Atilio Menéndez
Forum Replies Created
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That does indeed look like most NLE’s with tracks, but it’s quite different!
1. Overwriting part of a connected clip or overwriting audio. Whether you expand audio components, detach audio or break apart clip components – it all makes no difference. There is no way to IN ONE STEP overwrite a part of an connected clip, be it audio or video, or to overwrite just the audio of a clip. It’s always a TWO STEP process where you have to remove or mute the part to be replaced and attach the new one. It’s perhaps not terrible, but it’s such a basic procedure that it really should be improved, IMHO. Still, I personally like not being able to overwrite audio in one step or dealing with potentially disorganized audio clips way better than playing Track Tetris.
2. Keeping sync. If you care about the audio and video of a clip staying in sync, then it’s better to NOT detach audio or break apart clip components. A reason why there are no out-of-sync markers is that if you detach or break apart (which are virtually the same) the program assumes that you do not care about sync, since these functions are intended precisely to move the audio independently from the video. Now, by design everything still does stay in sync, you drag the video around and the audio follows, but in practice you can inadvertently bump things out out sync – a small slip of the mouse on a connected clip is all it takes! If you care about sync, it’s better to do the editing using the expanded audio components, which is precisely why they are there in the first place. That being said, I still think there should be a quick way to lock connected clips in place, but it’s really not a big deal if you don’t detach everything.
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I agree it’s bananas. Just like removing a perfectly functional, often used command from a context menu (“break apart clip items”), or not including others where it perfectly makes sense (right clicking on the small exclamation mark which appears on an event name where there’s offline media in order to… well… guess what). I guess/hope it’s just due to sloppiness.
But I don’t think this in particular is due to “restrictive decisions apple took in the design of the timeline”. I mean, there is really no reason why the overwriting could’t be done, or why the “muting” couldn’t happen automatically. To be fair, one drag and a keystroke is all it takes for the muting, but still it’s quite silly. X is specially exasperating due to the mixture of great features and ridiculous mistakes and omissions.
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cool. you have to paste as connected clip, then it pastes audio only. figure out! think different i guess. still no overwrite though, so you have to mute the portion over it, which is a needless step i hope apple will get rid of.
the way you can select a range and use keystrokes to increase or decrease the volume or mute the range is quite efficient though. -
Yes, I second the feature request allowing overwrite in both audio components and connected clips and also paste overwriting in a secondary storyline. But, really, was audio editing better in Legacy?
Personally, I just select all clips and EXPAND AUDIO COMPONENTS (I do not expand audio/video, or detach audio, or use compound clips, secondary storylines, open clips in the timeline, etc). On the expanded audio tracks the cursor automatically turns into the range tool, so with one single drag I can select any piece of audio, then mute it or adjust its volume, copy and paste it elsewhere, etc. All very efficient, IMHO.
Aindreas, I mentioned “opening in timeline” just because Joshua wanted “the little tiny clip to be safely embedded into the main audio clip”. It can very quickly be done, although I wouldn’t quite want to work that way either. I have no problem with those balls, eh, clips hanging there.
One thing I find more elegant in X is the way in which audio is connected to the video. In legacy the video and its audio often end up being vertically quite far apart, sometimes with stuff in between so it’s not obvious what belongs to what. In X you can also collapse audio components after editing audio, which greatly cleans things up visually on the timeline. Also the way one can reshuffle clips with J/L-cuts without these causing conflicts or the cuts being affected I would call more elegant. And proper subframe editing and the little handles to fade clips in/out are clear timesavers.
Of course the whole elegance breaks down as soon as you add some music and sounds and the audio clips end up getting thrown randomly all over the place in a sea of green, but, well, that’s another story…
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“i want the little tiny clip to be safely embedded into the main audio clip”
But doesn’t the “open in timeline” option achieve just that?
I find audio editing more elegant in x than in legacy. -
In my experience, something which has a HUGE effect on the reliability of sync in FCPX, is the amount of DRIFT of your audio recorder. Even a very small amount of drift makes a difference and it can vary a lot, even among recorders of the same brand and model (the variation among video cameras on the other hand is usually quite small and can be ignored).
My recommendation is to always fix the drift BEFORE importing the audio files into FCPX. You basically do so by very precisely stretching the audio from your external recorder so that it perfectly matches the audio from your camera. The only real work is to first find out the precise amount by which you have to stretch your audio.
You can find this “magic number” by doing the following: Record simultaneously with your audio recorder and your main camera a minute of audio where there are just two sounds, one close to the beginning and the other close to the end. These sounds should be distinctive, short and loud, such as the sound of a clapperboard. Now compare the waveforms of both recordings with a precise audio editing application. If you carefully align the first sound, then scroll to the second sound and zoom in, you will most probably find that the waveforms of both recordings do not match. Now experiment until you find the exact number with which to stretch the external recording so that its waveforms match those of the camera to one sample (remember to keep checking the waveforms of both sounds). This number will be something like 0.00093% or 1.000023%, so it can take some time to find it out, but since it does not vary with time, but only from one recorder to the next, this is something you only have to do once for each recorder.
Now all you have to do from now on is to use this number to batch process the audio files from your external recorder before importing them to FCPX. I have had very good results using the freeware Audacity, both to find out the amount of drift as to batch process the files.
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I also love auditions. And not just individual takes but *entire scenes* can be stored within a clip and be auditioned (as compound clips). You can then easily flip between different edits of a scene, compare them, see how these fit in their context, etc., and the timeline adjusts automatically. The different scenes happily live together in an audition, creating no “clutter” and making experimenting and later reviewing your work very easy.
This has always been one of my favorite features and one I use it a LOT, but surprisingly it is almost never mentioned.
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You could also install the freeware program “FreeMemory” which displays the overall amount of free memory on the menu bar. Keep an eye on it and you will see that the amount of free memory decreases constantly while using FCPX, like a balloon losing air. Once it gets below a few hundred megabytes the program becomes increasingly unresponsive. Simply quit and restart FCP before that happens, for instance whenever you have less than a gigabyte, and you will recover pretty much all of the memory you have on your system. You will find that FCP runs almost perfectly as long as there is enough memory available.
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The files will import just fine BUT if you capture with FCPX, then the date and time information is maintained, while that information is lost forever if you capture with FCP7. With FCPX both the names of the files and “content created” will indicate the precise time and date when the footage was actually filmed, not merely when it was captured into the computer. (This applies to tapes recorded by the EX1 but I suppose it applies to the Z1 too). Probably this is not important in your case but it might be good to know.