[Bill Davis]

It’s a cool (and kinda familiar) story, but as I read it, I kept thinking of the thousands of hours and hundreds upon hundreds of days they spent in a system that they eventually realized was not a particularly good fit for the type of work they apparently do most often.

I’m what? 8 years into X, and I’m STILL learning cool new ways to leverage it. Some days it still startles me how much flat out easier my daily work has become because of it.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Andrew Kimery] “I’d be interested in a write up of that project if you had the time.”

Nothing I would like more, but as is typical, all the content is client branded stuff, so getting permission to publish all their proprietary brand design property would be a nightmare even if it turned out to be possible at all.

I’ve actually already had a conversation with the Agency owner because I thought promoting what we were doing for this client could be an EXCELLENT case study for them getting more work of this type – and we kicked around some ideas about creating parallel content using a fictitious brand so as to avoid the IP issues — but that’s a good bit of work for the art directors to revise all the pallets, typography and designs and for the copywriters to change the target industry copy all “on spec.”

Sigh.

Since you’re interested, I’m sure it’s OK to post this screen grab since it reveals nothing proprietary. It’s a CU of a chunk out of the involved storyline. Blocks of white representing paper. Key luma-keyed knockout templates in grey to contrast the ad size in play with the desktop. Photos and copy that build over time to demonstrate how each part of the communications piece needs to maintain the brand guidelines and what are acceptable deviations. All running over a descriptive narrative. It’s been really interesting to break down the brand designers standards, while still allowing sub-agencies and market managers some flexibility to meet their needs to create short term messaging that has the “look and feel” of the brand without needing to go to “home base” for EVERY little decision and approval. Some of my connected clip stacks go up 30-40 levels if I have multiple ads in play on a page with multiple elements each. I’ll eventually compound them into groupings, but during the design/assembly phase, I can need to switch-out anything, so discrete units feel currently best. In this situation, Magnetism is totally AWESOME – as the corporate stakeholders change their mind about the order of topics that they need.
It’s been a very engaging and interesting project. overall.
,
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Well, if you’re primarily interested in Premiere, that makes perfect sense.
But there are plenty of FCP X specific groups that don’t necessarily cater to beginners.
Professional Final Cut Pro Editors comes immediately to mind.

The only downside is that occasionally the threads are in foreign languages, as befits perhaps how slowly US editors took X seriously compared to the wider global editing community.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

This is probably just me, but the days of “longing” for a system that works both reliably and as fast as I need it to — are simply a thing of the past.

I spent the last two weeks designing and building out one of the most complex storylines of my past few years. It’s the video equivalent of a “brand book” for a large financial client with many divisions, all of which their many agencies need to keep the “look and feel” of all their public facing communications consistent.

To achieve that, the team of content experts and designers I’m working with are constantly revising and replacing on screen design elements, precision type specs, graphics and live video elements.

The final work will be Between 30 min and an hour long – and I’ll likely have 50,000 edits, transitions and builds in the darn thing. So it’s pretty complex.

My point is that I barely have to think about X at all while I’m in a work session. And that includes the sessions where I’m huddled with the art director, producer and client hovering over my shoulder.

Everything just works, smoothly and easily. No waiting, no struggles, and I think I had ONE crash on a day a couple of weeks back where I was changing and re-changing type a bunch – and like always X rebooted, post hang up, without my losing a single keystroke

And this is all on a 2016 MacBook Pro.

So essentially, the big change for me is that somewhere along the line, I was able to STOP chasing “hardware and software fast enough to drive more friction out of getting my work done efficiently” and just focus on the work itself.

I only moderately care about all those things I spent years chasing so hard after. Processor specs, graphic cards, extra GPUs, waiting for “the next software speed up” those are not such a big deal for me now.

Sure I’ll keep upgrading my hardware, but it’s not to escape challenges any more. It’s just normal equipment upgrade cycles to keep up and get the benefits of industry progress.

When revs like 10.4.5 come out and something like workflow extensions arrive, the new capabilities are great, but not because they FIX stoppers. Just because they offer even more bang for the same bucks I paid back in 2011.

Do the game has simply changed for me. I don’t NEED a better engine at the core of my business to compete.

I feel like I already have that, and have for a few years now.

FWIW.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Hi James,
Ty is apparently busy and so I’ll take a stab at this.

If you think of sound in the context of cooking, you’re mics are kinda where you get your ingredients. Just like various proteins have different flavors, so do microphones. Some have strong flavors, some are kinda bland. Neither of those are necessarily bad things. You don’t want Rice to taste as strong as, say, Lamb. And while rice is pretty neutral and works with lots of sauces, Lamb, is different. It works WONDERFULLY with, for example, mint jelly to create a flavor combination that is generally celebrated for tastiness. Switch the mint jelly for ketchup, and you might well leave a LOT of people saying MEH.

The point I am making is that capturing great sound is VERY complex. Even a good ingredient. A nice chicken breast or pot of potatoes, can be stored improperly such that they spoil, or can be badly cooked, or seasoned improperly, such that you can end up with a mess.

So lets imagine you buy the CMC64 and put it on a boom in a room and start recording. You might expect that with such a sensitive, low noise, quality microphone you are guaranteed a quality recording!

BUT – just as with starting with a great steak, you can STILL handle things improperly with respect to your sound recording of that fine mic, and get a poor result.

Lets imagine you put that nice mic in a room with all sorts of unaddressed audio issues. There AC or Mechanical Noise. The room is a 10×10 square with hard, parallel walls and little soft diffusion anywhere. As are the floor and ceiling. The talent was sitting in a chair near the middle of that reflective cube. Having used no baffles during the recording to address any of that, you come back with a recording that sounds kinda awful. It’s tinny, with weird frequency spikes all over the place, because the room was taking the voice, bouncing it around, and it was landing at the microphone element with all manner of echos and room nodes, and phase cancellation issues at different frequencies – which are ALL dependent on what’s present in the original voice – AND how that particular voice interacted with the room itself.

My point is that it’s not just the quality of the mic that matters. It’s doing it’s job REALLY well. It’s recording VERY ACCURATELY, the awfulness of it’s sonic environment. This is part of why owing just ONE mic might not be a great idea. Seriously, in an awful room like that, a $50 areobics headset mic might have been a better option, not because it’s a better mic, but because it will let you separate what you WANT to record – the person’s voice – from what you don’t want to record, the sound of the room.

There are techniques for addressing some of the issues. You can open your audio files and spend a bunch of time in your waveforms identifying standing waves and room nodes and painstakingly notching them out to improve the recording. But that’s not very efficient unless you have lots of time and money to perfect things.

This is getting long and rambly, and I’m sorry for that, but just understand that sound recording is, by it’s nature, increasingly complex as you get better at it.

FCP X uses a ton of Logic Code as it’s audio engine so you have a massive array of seasonings at your disposal right inside the tool itself. But having a tool and understanding how to use it will always be two different things.

And the “how” is kinda, never really formulaic.

Good luck. And keep asking questions like this. It’s how EVERYONE learns.

Take care.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “There’s another aspect to this. Both Adobe and Avid have been conscientiously engaging the film community in an official capacity for years. Apple quit doing that a while ago. They have shown up at some key events, but have largely left that direct interaction to other parties. It certainly affects the perception of Apple’s apps as to whether they are just for advanced individuals or actual enterprise-level pro projects.”

While this is totally accurate on it’s face, there’s perhaps another dimension to the question.

Given that the overwhelming cadre of “experienced feature film editors” have universally been using one dominant workflow for decades now (The evolving Avid Media Composer Workflow) it’s fair to ask whether ANY sort of workflow innovation that challenges the existing standards will EVER organically emerge specifically from those practitioners.

We’ve seen the same thing time and time again. Editors saying “give me new capabilities BUT ONLY if you don’t disrupt the processes I have come to rely on to do my job.”

Whatever else you think about it. FCP X took a different path. One of tossing out quite a few of the older assumptions of how an NLE should be structured in order to be more efficient and to remove existing friction in lots of it fundamental operations.

Each editor must judge for him or herself whether the X approach is attractive enough to cause them to learn and adopt the new processes and thinking.

But here we are, coming onto 8 years along – and this thread proves that some individuals that elected to adopt the new processes are having success with this tool – in exactly the same way that plenty of editors are obviously still having plenty of success holding to the classic industry workflows.

So the only thing sure is that those who thought that the X way of editing was going to be incapable of enabling editors to succeed at the highest levels of the industry were patently WRONG.

It’s just now how things worked out.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Two for Two now in the short subject live action Oscars for FCP X.

Last year for The Silent Child.

this year for Skin.

Last year out of England.
This year out of Israel. (tho shot in LA.)

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[greg janza] “Bill, you’re right about Apple services being a growing part of the overall but as this chart shows they remain primarily a phone company.”

That’s just bad semantics. That thing in your pocket isn’t really a phone anymore. It’s just another digital terminal – one that happens to handle voice calls brilliantly.

I’d frame it as “clearly demonstrates that of all the technologies that Apple has re-imagined and attempted to improve – the personal, hand-held device (with voice and data attached) has been the MOST widely adopted and the most successful.

Your wireless service provider is the “phone company” now. Apple just creates and sells digital tools – and “phone” services are an important, but actually today, a very small part of that.

The world spends WAY more time on phone creating, manipulating and consuming all manner of digital content, than making traditional “phone calls” – as I’m sure everyone here will acknowledge.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Joe Marler] “[Mauricio Lleras] ” finding the playhead in filmstrip mode can be a nightmare. When you matchframe to an event full of clips it sometimes is nearly impossible to tell which clip you’ve matchframed to and where the playhead sits…”

Just enable Skimmer Info (CTRL+Y), then nudge the skimmer one frame with K+J or K+L. You’ll immediately see where it is. I always have Skimmer Info enabled, so this makes it easy to visually acquire it in the browser after matching frames.

Another tip: How to find your place when scrolling through a long list of thumbnails. Say you were looking at a clip, then did something else, then want to go back to your previous thumbnail in the browser. You don’t want to scroll up and down looking for it. You don’t want to do a filtered search which only shows the query results. You want a bookmark that jumps to your clip’s spatial location amid an ocean of clip thumbnails.

The easy solution: use markers. They not only work on the timeline, they can also act as a positional bookmark for clips in the browser. You can apply them to clips, do something else, then jump back to the marker you left. The marked clip will be shown in context in the browser with the adjacent clips before/after it. You can also step forward and backward to the prev/next markers, which could be on other clips.

Keyboard commands for markers:

M: create marker at current skimmer location on current clip in the browser
CTRL+M: delete marker at current skimmer location
CTRL+’ (apostrophe): Jump to next marker in browser
CTRL+; (semicolon): Jump to previous marker in browser
SHFT+M: Modify current marker. You can name it or make it a red “to do” marker”

The essence of the view difference between X editors.
One focused on how X should do more of what *I* prefer.
Another focused on gaining a deeper understanding of what it actually does and how that can be leveraged for better results.

Certainly doesn’t address “everything” people would like X to do differently. But I think it’s a great example of the “half full verses half empty” split in individuals approach to the software.

Thanks Joe. Another very nice contribution to the canon, IMO.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[greg janza] “Apple is first and foremost a phone company. “

I too would disagree.

Apple is now mostly a digital communications enabler.
That description is consistent with phones, laptops, desktops, and all the various services they embrace, including the content creation and content initiatives everyone is expecting.
Heck, it can even embrace the long rumored “Project Titan” vehicle initiative, since transportation feels like it’s becoming just another connected comminication hardware touchpoint.
My 2 cents.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.