[Andrew Richards]

[Craig Seeman] “Personally I’d expect that in one of the upcoming updates there would be an improved 2-up display. One of the problems I have with FCPX GUI is that for a program that relies on 2-up it’s inadequately implemented.”

I agree. I think it should be active at all times when the Precision Editor is engaged in addition to all Trim operations, as is the case today. I submitted a Feedback saying so the day the form went live.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Craig Seeman] “Actually very easy to duplicate. Using a 2 monitor setup send the Event Browser to your 2nd monitor. The 2-up display is now full top of screen when you trim.”

At first I thought there wasn’t a Trim operation in progress, but then I noticed the Yellow bracket (as I pointed out in my follow-up to my initial post). The thing that threw me off initially was the absence of the mouse pointer.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Actually, nevermind, if you look at the unvarnished screenshot, the edge of a secondary storyline clip has the telltale yellow bracket suggesting it is being Trim’d. No apparent mouse point though.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

And in the whole image, you’ll notice two OS X menu bars- one on the 27″ and one on the MBP. Somebody doing web graphics made a composite image without regard for reality…

The inexplicable dual viewer “screenshot” can also be seen here. It has always appeared in a dual monitor context, but I haven’t been able to duplicate it.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Don Walker] “While it is obvious that the magnetic timeline is geared to a ripple edit workflow, is it a simple task to do an “overwrite edit” where existing footage is replaced by new footage, with no change in timeline length?”

One keystroke will do it: “D”.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Vincent Strader] “And.. should I at lease upgrade to Lion or stay with 10.5.8”

I’d start with updating to Snow Leopard first. You need it to get Lion anyway, at least until they start shipping the USB sticks with Lion installers on them next month.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

There’s a post on Philip Hodgett’s blog about it with several comments.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

I don’t see a distinction between the “open” timeline and the magnetic timeline in terms of time base. Both have a preset frame rate. Both are a linear time scale starting from an origin. In the old FCP timeline, even if there was infinite apparent real estate shown to the right of origin or to the right of the final clip, the playhead stopped playing when it got to the last element. That FCPX doesn’t yet offer a way to set a timecode offset for the timeline is not an indicator that a whole new metaphor for time has been created. There is still a scale at the top of the timeline showing the relative scale, and that scale is always regular and scales linearly just like any traditional timeline.

The big distinction for the magnetic timeline is the default closure of gaps and the lack of defined tracks. I think it was created not to redefine the philosophy of editing, but for a much more pragmatic purpose. I think it just boils down to making a UI that doesn’t require so much fiddling to get a desired result. If you are going to do a lot of editorial work in the timeline, you are more efficient if you don’t have to constantly rearrange objects in space to accommodate your edit decisions. Sure, there are seasoned pros who still maintain the discipline of a linear past that results in fewer timeline edits. But I suspect a very large majority of FCP users, high end pros included, do a great deal of manipulation of complex structures on the timeline. To draw yet another analogy, think of the magnetic timeline as cutting/pasting paragraphs in a word processor versus the traditional timeline which is much more like rearranging blocks of movable type on a press.

Certainly this changes how the user must approach meeting certain editorial goals. The framework of the traditional timeline spawned conventions that matched it’s behavior. Different conventions will evolve to match the behavior of the magnetic timeline. But both the traditional and magnetic timelines express a linear time scale against which media is laid out in sequence, so I don’t think there is a seismic a shift as David’s premise suggests.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[David Battistella] “FCP users who never saw or took the time to understand the database power of FC server might not be able to grasp what this means but it’s powerful file management in large multiuser setups when tens of thousands of pieces of media need to be tracked.”

Shared Event and Project Libraries would be a lot more powerful than FCServer was, at least with respect to the editors. I loved FCServer’s automation capabilities and scriptability, but my editors always shrugged about it since all the metadata goodness never really translated into something they could see and use in FCP itself. FCPX is poised to be a very powerful workgroup editing tool, if Apple wants to take it there.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Yes, but as a composite. It only shows the discrete channel waveforms in the Inspector Audio tab (where you can scrub them individually) or when you break the compound clip into constituent tracks (and even then only when they are flagged to be treaded as mono tracks, stereo or 5.1 in the timeline is also shown as a composite waveform).

Best,
Andy