Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think that compound clips/explicit relationships/metadata and spatial arrangement are mutually exclusive, though, and I’d certainly prefer a system that offered both.”
I yield and agree that there is no mutual exclusivity, and that spatial organization is valuable to users.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “FCP’s media organization (“clips” in “bins”) is absolutely a film metaphor, and shares some important concepts with film. A clip can only exist in one bin. If you want to store the same thing in two places, you have to copy it.”
Why is this a good thing though? Why copy digital data when you can just reference it?
[Walter Soyka] “FCPX’s media organization is totally different. Metadata rules over physical arrangement.”
Yes, and that metadata makes it searchable. Spatial is quicker to locate only as long as the data set can fit in your field of view. Truly a fundamental difference, and a debate that is not at all limited to NLEs.
[Walter Soyka] “FCPX’s editorial abstractions (storylines and connected clips) don’t exist with FCP or with razor blades and splicing tape. They behave as if they were physical in the context of the FCPX timeline, but there’s no physical analog.”
True. And I think that’s why I like the abstractions. Forcing a meatspace analog onto fully digital workflow seems incongruent to me. I can understand why others hate it though.
Best,
Andy -
[Chris Harlan] “You know, you say all this Andy, but the claim is constantly being made that X represents a revolution in editing, and is much, much faster. I think it is fair for people to ask for that to be substantiated.”
Fair enough. Likewise it is only fair that the accusations of FCPX’s timeline being “unusable” be substantiated. Experienced veteran editors have weighed in on both sides, so no one gets a pass on offering supporting arguments. Just saying it is slower is no more valid than just saying it is faster.
Best,
Andy -
[David Lawrence] “I don’t hear anyone saying that building a sequence like this in FCPX is impossible. What I’m hearing a vast majority of advanced users saying is that it’s so painful to do that it might as well be impossible. If Apple cares about these users, they need to listen and act on their feedback. Apple’s silence has not been helpful.”
And I’d be much more willing to accept these statements if these advanced users supported them, which would help convince me their frustration was with a structural problem in FCPX’s timeline model and not that it doesn’t behave the way they are used to a timeline behaving. There’s a big difference if we’re debating the merits of the model. If you attempt to apply open timeline disciplines to the magnetic timeline it will be painful and frustrating and seem to be fighting you. You call that Apple arrogantly telling you how to work, I call that driving a nail with the cheek of a hammer.
[David Lawrence] “If FCPX takes 5 clicks and a bunch of mousing to achieve the same result I can get with a single right-click select in FCP7, then yes, you can absolutely say it is less efficient at that task.”
Didn’t we just share an exchange recently where what seemed to take five clicks only took one or two? 🙂
[David Lawrence] “As cynical as what Apple did at NAB?”
Touché.
Best,
Andy -
[David Lawrence] “I have yet to see any proof that the magnetic timeline adds efficiency to the creation of timelines like Mr. Federline’s. I believe him when he says it is unusable for him. Before you say he’s full of baloney, I invite you to prove that he’s wrong. Prove that FCPX is faster, more efficient, and a better way to work for advanced projects like these. I extend this invitation to anyone who believes the magnetic timeline is better.”
What, are we to stage a race? If I mischaracterized the point of his argument (focusing on the structure rather than the process) I was calling baloney on a misapprehension. All I have is a screenshot and his assertion he found FCPX “completely unusable for a project like the timeline [he] included”. What should I be seeing in his screenshot that is impossibly cumbersome to achieve in FCPX? Certainly not the compositing layering. Not the layout of the audio. Other than the elevation of some clips above some video tracks, what jumps out of that screenshot as being a nightmare to pull off in FCPX?
[David Lawrence] “Let’s see the evidence. Show me how that it’s better for more than just simple assembly.”
I’m not sure what kind of meaningful evidence anyone could gather in support of one side or the other on this point. Number of clicks? Time spent? Layers required to achieve a given effect? What is your metric for editorial efficiency?
[David Lawrence] “The open timeline model has proven itself with over twenty years of refinement and success. The magnetic timeline is the result of Apple engineers and marketing people deciding they know better than me how I should do my job. It’s a pretty arrogant stance to take with a professional industry.”
That’s a cynical way to charaterize it. Is it at all possible it was Apple’s UI designers studying how people use their software and seeking to remove barriers to common tasks? I don’t believe this thing is the product of a gang of cruel scientists and hucksters bent on insulting professional editors.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “Film editorial always ripples, but I think that FCP is conceptually much closer to film editorial than FCPX is. Consider the concepts (and language) if things like bins, clips, and sequences, and the lack of concepts like storylines and clip connections. “
Conceptually? Or simply semantically? I think the ripple behavior is much more intrinsic to the comparison than what we name the icons in an NLE.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “Proximity and alignment are visual cues that people use to quickly understand the relationship between objects. In an open timeline, the editor can take advantage of these, actually designing the track layout both to composite properly and to convey information about the edit back to the editor at a glance.”
These are loose conventions which can and will vary widely from user to user and shop to shop, and I did say that there are workflow and organizational reasons to want to elevate things vertically. However, a much more explicit means of organization and communication exists in FCPX: compound clips and the timeline search panel.
[Walter Soyka] “FCPX with its self-collapsing timeline makes it impossible for us to use proximity on the timeline to convey meaning at all, and it fights our inclination to use alignment to relate objects. Any relationships between aligned objects in the FCPX timeline is purely coincidental.”
Apple needs to allow for naming of compound clips, but that aside, gathering elements into compound clips as well as tagging clips with metadata is a far more explicit means of communicating order and intent than what can be implied with simple proximity.
[Walter Soyka] “Graphic design offers us a few tools to convey information in 2D space, but FCPX’s self-collapsing timeline totally disregards them.”
Yes it does. But I say it is better to convey information with metadata and explicit relationships than to imply it with spatial proximity.
Best,
Andy -
[David Roth Weiss] “Holy mackerel, first it’s open season on professional editors, now Citizen Kane and The Godfather are being used in the context of the magnetic timeline. Is nothing sacred anymore?”
Not those two specifically, but any film edited by cutting celluloid.
[David Roth Weiss] “Could you please go into detail with a full explanation the theory above, please? I think this one’s a bit of a stretch.”
Editing celluloid involves gluing or taping two film ends together, creating tangible links between two clips. Seems to me that is a lot more conceptually similar to the magnetic timeline’s explicit clip connections metaphor than the metaphor employed by the traditional NLE timeline, which if translated literally into meatspace would look like laying strips of film out in sequence with nothing but spatial proximity linking them together.
My argument is in defense of the UI metaphor of the magnetic timeline, I’m not implying any endorsement of FCPX by any revered film editors, past or present. I’m only drawing conceptual parallels.
Best,
Andy -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “There is no primary storyline, or secondary storyline, or auditions rippling things up and down – its the timeline. That’s what existed before. That what every editor up to Murch and beyond had. An absolute, open multitrack timeline you placed elements into. “
This is what I was alluding to in my question. I contend that the examples of Citizen Kane and The Godfather were cut in a manner far more like the magnetic timeline than the so-called open timeline; actually cutting and splicing celluloid. The Cameron films were cut on Avid, so they could have taken on a more free-form layout in their timelines.
The point I’m angling toward is this; there is no structural requirement that the NLE metaphor maintain a grid-like layout to achieve any particular linear outcome. The editing might be non-linear, but the outcome is always linear: a sequence of moving images with synchronized audio.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Apple have seen fit to replace all that with the primary storyline, secondary storyline, connected clips malarky. look at that timeline the guy posted, it’s powerful, malleable, reads like a sheet of music – but there is, in no way, a primary storyline there. Many work usage situations will produce something that is sympathetic to primary, secondary, connected metaphors – but many will not – the beauty of an open, multitrack absolute timeline is that it can encompass all approaches.”
It doesn’t matter if you call it a “Sequence” or a “Project”, “V1” or the “Primary Storyline”. It is all metaphor anyway. The argument that Apple somehow threw out 100 years of moving picture editing theory is absurd. Are we really suggesting that the cutting of Citizen Kane and the cutting of Avatar followed the same workflows? Don’t forget the post I was responding to implied that a consistent editing paradigm has existed from cutting celluloid right up through Avid’s timeline. I was asking the author to back that up, explain how the technology employed to edit Citizen Kane and The Godfather was completely analogous to the Avids James Cameron used to cut Titanic and Avatar in a manner that FCPX eschews.
Everything in any NLE UI is metaphor, merely an illustration of what is going on underneath. Whether it is the grid-like “open” timeline or the explicitly connected chain of the magnetic timeline, the metaphor is just illustrating how disparate chunks of content are being arranged to form one track of video with synchronized audio.
In the example you cited, the post’s author insists no one could ever match his FCP7 sequence in FCPX. Baloney. Sure, it wouldn’t have all those open spaces on V1, V2, and so on. So what? Ultimately, those spaces are meaningless to the outcome as the layers are all composited down into a single video track. He also neglected to explain where his experience with FCPX broke down when he tried to use it. He just calls it impossible without sharing how he arrived at that conclusion. I reject that argument on the grounds it is unsupported. Tell us why it is impossible to match that editorial outcome in FCPX. What specific editorial decisions cannot be represented in FCPX?
There is no structural requirement to elevate the clips he elevated above V1 unless they are being composited with something beneath them. There might be workflow rationales for doing so, organizational rationales, but no structural requirement. There is no reason FCPX couldn’t be used to arrive at the same composite outcome of linear video with synchronized audio that he achieved using FCP7. It might be illustrated differently in the UI, but that is only metaphor. From where I’m sitting, FCPX’s metaphor is capable of representing every editorial decision in the example timeline, or any other timeline for that matter.
Best,
Andy -
[Don Scioli] “And changing the rules and terminology on non-linear and linear editing. So does that mean that Robert Wise who edited CITIZEN KANE, Walter Murch who edited THE GODFATHERS and James Cameron who edited TITANIC and AVITAR were wrong in their thinking and terminology… do Apple’s software engineers know more than these guys.”
Please humor me and expand on this. Which editing rules and terminology that is common to the editing of those four films (which were produced many decades apart from each other) have Apple’s software engineers changed?
[Don Scioli] “Who the hell does Apple think it is to change the rules in the middle of the game and handicap the film/video community who have spent over 10 years mastering a now flawless piece of editing software like FCP7. “
Flawless? Really?
Best,
Andy