Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Geoff Dills] “If I’m in list view in the event library and I’m viewing a clip from a keyword collection and I want to see the original clip, all I have to do is click on the Event it’s attached to and it instantly pops up the clip it came from, twirls open the clip to see all the keywords an highlights the keyword I was looking at originally. Why is that so hard?”
I’ll be damned. It even places the playhead for you, and you get the colored line indicator of the selection duration. One click, JKL from there.
Best,
Andy -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Here’s a fun question – do we think the dot releases will be beta tested? As you say 10.1 is a full release that’s probably a year out, but what about 10.0.1 or 10.0.7, when does beta testing crank back up? Are they talking to their original NDA beta testers already? Oh that’s right – NDA.”
Apple is very selective in who they gather beta feedback from, and I’m not at all sure if they seed minor revs for apps. They certainly do for OS X, but that is a different animal (har har). I’m not in the Double Secret Probation Inner Circle of Forbidden Knowledge, and if I was, I’d have been disappeared by now for even mentioning it.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Still – they do have some alternate timelines lying around”
Quite the intriguing artifact, no? Love those detective posts from Alex. Particularly the one about shared projects and events.
Best,
Andy -
[David Lawrence] “In FCPX, a keyword collection only shows selected ranges. To play beyond the keyword range, you have to 1) select the source event, then 2) view in list mode, then 3) select the clip from all the other clips in that event, then 4) click the disclose triangle to reveal the keywords then 5) select the keyword. Then you can do what would have taken one double-click to do in FCP7. Five steps vs. one step. This seems to be the pattern with FCPX.”
Yes, that is cumbersome. There needs to be a quick way to find the original source for the keyword range.
Best,
Andy -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “if you offer someone the choice of a selects reel in its own monitor, or jittering the skimmer around the filmstrips tagged select as the edit timeline viewer collapses into the source monitor – its just not going to fly. No one is going to buy that as a workflow improvement because.. its not.”
Valid opinion, I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate to point out that there is more than one way to tackle a task. You don’t have to skim, you can turn that off and use good ol’ JKL. But if you need to see the next frame all the while you are doing that, as David Roth Weiss previously pointed out, then a single viewer is indeed a no go for you.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Working rigorously to lay out a good selects reel is a part of the process no? just like rigorously naming your clips for easy recall, rigorously preparing and categorising the bins – none of this stuff was broken or went out of style.”
I did say it was how Rodin worked, I wasn’t arguing against it. If it is part of your creative process it is definitely valuable. I was operating under my own idea of a selects reel that didn’t consider it anything more than a playable bin.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “appple got REAMS of detailed feedback from top flight editors on these issues – they just chose to completely ignore it.”
If Larry meant the late stage beta starting in February of this year, then the timeline is too short to have implemented anything from that feedback. Any feedback collected there, aside from bug reports, is for major revs way down the line. Software development cycles for these products are measured in years, not weeks. New features don’t go from suggestion box to shipping product in a few months. Granted, “new” is relative, many of these are probably features that have been on all the old NLEs for years…
We can only really call these suggestions ignored if they don’t show up in 10.1 or 10.2. Of course, none of that at all excuses the hubris shown in yanking FCP7 off the market without offering a suitable replacement!
Best,
Andy -
Try the SAN forum, but no, there is no way to have two editors work off a single FireWire drive. You’ll find the least expensive shared storage solution is indeed a server, sharing a fast RAID via Ethernet. You’re looking at many thousands of dollars minimum.
Best,
Andy -
[Robert Brown] “Like I said before, there is no substitute for actually looking at what was shot even if it’s already been evaluated and sometimes that means going through long reels.”
There’s nothing inherent to sorting media with metadata tags that precludes seeing all the original source and finding that hidden gem.
[Robert Brown] “It is still common practice for a director to not call “cut” and then just reset while still rolling. And then if you get into things like shooting young children and animals where you can have 10-15 minute rolls just trying to get the perfect thing. Metadata won’t help you with that. You might have to look through every bit of that material many times before you find the exact right bit. “
Even in these cases, you can turn off the skimmer and have the exact same screening capability via JKL that you have in every other NLE. All I’m arguing is that a selects reel is just a clip collection by another name. Both require you to watch and sort the media. If you have a 15 minute clip and you lift a few selects for a selects reel, how is that any different than selecting the same ranges and tagging them with keywords for a particular collection? That’s all I’m getting at.
[Robert Brown] “Metadata doesn’t supersede anything. It’s a tool to use as you wish.”
It’s the primary organizational tool in FCPX, and the rest of the app is designed around that premise. I originally posted trying to use FCPX another way is swimming upstream. You can beat a nail into some wood with the cheek of a hammer, but it works better if you use the face.
Best,
Andy -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Consciously trimming and preparing a reel of takes for viewing and use in the main edit or whathaveyou is pretty different to just dragging a yellow bounding box around something and typing ‘selects’ in the keyword box.”
True, kind of like the miniature pre viz sculpture an artist might make while developing the final casting (Rodin did that anyway). My impression was that the selects reel was less conptemplative than that, and more of a playable bin that didn’t require opening each clip in the bin to scrub through them. A selects collection in FCPX could give you that kind of quick access to screening good takes (mouse over, JKL, repeat), but it wouldn’t put you through the rigor of laying anything out as any kind of a rough edit.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Metadata is getting kind of crazily overrated and overstated in this release IMHO. You’d swear it was the ark of the covenant or something?”
It’s really powerful when embraced. A lot of well-worn techniques are analogs for metadata, except the computer isn’t aware of them. Metadata is what you make of it.
Best,
Andy -
DUPLICATE POST
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[David Roth Weiss] “So, when cutting this type of material, you’re consistently making edits from similar, yet very different takes, most of which have innumerable variables, and both good and bad elements, all of which must be considered, requiring you to see both the A & B sides of the moving action on virtually every shot at all times. “
Agree. FCPX only begrudgingly gives you a two-up A/B while actively trimming. It ought to be available under more circumstances than that. I still think there are times a two-up would be wasting screen real estate, but FCPX is too stingy with it today.
Best,
Andy -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m not sure that captures what a selects reel’s function is – but I’d let someone besides me who actually knows what they’re talking about step in on that one.”
My mostly ignorant understanding of selects reels are that they are string outs of good takes used to primarily to locate shots. Like a playable bin, so to speak. If that isn’t correct, I’m keen to know what they really are for.
Best,
Andy