Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Andrew,
Just a note of thanks for your postings.
Clearly your focus is more on the code underpinnings of the software than most of us who are largely focused on the user interface.
I appreciate the time you take to post here from that perspective and I always look forward to reading what you write here.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Tony,
Most of the “here’s how this works” stuff takes place next door in the FCP-X Techniques forum.
This space is largely for arm wrestling, rambling screeds and low grade, seldom serious character asssasination.
It’s quite fun, and sometimes something actually useful gets posted – but this is not so much a “practical” learning space.
It’s more akin to Speakers corner in Hyde park in london – where on any given day – anyone can stand up and spout anything – and the kudos to brickbats ratio is directly proportional to the makeup of the crowd present at that moment in time.
If you want to start threads in the Techniqus post and have people weigh in on how they arrange their workflow – feel free.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Tony,
Couldn’t agree with you more.
I’ve been here for nearly a year trying to say the same thing.
If you expect X to be “like 7 but a bit different” you’re in for a whole lot of struggle and even anger.
Only when you actually stop trying to make it work like you’re conditioned to expecting – and start to understand how it actually functions, can you start to see the value of the new suite of ideas.
Then things really start to cook.
Welcome aboard.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Oliver Peters] “That requires that the application always sees all the projects and all the media. There is no way to hide, disable or re-access de-activated projects from within the application. “
This is abjectly wrong. Creating folders in the Project library is trivial (there’s a button for it) Make as many as you like. Name them anything you like (completely obscuring their internal contents at the finder level. Store your projects in them. Those projects are then “invisible” to clients watching over your shoulder with a click.
If you’re talking about hiding them on an unattended machine, that’s easy too.
My favorite is to simply store client A’s work on it’s own $140 firewire 800 drive. Unplug the drive and all the projects on it become completely inaccessible. Not even a hint of them in the interface. And that includes all the attached event content too. Plug it in, and they all auto-mount and are again available.
You can also use Hodgetts Event Manager X or just move a project out of the Event Library via the finder.
Thats multiple perfectly usable ways to do what you’re saying X can’t do.
[Oliver Peters] “Same problem. You access all of the media for all clients, all sessions, etc. Just like Aperture, iMovie, iTunes and iPhoto.”
See above. That you don’t understand how to manage volumes via external drives through X does not mean that the program “can’t do it.”
[Oliver Peters] “There’s no reason to cop an attitude. “
I don’t mean to do that at all. I do a lot of the things you’re saying X “can’t do” on a regular basis.
It hasn’t been particularly difficult to establish a workflow that does the job for me.
Drives are cheap. Attached to X via even Firewire 800 – they’re responsive and useful.
I know a lot of people who are still trying to work like Legacy where everything had to reside in a on-machine Capture Scratch for Legacy to find it – and I think that approach is still informing their approach to X.
X is totally fine with any entire project including all it’s events, living on a connected drive.
I agree that if you’re in a “facility” environment, then the central storage mode is less useful in X than in other software.
But X is an excellent personal editing environment that allows a seat holder to manage files to hide or reveal projects and events very easily. It does NOT force the editor to reveal their work to those they wish to keep it hidden from. It allows you to work “modularly” with inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware.
And is particularly useful for tracking multiple projects and keeping them available and publishable in real-time access environments with astonishingly little requirement for complex or expensive network infa-strucrure.
Yes it’s currently best for individual and small group video creators. But the foundational structures are there to let it grow into much, much more.
And for the freelancer, it can be transformative.
Arrive with your laptop, your personal drive, and all you need is a desk, chair and the network password and you you have your own suite capable of contributing to multiple projects right out of your briefcase.
If the editors true value is seen as what’s in his or her head, rather than the hardware they operate – X is a beast of seriously excellent possibilities. It’s affordable, capable, agile and actually FUN to use IMO.
My 2 cents.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Rob Mackintosh] “Apple should do away with the project browser and allow all sequences to use FCPXs metadata tools.
If there’s architectural reasons this can’t be done, they’ve got the architecture wrong.”Nooooooooo!
Take away my project browser over my cold dead body.
It’s one of my absolute favorite parts of the interface.
Without it i’m left in a world like Legacy. The moment I finish a project and close it’s window, all I have access to is a dumb icon on the desktop and my notes.
In X, it doesn’t matter how many projects I have on how many drives, If I’m experienced enough to store them properly – I can see them, skim them, hide and reveal them by groups – and evan export and transcode them directly from the Project library without any need to OPEN them in the software at all.
It’s a KILLER project management feature.
And as to “using X’s Metadata tools” – you don’t understand the metadata flow in X yet. The reason that the EB treats metadata differently then Projects is that the project is downstream from the Event. This means you can use any event as a source repository for multiple projects – retain the original metadata and then alter, refine, or amend it on a project by project basis.
If you just “bolt on” metadata flow into and out of the EB and all Projects without limit, you’re in chaos land. Every change in every project then flows back to all events it’s linked to? Some of them? When? Via what rules?
Right now, it’s simple, easily grasped (as you understand the new X overview) and very powerful. Meta data flows from camera to event browser, is inherited by Storylines, then is enshrined in the Project library. It’s like a river. It flows one way in dependable steps. Undersanding that lets you apply new metadata on top of the old without penalty.
That’s how it works now. And how it should work I think.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Oliver Peters] “Project and event management is one of those. There currently is NONE within the application itself.”
Huh?
What’s the project library?
I can manage projects in the project library. I can publish them, delete them, rename them. Correct them and republish them. I can make 50 copies of a project, tune each one for a different purpose – and manage the resulting versions quite easily.
And X has – wait for it – and EVENT LIBRARY too. In it I can arrange, keyword, sort, sift, find and manage program assets (events, essentially) down the RANGE (sub clip) level.
This has GOT to be a case where your “definitions” of project and events are simply not the same as mine.Which is well and good at one level.
The problem is that by making contentions like this, you’re implying that anyone who doesn’t define these functions as you do is wrong.
Which is the entire point of my post.
If those terms need to be exclusively what YOU define them to be, then there’s no way you’re ever going to be happy with any product other than perhaps, the one you originally formed your biases around.
That’s the whole point of X. It’s an attempt to look beyond the paradigms of the past and look at some things in a new way.
X is all about a change in approach. And to allow you, me or anyone else to define failure as “change that doesn’t meet my way of working” is a silly game. It presumes that your way is the correct way. And I challenge that. Why? Why is your view of what a project or an event must be correct? For whom? For what types of projects? For what type of user?
In the final analysis, there are a variety of editing software that all work like all editing software has worked for the past 20 years. And then they’re X. A package that actually has a whole lot of similarities with past NLE software, but a handfull of breaks from the past standards that some of us are coming to appreciate as being better suited to specific kinds of video creation and deployment.
Trying to argue that project or event management “doesn’t exist” in X is beyond silly.
The terms pervade the software interface, after all.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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If someone has a comprehensive solution that they can describe, I’d be grateful as well.
I keep flirting with too many partial solutions.
I have Tubs (heavy guage power) Totes (misc long cables) Boxes (smaller power and speaker cables) Hanging comb racks (shorter patch and signal) Velcro straps (XLR and BNC long cables) Ziplock bags (“device specific” cables), and a shelf unit with small locking tubs (short splitters, gender changers, adapters etc.)
In short, I have at least a dozen divisions of where I store wire and cables depending on the class of the cable and whether it needs to stay with the device or is a general purpose stand-alone connection for specific devices like remote recorder patch cables, phone/ipad/charging cables et al.
It’s always more complex than it seems to someone outside this business.
I’m going to keep an eye on this thread, and would be equally appreciative of any useful ideas.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Third.
You can bet that in the Apple X development labs, they’re not coding features and testing things for an older OS that’s been officially discontinued.
Time to move along.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Oliver Peters] “While you guys all seem to be jazzed about the project browser structure, it strikes me as completely inadequate. “Management” is relegated to working manually in the Finder or using a third party product (Event Manager). I’m sorry, but that’s simply a workaround.”
I could not disagree more.
As half a dozen people here have indicated, X has an array of perfectly usable array management tools for versioning work for client review.
I’m not arguing that it might fail to work in any one editors preferred style. But multiple people here who work with it regularly have indicated that it works really well for them.
Once again, this entire thread is a reinforcement that a large swath of the people who have the largest problem with X are those who came to it expecting it to work in a fashion that they’re well conditioned to expecting – and they quashed their curiosity about how it actually works too soon after it failed to meet those expectations. (I say “too soon” because like the OP, they tend to demonstrate a lack of very deep knowledge about how the program actually works much beyond surface issues.)
I think it’s short sighted to argue that because it’s feature set satisfies a user with alternate expectations that the person who likes it is somehow under skilled or too foolish to see deep flaws that might actually NOT be deep flaws for the way they work.
For any business tool, the only truly catastrophic flaw is if it doesn’t allow the user to get their work done and get paid.
There is a growing group of us who use X to make our livings. It’s working just fine, thank you.
So arguing that it’s “not good enough”, not “pro” enough, or not “full featured” enough is dumb.
If it wasn’t we wouldn’t use it.
Because we’re no different than you. We edit to make our livings.
And if the tool doesn’t work, we don’t get paid.
Period.
So what’s the problem?
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Now if they’ll just post something about Craig posting something about them posting about us posting about the original posting, we’ll be just one post away from a perfect six degrees of metadata separation!
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor