[Andrew Kimery]

My sentiments are similar to Oliver’s in that what I’d be most interested in hearing about is what took place behind closed doors deep inside the bowels of Apple, but I doubt that story is coming to light any time soon. Given my level of closeness to the subject matter (pretty much everyone interviewed for the doc I’ve already read their books, seen their demos, attended their panels, listened to their pod casts, followed them on Twitter, etc.,.) I’m not really that interested in watching a 90min recap of 6yrs worth of events that I already followed on a daily basis.

I’m sure it will find an audience though.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Oliver Peters] “In many docs, the editor is the de facto director and even writer. Yes, there may be a director in name, but it’s often the editor who shapes the story and does indeed make the decisions of what to keep and remove. And what to re-arrange to tell a cogent story. So yes, it is your call.”

That’s mainly my experience as well. I take on a producing/writing role as the editor and the director and/or producer expect me to know the footage better than anyone. They’ll of course have their ideas and input, but usually it’s more of a skeleton. They want to go from A to B to C, but exactly how to create a cohesive and compelling narrative path in order to get from A to B to C falls on me. Sometimes A to B to C doesn’t work so I have to know the footage well enough to be able to create a new order and a new narrative path. More than once we’ve been three months into an edit, hit a snag (or an epiphany) and back to the raw we go reanalyzing it in a way that wasn’t conceivable three months prior. This is a big reason why I love transcripts. It’s so quick and easy to go back and skim (or keyword search) though them long after memories of who said exactly what, when and where have faded.

That’s not to say I haven’t worked on projects where I basically walk into a waiting string out (or paper cut) and I never have to have a working knowledge of the raw footage, it’s just not typical for me.

[Walter Soyka] “When I was cutting full-time in FCP Legend, I spent a lot of time in the Browser. Like a hipster burning his mouth on his coffee, I was drinking metadata before it was cool. I subclipped the heck out of my footage. I used color-coding and scene/take columns and the Good Take checkbox. I wore out the Alt key on my keyboard scrubbing picons, then I freely switched to column view and pretended the browser was Excel. I gave myself fake smart collections with constant Find operations.”

I used to work very similar to that too, but I started drifting more towards subtractive editing when tapeless media became more popular. Someone might record 100 different shots to tape on a shoot, but when it got ingested you could do the whole tape at once and those 100 different shots would all be contained w/in a single piece of media. With tapeless you end up with 100 piece of media. When I was trying to figure out how to organize it all (renaming hundreds upon hundreds of clips every day or so wasn’t feasible) I had the idea of putting all the media shot to a card in its own sequence and treating that sequence like a tape (CamA01, CamA02, CamA03 etc.,). For me the switch from mainly additive to mainly subtractive wasn’t some sort of philosophical shift or ‘awakening’ it was just a pragmatic way to adapt to a changing post world. Over the years I just kept experimenting and refining my methods to best suit the work I do (which is almost exclusively doc/unscripted) and the manner in which I like to work.

It wasn’t until this thread that I really thought about how my approached to editing has changed over the last fifteen years.

[Andrew Kimery]

As if we need another perspective… ????

“…subtractive editing can rarely do more than shorten the ordeal of watching the result.

Genuine video editing is not subtractive, but additive. Starting with nothing, you purposefully select and place one shot after another until they add up to a program. Notice that you don’t select what to take out but what to put in.”

https://www.personal.kent.edu/~lhanson/whatisediting.htm

[Andrew Kimery]

[Simon Ubsdell] “And apologies to everyone for my clumsy bricklayer metaphor. I have great respect for bricklayers of all kinds whether real or metaphorical.
“

So sculptors and painters then, bricklayers are out? 😉

Edit: Sculptors and Stone Masons, maybe?

[Andrew Kimery]

I’m sure you guys will hear from me a some point. 😉

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “You know enough about the FCP X workflow, Andrew, to understand why the above sounds like a nightmare step backwards to any qualified FCP X editor.”

I freely admit it sounds like a nightmare, and like I said I pretty much stumbled into it by accident, but it worked out very well and certainly expanded my organizational vocabulary. After fifteen years of using NLEs (Premiere, FCP Legend, Avid) I never would’ve thought to try something like that, but I guess you never really know until you try something new, even if it’s out of your comfort zone and different than what you previously thought was viable. ????

[Tony West] “I find myself more and more not even labeling broll shots because I can see what they are. I don’t really have to type “front of plant” because I can see it.”

Yeah, once tapeless took off and we became besieged by a relentless sea of clips I got away from labeling individual clips too. I think that helped push me towards crafting a more sequence-based approach.

I’ve been trying to make time to get more familiar with X (slowly making my way through the Ripple Training) but something always comes up. I’ll get there eventually (though probably not until the end of August at the earliest since I have a big project about to start soon).

[Andrew Kimery]

[Tony West] “Wow, that’s interesting. I can see how it could work.”

I kinda stumbled into it. On a doc project a director wanted to watch down all the broll he shot and since clicking on clip after clip in the Browser is tedious I started putting them into a single time. I kept adding more and more and Premiere never became sluggish so I ended up going “what hell” and put them all in. To my amazement the 14hr hour timeline played back fine. Even on my 2011 MBP it didn’t lag.

What I’ve noticed with PPro is that timeline duration alone doesn’t seem to cause lag, but a combination of a lot cuts plus long duration will get it to lag. So if I started editing in that 14hr timeline then it would start to lag once hundreds and then thousands of cuts started to appear. So super long timelines are great for selects/broll, but not great for editing in my experience.

I wouldn’t label every clip, but I would label the beginning of each section with a blue marker, and then interesting bits of broll with a red marker. So a mix of color coding and markers w/notes for the organization. And since markers can ripple I can easily add new content as needed and not screw up my organization.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Tony West] ”
Say you have b-roll from 6 different cities. Where is your b-roll kept? Do you just mix it all in together? Instead of Chicago b-roll separated from St. Louis B-roll and Missouri River Separated from Ohio River and so on?”

Depends on the situation though last year I worked on a doc project that had a 14hr long broll timeline. I used markers to organize it and played back never chocked. The Marker Window is searchable so it’s pretty easy to narrow in on what I need.

-Andrew

[Andrew Kimery]

[andy patterson] “You keep responding with strawmans. I don’t doubt Avid is top dog but how is this relevant to the fact the Adobe is not worried about the little guy? That is what my comments are about. Can you please explain why the CC would be a better option for a blogger or hobbiest than the DR? “

I’m just asking you to tell me what Adobe product was for the little guy years ago when you say Adobe cared about the little guy.

Is Premiere Elements today not a good option for the little guy? If the little guy is only concerned about price then free DR and free Media100 beat everything. They beat full price DR. They beat FCP X. They beat Adobe. They beat Avid. They beat Vegas. They beat anything that costs money (not matter how much or how little money).

As to why anything other than free DR or free M100 would be better for a hobbyist? That’s up to each individual and their wants/needs. That’s the odd thing about value, it encompasses more than just price. Maybe they use Adobe products at work and make tutorials for Adobe products in their free time? Maybe they make movies with their friends who use Adobe products so they do too in order to make collaboration easier? Maybe they chose it because that’s what the filmmakers they follow us? Maybe you could find actual hobbyists themselves and ask?

[andy patterson] “Will Google Docs make MS Office Obsolete? Probably not. Can some people get by with Google Docs. Probably. “

So MS Office can still be competitive even though it costs way more money than Google Docs? It’s almost as if a product’s value can be important than its price. I agree.

[andy patterson] “I think FCPX is what made people switch. If FCP 8 was here today who knows what would have happened? “

Certainly agree with that. Apple killing FCP Legend and launching X busted the door wide open for competition.

[andy patterson] “On the flip side the bloggers who have stopped the CC subscription always mention FCPX is less expensive and does the job. “

So Apple should make FCP X free so they can compete with free DR?

[Bob Zelin] “I am an amateur musician, and I know lots of amateur musicians… “

That’s a good point, Bob.

[Andrew Kimery]

[andy patterson] “I was not interested in DR five years ago. If you watch the video other people mention DR 14 is a game changer and the price for the paid version has dropped. You forgot to mention that. “

I think I started with DR at version 9 and people have been saying DR is a game changer for the past 3 or 4 years. Each year people praise the updates to it’s NLE functionality, but then the tone changes to “the updates are great but…” When it actually starts changing the game I’ll believe it is a game changer. I didn’t mention the price drop because the conversation keeps focusing on lowering prices and free is a lot lower than $299.

[andy patterson] “What I am stating is Adobe wants to cater exclusively to the higher end editors like Avid once did. “

if Adobe is trying to carter exclusively to the high end they are failing miserably. First off, they aren’t charging nearly enough ($50/mo to Avid only gets you MC where as $50/mo to Adobe gets you everything). Secondly, they pretty much failed to secure the vacated inroads FCP Legend made into the high end. I’d guess Avid owns more of the high end now than it has in years as places that used to use FCP Legend opted to switch to Avid instead of X or PPro. Finally, they have YouTubers like Freddie Wong talking at their events and waste their time on down market features like the Social Media Publishing tool…

One of the things Adobe has done a solid job of though is hoovering up a lot of the mid market and lower market that used to be dominated by FCP Legend.

[andy patterson] “You are totally proving my point. I never stated a blogger would spend $1800.00 on the CS Production Premium. “

You keep saying things like [andy patterson] “There was a time when Adobe cared about the little guy.” and I’m just trying to figure out when that time was and what Adobe product you keep alluding to. It’s certainly not the Creative Suite that you wish Adobe would return too.

[andy patterson] “What I stated is that for the web blogger wanting a little more than what iMovie offers Adobe has opted not to compete with BMD or FCPX.”

Adobe Premiere Elements is $99 (perpetual license). $149 for Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements combo (I might have just answered my previous question for you). Of course that’s still not as good as free DR.

[andy patterson] “I never stated there are only YouTubers and post production house. Never did I make that statement. “

I never said you made that statement. I said that you keep focusing on two extremes (hobbyist YouTubers/vloggers and post houses). For example:

[andy patterson] “I have already stated for a post production house $49.99 is not expensive… In fact I stated for the average blogger $49.99 is expensive.

I doubt the average blogger needs AE while on the other hand Motion and FCPX can offer a lot for the price… To say $49.99 is not to expensive for a post production house is a non issues…”

[andy patterson] “As I have stated $49.99 is not a lot of money for a post production house but for a web blogger it is”

[andy patterson] “I am saying many YouTubers will opt for FCPX or DR because of the costly rental paradigm when compared to Premiere Pro. No one is saying that for a post production house $50.00 a month is to expensive. “

[andy patterson] “There are a lot of Youtubers that use Macs that have ditched Premiere Pro in favor of FCPX… I admit a post production house is not going to be as concerned about the cost as opposed to workflow paradigms.
“