Andy Lewis
Forum Replies Created
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I haven’t. I’ll definitely check out the mac version when it arrives, thanks.
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Ahem… I meant nodal not modal.
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My fantasy for FCP8 organisation turned out to be almost exactly the opposite of the direction apple went in. They went more verbal when I was hoping for more spacial and visual.
I imagined some kind of supercharged storyboard mode for rough organization of clips. Just filmstrips on the screen with one tiny viewer. You drag clips around, arrange them how you want, group them, sync them, write notes on them or next to them. Circle a group while holding command and the clips form a timeline. Not sure how practical it would have been in reality.
I’m sure that some kind of modal interface for compression and output would work well though. It would be nice to be able to copy and paste entire output pipelines between projects and be able to see at a glance exactly what you are doing.
Doesn’t seem as if any NLE is going in that direction. I’ll just have to cross my fingers wait and see what’s announced a NAB for windows moviemaker
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A part of my brain loves the idea of obsessively tagging all my footage and then being able to quickly refine searches. What we need here is a girl smiling in the park – fantastic! Type… girl, park, happy… Done!
The thing is though, that projects consisting of those kind of tasks are the kind of projects I’d rather do less of. In my experience, the literal-mindedness usually goes all the way to the top. As the editor I am looking for a shot of a girl smiling in a park because the project was conceived in a crudely literal way. She’s happy because her whites wash whiter!
I’m not snobbish about marketing – there is plenty of marketing to which this doesn’t apply.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “I feel there is a pay off when you start to draw on it at the critical back end. that you are not simply staring at a list of tags – rather that you have a few mental fold iterations of the set of assets”
When I’m thinking like this it means I’m properly engaged in the edit. And actually the sorting process (I use markers a lot in FCP7) is just a means to an end – an intuitive grasp of the whole and the specifics of the material. It’s only on “decent” projects that this kind of intuition is of value. Definitive labelling and automatic sorting of everything doesn’t look helpful to me when the goal is knowing the material with any kind of depth and subtlety. It seems more like a (very seductive) barrier.
In short, FCPX looks perfect for exactly the kind of jobs I’d rather avoid.
That said, I use classic FCP in ways it wasn’t designed to be used – I use timelines as scratch pads for example. So my question for FCPX users is – are there ways to usefully subvert the literal nature of metadata tagging?
I’m not ruling it out and like I said, a part of me loves the idea.
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hey guys, nothing to add. I just wanted to use the phrase “bang for the buck.”
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Thanks David.
Will I have to go through AE just for decent quality scaling?
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“while PremierePro in many regards is great;
but image processing (Scaling, De-Interlacing, etc.) is it’s weak point!”Oh no! Really? I’m about to move to PPro and these are weak points of FCP7 that I was looking forward to leaving behind.
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“After 15 months with the software I’ve finally taught myself enough keyboard shortcuts to not feel in any way restricted by the way the FCP timeline works. ”
In FCP7, I rarely touch the mouse. Even clip selection in the timeline and adjustment of effects parameters is all possible with keyboard shortcuts.
Is FCPX as fully keyboard-shortcut enabled as this? Cos Premier Pro certainly isn’t.
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“If I would edit with some kind of script, probably I would edit FCPX.”
Is this because FCPX is based on the assumption that you know the purpose of all your footage at the ingest and rough cut stage?
It seems that way to me – with tagging instead of bins and primary and secondary storylines. I do a lot of documentary and really don’t like the idea of an NLE forcing me to be less open-ended and democratic.
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“I’ve been saying here for some time that many editors here do not need a Mac Pro and can very comfortably use an iMac. CPU power grows exponentially, and has outpaced video needs.”
I’d better say first that I think there absolutely should be a performance beast option from apple, and there are areas that definitely benefit.
But…there seem to be a lot of people on these boards who talk about the importance of performance and then say that they buy a top-end workstation and only replace it every 5 or 6 years.
If you what you care about is computational power (and I accept that workstations might have other advantages) then you’re always better of buying mid-range and replacing more often. Because “CPU power grows exponentially.”If you’d had a fixed budget to spend on macs over the last 10 years – let’s say enough to be on your second, ageing mac pro screamer- you’d have got far more calculations per second from 4 generations of imacs. On average you’d have had a much faster computer for the same money.
Sorry for the off-topic. Yes, apple will come up with something and it will “infuriate and amaze” pros.