH synced sound and corresponding B camera shots) and then use them in the timeline as needed. Ideally that is what I want to be doing now as well. How does that work in x? Applying keywords to clips sounds like a savvy tool, but physically dropping things in folders seems like a more convenient way to work (that requires only tying a single keyword – the folder name). Like calling my main Folder “Interviews”, my sub folder “Frank” and my clips “Frank talks about ladies”, “Frank blows his nose”, “blank stare” or whatever they may be. So convenient, so simple.

Sorry if I’m just not “getting it.””

Alice,

I understand where you’re coming from. And I appreciate how hard it is to re-calibrate your thinking when you’re coming from legacy editors and coming into X. The issue is that you simply can’t think about how Legacy USED to operate and apply that thinking to using X. It doesn’t work. In Legacy, editing operations were largely finder and code based. In X they are nearly exclusively metadata and database expressions. These two things work VERY differently. In Legacy, copying clips and moving them around was trivial. In the X database, clips should NEVER leave their home base, and literally everything is a function of adding additional code pointers back to the basic data – and TRACKING those changes in the metadata database.

Essentially Legacy was largely a “disconnected” system of standalone code expressions. X is an “interconnected” system of metadata.

Failing to understand this – and worse, trying to operate X like you operated Legacy can lead you to very bad performance.

I hear people having lots of issues with sluggish performance. And I used to have them as well.

But then I started noticing WHEN my performance got sluggish, and over time, my own actions started to reveal what I was doing that I didn’t understand well enough to “get” how to operate to avoid sluggishness.

Whether is was stacking “high-calculation” transitions with lots of transparency layers to calculate – or failing to give X the time it needs to do it’s internal database cleanups when I’ve asked it to do transcoding or other intensive background operations – things I used to do that caused “sluggishness” I’ve just stopped doing over time. Because there are plenty of alternate ways to get the same stuff done without doing things that make the program sluggish.

For example, I’m sparing on the use of compound clips. Why? Because they aren’t at all like Legacy nests. They can help you with some calculation types (like titling) and KILL you with others (like cutting up long clips with lots of markers and sprinkling the new smaller clips into new projects – since each of those tiny clips has ALL the metadata of the original long form pieces they are taken from!)

X is a new beast. It simply does NOT work like other NLE programs. So the big temptation – to use it like your old editing software and expecting it to be similarly efficient doing things the way they USED to be done – often fails with X.

You MUST learn to do things in ways that X is built. If you do, it’s wicked fast, extremely capable, and amazingly agile.

But that facility comes with experience, NOT by simply trying to “intuit” how it works based on your prior experience with other NLEs.

This is why it’s been such a long slog for so many editors in transitioning from mis-understanding the program to appreciating it.

But look around. More and more editors who have taken the learning journey are now coming out on the other side of the long, slow learning curve and we’re pretty darned excited to be here.

Because if you match what it does to what you need – it’s a radically superior tool for doing a lot of excellent editing work really quickly and easily.

Not for everyone, but in my experience as a working editor for way more than a decade, it can cut 95% of the kind of work I do – and it doest is MUCH better than any other tool I’ve ever used.

If for no other reason than it’s build on the basic idea of a two stage editing system where all the work you do in the pre-editing space (the Event Browser) remains accessible to every project you do from that point on. That drives some very sweet efficiency over the “do all your work in a timeline and then when you close it down – everything you’ve done is functionally hidden away by the program.”

X on the other hand gets BETTER over time since it’s designed to gives you on-line access to a whole lot of the work you did yesterday as you build each new edit.

That’s pretty powerful stuff, in my book.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Bret Williams] “You’re either high or misunderstanding the question. Or I am! 🙂

Someone has a chunk of a timeline – could be 40 layers and a thousand edits. They need to put that chunk into another timeline and your answer is to break it all apart into clips and keywords and re edit them into another timeline? I don’t get it.”

Well, here’s the OP’s statement:

I am trying to put together an edit of material that was pre-synced and organized for me in projects. The complete material is divided up between 9 different projects (all with A and B cameras), and I need to be combing parts from all of them.

It says NOTHING about 40 layer thousand edit timelines. I think you’re simply projecting what you work with onto her.

Her statement implies to me that someone else did an audio video sync against two cameras. Period.

And if she wants the maximum benefit from X, she would need to step back and use the tools that X has available that will make her editing life so much easier over the life of the project. And that necessarily means doing clip range tagging in the Event Browser, since that is the foundational concept that X is built upon that allows you to leverage work you do once, and benefit from it in subsequent projects in the future.

I get that people can use the software “like they edited in legacy” – but if they do – they might as well be using Legacy – since it’s like going to a party in a mansion, and spending the entire party in entry hall. Yes, you’ve gone to the party. But you’ve also missed a whole lot of the experience that makes this party unique.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Alice Barci]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your reply, and I really appreciate your passion for the program. I completely understand and am aware that I simply do not know how to work with X yet, and that it cannot benefit me until I do. I know I must completely rethink my use of the program and not rely on my old habits.

That being said, I still can’t understand how I am supposed to efficiently work on this project without being able to arrange these clips I want to work with effectively.

I don’t know how to best describe my problem than how I did earlier: Essentially I have roughly 15 hours of footage, all synced up with corresponding cameras and sounds, divided into these different projects labeled by day. I can easily navigate through these projects with my notes and the literal timeline they follow.

But now I want to edit this into a 3 minuted thing. While going through the whole footage I’ve made markers at points I want to use. They correspond to my notes I have taken on paper. Now I am looking for a way to organize all these markers and sections I want to use, and I can’t figure out how. I want to label them and prepare them for future use, just as you say. But I want them to remain synced with their counterpart camera and sound.

With the new workflow of X and whatnot, I can’t imagine there not being a solution to organizing synced clips. Again, I understand that I am thinking on old terms, maybe I’ve been editing “wrong” all this time before making the switch. But how on earth do I organize these damn clips I want to work with in an X-friendly manner? I’m sorry, I just can’t get over wanting to find a way to make this work! If this option just doesn’t exist, what am I doing wrong that I can’t figure out how to work without this option? I just keep putting stuff in my new timeline that is increasingly looking like chaos!

Thank you for your continued efforts to help me understand this.

[Bret Williams]

If that’s what she meant, I sure didn’t read it that way. Neither did a few others. Maybe it wasn’t an edit pe se, but it seems like there are at least 3 tracks involved – A, B, and audio perhaps.

If thats the case someone screwed up and they should’ve been putting all their effort into making multicam clips.

But as it seems it’s too late for that, perhaps copy and paste is the only option that is going to keep the A and B and audio in sync. I didn’t see how you addressed that. It seemed ilke you were just addressing key wording individual clip ranges.

[Bill Davis]

[alice barci] “I just can’t get over wanting to find a way to make this work! If this option just doesn’t exist, what am I doing wrong that I can’t figure out how to work without this option? I just keep putting stuff in my new timeline that is increasingly looking like chaos!

Thank you for your continued efforts to help me understand this.”

alice,

First and foremost, you’re not doing anything “wrong.” Period. You (and countless other editors!) are just coming from a world where the timeline was where all the editing happened.

X has changed that idea. Basically, the difference is that the timeline is DOWNSTREAM from the Event Browser. So work you do in the timeline is kinda “stuck” in a way it never was in Legacy.

Your problem is a good example. It appears that someone has tried to help you by “pre editing” your work making compounds and syncing sound in timelines already – but by doing so, they’ve kinda “stuck” you working in a space that’s downstream from much of the transformative power of the software.

Decisions made in the timeline can’t really be “leveraged” across multiple projects. They’re STUCK in that timeline. That’s one of the essential differences of X.

The huge leverage of the software is choosing ranges in the Event Browser and applying pre-edit decisions there. Anything from trim choices, color corrections, and the BIG deal – keyword application to ranges – in the Event Browser is all work that “sticks around” so that you can benefit from it over multiple projects.

If the person trying to help you by “pre-editing” your clips into compounds had instead not focused so much on “building timelines” which was the Legacy way of prepping for an edit – and had instead focused on using keywords to mark ranges in the Event Browser, compounding clips THERE – (particularly doing the sync audio work there) and allowed you to do the B-camera shot matching via Multi-cam, for example, you’d have everything you have now, but ALSO you would have the beginnings of an incredibly useful database of all those previous decisions waiting for you to add YOUR decisisions – like picking the scenes for your new edits.

The point, once again, is that too many people are coming into X but trying to edit just like they did in prior timeline based NLEs and therefore missing the whole point of the new database driven model.

With the prep done the way it appears they did it in your case, there’s little you can do outside learning X step by step, and making sure that the next time you work on a project, you force yourself to work int the upstream Event Browser FIRST – rather than arranging clips on a timeline FIRST.

Hope that helps.

B

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Bret Williams] “If thats the case someone screwed up and they should’ve been putting all their effort into making multicam clips. “

AMEN.

[Bret Williams] “But as it seems it’s too late for that, perhaps copy and paste is the only option that is going to keep the A and B and audio in sync. I didn’t see how you addressed that. It seemed ilke you were just addressing key wording individual clip ranges.”

I was once again trying to help someone new to X to understand it’s differences. You clearly understand them since you’ve been around here a while and I know you’re using the software usefully.

But I try not to forget that most people coming here are just starting out – and their natural tendency is to try to shoehorn operating X the way they operated legacy. (I know I did at first!) And we both know that that’s a bad way to approach the new software. It leaves WAY too much of the power of X on the table.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Alice Barci]

Okay, I believe I understand the process now. I’m sure this has some major advantages for a lot of editors, and once I get a hang of it, I hope I will feel the same way.

Thanks for your help!

[Bret Williams]

Well maybe. I’m really only into my 4th project. All multicam 5d / 7d shoots so after a test, it was a no brainer. The graphics were all AE overlay for the first couple projects, but right now I’m wrapping up 2 corporate videos. Each very long and full of bullet points ps files, PDF conversions, and of course a 3 camera shoot. My timeline at points is7 or 8 layers (I prefer not to compound) and its 45min. It performs great. But I don’t really keyword and range. Well, I guess I do. I bring in folders of images as keyword collections and pretty much treat them as bins.

On our earliest project I was key wording interviews to find.comments and such quickly so as to creatively find a way to intertwine them. I thought it was great and efficient.

But my wife (producer) printed out a transcript and with some glue and some scissors had a rough cut for me before I was done key wording and logging. Sometimes high tech ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.