Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Brett Sherman] “At least medical and sanitary practice is better now, and information more readily available. But what we do know is this is a rare situation. So caution is called for now.”
Absolutely true.
But while practices ARE better now – the more potent reality is that global travel (and thereby viral spread) is many, many orders of magnitude more widespread now.
They were saying that the core reason that China had such rapid spread of Novel COVID.19 in the early days (compared to SARS and MERS) was that in the last 20 years, China’s travel infrastructure has morphed from rural to robust.
America’s travel capability is INCREDIBLY robust.
And that’s going to be a BIG problem in this.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Francois Jean] “All decisions are individual choices but it is not that easy to decide …
“This one might not be. (individual choice)
The map of what we know about the virus spread on all the Sunday news shows was pretty daming.
(and this is still before more than a relative handful of test kits have been widely available, so the “actual taken test” to population ratio is still extremely low.)The single confirmed attendee case out of the CPAC conference yesterday, will also be pretty damaging, I suspect.
George Stephanopolous had Ben Carson on ABC today repping the administration and it did NOT go well. Then they had a pair of ACTUAL health care professionals and the two of them were pretty clear we are well past the prevention stage and into what needs to be a robust mitigation stage.
As with SXSW, you can only attend NAB if they put the show on. And I have more and more serious doubts about that.
We’ll see.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Neil Goodman] “i am guilty of sticking clips at the end of the timeline – even in FCPX. sometimes Ill put a clip in, decide it doesnt go there and then throw it to the rear to put somewhere else later because its quicker FOR ME to just grab it from there, then go back to the library or favorites.”
I don’t criticize ANYONE else’s work flow. What works for you, works for you.
And I’ve done the same. But I came to realize that the PRIMARY reason I was doing things that way was because I’d long ago conditioned myself to THINK that way.
It’s like driving to the local store. You take a path, it works, there’s no real reason to look for another route. Until one day you do – and discover a back way that’s faster and easier. And suddenly, a change is called for. Doesn’t mean you’ll NEVER take the old route again. But now you KNOW the neighborhood better, you’d be nuts to settle for one old solution, after you’ve found one that works better for where YOUR house is positioned relative to the store.
That’s all.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bob Zelin] “We cannot have our computers go to sleep during a render, because if it’s a matter of saving the planet, or not seeing the TV show – the TV show WINS – screw the future generations !”. “
I get the perspective. And it’s undoubtedly served you EXCEPTIONALLY well in building a sterling reputation in a damn tough business.
But I’ve still got to disagree.
This is a RESPIRATORY illness that targets the old and infirm.
If someone passes it along to someone in the nursing home (as we’ve already seen.) you’re potentially condemning someone (and maybe many someones) to a MISERABLE end of their life while fighting for each breath. To me, allowing that as the norm is INTOLLERABLE if we can help avoid it.
If you could show me a pill, shot or therapy that could stop THAT, I’d be on your side in a flash.
If you can’t – sorry. But I’m NOT going to be someone who feels that a young healthy client gets the nod over the whole community, 10 out of 10 times.
Just me, probably. But that’s OK. We all make our own choices about this stuff.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “First – I would be careful about assuming features and functions that appeal to your own preferences are somehow superior to other methods. There are many editors who use the timeline as a “scratch pad” and that works quite effectively for them. FCPX does not make it easy to do this, while other NLEs do. Whether that’s “good” or “bad” is merely a matter of personal workflow and preference.
Second – the client shouldn’t really care how you get the results as long as you can get there quickly by whatever means suits your style.”
Oliver,
I’ve simply come to see the entire browser as a scratch pad. Once where I can call up tagged groupings of pre-trimmed, useful clips. And if I use my range tags properly, I can have as many of them as I like, with as many different layouts of clips as I want to keep track of.
It’s just as much a ‘scratch pad’ but it’s a digital one with more search and recall capabilities than I ever had inside a flat timeline.
Just a different perspective, I suppose. And yes, to each their own.
AMEN to part two of this.
How you train your brain as to expectations and process is your own damn business.
And I support that fully.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Tim Wilson] “But I’m also aware from having some immuno-compromised folks in my family that I could easily survive something like the flu or Coronavirus that I might pass along as a carrier, that would kill THEM. I gotta tell you, I’d really rather not live with the burden of killing an older or younger loved one because I felt the need to see a bunch of new widgets or old friends. It can all wait this year.
“THIS.
I’m blessed with pretty excellent health for my age. So I don’t have a single fear that attending NAB would put me in the slightest jeopardy.
But I’m utterly unwilling to become a vector for a known virus that’s spread by close human contact.
Two anecdotes from the past week. There’s a small little shopping center a 2 minute walk from my front door. We’re there a LOT because the mom and pop restaurant is convenient, they all know us, and when we need a break from edit sessions, we tend to take that path of least resistance. It’s the type of restaurant where there are two signs on the wall near the large “back room” noting that the Rotary and the Lions both have held meetings there for decades. Three of us were eating there the other day and I looked around the eatery and while some days the place is full of families and business folk, this particular day a bit late in the lunch cycle I suspect the average age of the clientele was about 80.
THAT is where I’m simply NOT going to be the guy who came back from a monster convention carrying a bug that probably wouldn’t hurt ME – but might screw with all the decent veterans and locals in my neighborhood who are just trying to live out their lives in peace and quiet.
Two doors down is the local barbershop.
I don’t always go there, because frankly, the shop is kinda Trump Central, and the political discussions barely make sense to me. (Bitcoin is a liberal plot? Really?) But I still like to stop by every few months and listen to the concerns of that slice of contemporary thinking. But THIS TIME, the average age in the room was closer to 90! Talk about the MOST vulnerable population.
And what REALLY stuck me was that as both the barbers finished one customer, they didn’t even wash hands or use sanitizer between clients. They had actually TALKED about COVID-19 during the time I was there – but didn’t actually do ANY of the recommendations as a public business full of barber chair arms and cash bills and magazines that the general public spends time touching all day long.
The more I think about this the more I think maybe I ought to look seriously into buying a Flowbee.
That’s the landscape out there, at least in my neighborhood here in San Diego.
And it’s not very pretty.
If I did go to NAB, I’d try to spend the next month self-monitoring and go out as little as possible for the next month. I can do that because my entire editing operation is at home now. But I’m still an outlier that way.
And my thinking about everything has changed a bunch in the past month.
FWIW.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Enjoyed the article tremendously Tangier!
Well done!Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Ugg.
I have a good client that is totally stuck on the mental construct of “park those clips at the end of the timeline so we can get to them later.” Which is just a variation of what pancake editing is all about.
I try not to do it, because tapping to simply temporarily mark them as a Favorite for instant recall is so much crazily more efficient.
(That’s in the context of the fact that I seldom use Favorite except during the early phases of my clip markup and organization, and after my keywords are set, I generally REMOVE those temp tags after the ranges are PROPERLY tagged — which frees me to use F for something else — like this.)
But I can TELL that the client is utterly uncomfortable not having that dumb tail of “clips” to drag around later. Sometimes I simply humor him and put in a Gap Clip and E key what he likes after the break just to humor him.
But then he always says “lets use the clip of Kathy we parked at the end here.” When he says that, I don’t ACTUALLY go to the clip rash at the end of my timeline (which is screwing up my running time display now, anyway – grrrr!) I just keyboard filter for favorite, tap K and insert the ACTUAL Kathy clip from the Browser via the keyboard in a third the time It would have taken me to mouse over and drag the clip into place.
I now wonder what goes through his head when he calls for a specific clip, and it appears in the storyline flow as if by magic in half a second? Oh well.
Expectations about the value of the techniques you KNOW, is one of the hardest things to overcome in editing, in my opinion. But you’ve GOT to if you truly want to become efficient at this stuff.
FWIW.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Risk is just too high.
I’m not going either – and I’m going to predict that they’ll have to cancel NAB this year.Covid-19’s general lack of lethality for the healthy among us isn’t the issue for me. It’s that spreading the virus increases the chances that it reaches someone in the high-risk categories, and I’m unwilling to act as an unknowing vector.
I suspect all that remains to be seen is what the trade show landscape looks like AFTER this year.
These giant gatherings have been wheezing along for a few years now. I’m uncertain whether this year will be an anomaly, or a sharp nail in the coffin of these shows as an overall business driver.
AJA and ADOBE have announced they are both doing what would have been their NAB product rollouts via webcasts. Grant at BlackMagic already was doing them as part of their overall marketing efforts. And of course, Apple, had already left trade shows for a virtual “event marketing” strategy a decade ago.
Things are changing fast.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “We shouldn’t lump “collaboration” into a single workflow.”
Bingo. My thesis for years now.
I also resonate with the discussion of differing needs for differing levels of employers or users.
Tangier’s Billie Eilish nod is very relevant to my thinking. If the myth makers are to be believed, Billie and her brother had the initial EP that launched her career done exclusively on stock MacBook tools in the brothers’ bedroom. When things utterly blew up success-wise, the two of them tried recording in a “real” studio – but from what I read, that change lost them as much as it gained in terms of creative flow.
Who knows where it will go from here. But the genesis of the success wasn’t a “production house” in this case. It was personal expression enabled by very personal tools.
Collaboration implies distributed effort. The “production” mentality can certainly involve the application of creativity – but as we all know from spending hours just managing files, it also might not.
How far each of us wishes to position ourselves away from – or adjacent to – the actual creative rather than mechanical nexus of the business — is going to be more and more a personal choice.
The excitement is that you can now work “for the house” for your 40 hours. Then come home and work “for yourself” with the same level of production capabilities that ONLY the studios used to have.
That’s a very good thing, IMO.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.