[Bill Davis]

[Jules bowman] “With all due respect mate, we weren’t talking. I was replying to Bill believing misinformation is irrelevant.
“

(in a calm and respectful tone:)

I do not “believe” that misinformation is irrelevant. And never posted any such thing.

So please don’t impute thoughts to me by name unless you do so accurately.

You have decided that apple’s information is “misinformation” – that’s your opinion. Fine. Just understand that unless everyone agrees that you are allowed to define what “background rendering” needs to be for everyone, your concept is not particularly relevant for some of us.

The new convention in X is to allow the user to set a period of inactivity, after which the software goes to work rendering whatever needs to be rendered. For those of us who actually use the software daily for work, we’ve learned how to use that smartly. And it’s a very nice advance over Legacy in an area that is “nice” for me, but hardly mission critical.

Let me help you understand why I say that.

I have two systems. I use X on my MacBook Pro – and I use it on my bigger but older desktop system.

On the bigger, but slower system, I have background rendering (and that’s what I get to call it since whether anyone else likes it or not!) entirely turned off. That increases performance on that particular systems slower processors.

On my laptop (dual core i7) the performance is so good that I leave it turned on and generally set to 2 seconds of idle prior to render initiation.

i’m experienced enough to change these settings on either machine depending on whether the timeline is long or short, the edit is simple or complex, or my deadline is rough or relaxed.

Finally, I’m glad you like Premier Pro. I hope you edit successfully and are delighted for your entire span of time using it.

I’m personally delighted with X. I feel I’m editing much faster than ever before, and actually, the editing itself is only about half of what really excites me about the program. Of the top 25 or so features that I don’t want to lose to go back to my pervious editing software (I’ve been a FCP editor since April of 1999)
rendering isn’t even on the list.

It’s a “checkoff” for me. X renders faster than I’m used to. But again, “fast rendering” is not the core of what I need. It may be for you. If so, fine.

Rendering isn’t particularly relevant to what’s changing my entire approach to my video production practice and what I’m starting to build toward offering my clients these days.

X has sparked in me, a huge departure from the way I used to think about video production.
I find myself shedding years of preconceptions and looking at things very differently because of what I’ve learned studying X.

I fully understand that most people just want to keep editing the way they’ve edited for years – just faster – however I don’t think “faster” is the key to the game any more. I think all that separates people who can edit fast from those who can’t is money for hardware and time in the seat developing muscle memory in operating the software interface. And unfortunately neither one of those form any kind of a “competitive advantage” in a world where no matter what crowd you stand in, you can’t throw a handful of beans without hitting a couple of video editors.

So again, “rendering” isn’t particularly important to me right now.

If it is for you, great. Keep focused on it.

And if you want to remain stuck on how another software company is wrong in the terminology they used to describe their way of looking at rendering – feel free to obsess on it as much as you like.

How you spend your time is your business.

Take care.

“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

[Bill Davis]

[Jules bowman] “He says background rendering occurs WHILST you do other stuff which NO OTHER NLE DOES.

My understanding is background rendering was just automatic rendering that occurred whilst you WEREN’T doing something. “

Does it really matter at all if it someone’s definition of “background rendering” is the same, mostly the same, mostly different, or entirely different than mine. That’s insignificant to my thinking.

The truth is that .001 percent of potential users will pick their NLE because of how it handles rendering. The rest of the world will select their tool on how it fits their editing thinking and how it handles the jobs they need to do. And “rendering” is but a very small part of that for most editors.

[Bill Davis]

What fun to read.

It’s like an article length version of the adorable “translated” assembly instructions for a complicated kids Christmas toy – only a bit more surreal.

It’s also pretty amazing that we live in a world where a couple of clicks on the web will decode another language instantly to give us the sense of the thoughts of someone expressing themselves from within another culture.

It’s also cool that if you select anything in the artical, you get the original Spanish text and can perhaps sense how the computer translation relates (for better or worse) to the original.

The power of the searchable, globally connected world continues to reveal itself.

“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

[Bill Davis]

David,

Thanks very much for pursuing this.

This is precisely the kind of thing that helps the entire community solve real problems.

It seems as if with the new database structure, changes in X have to be applied to the metadata of the code for all the assets that are linked to a project. When the software gets to a bit of code that is “non-standard” (i was going to use the term “corrupt” but with so many camera codecs, wrappers, and alternatives, I’m guessing that it doesn’t have to necessarily be broken, just non-sensical to what X is looking for) the program can hang up trying to figure out what to do.

I think this is an offshoot of the new era where people want to throw so many alternate formats into a timeline, something that is beneficial to all, but not so easy for the software to handle.

I expect digital editing was easier when every timeline expected the editor to be working in a single, known format.

Industry groaning pains which I suspect will sort out over time.

“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

[Bill Davis]

[Jonathan Ziegler] “A corporation or LLC (limited liability company) limit your personal exposure to liability created by doing business – if someone sues you, they won’t get to come after your house and car. “

Well, that’s its purpose.

However it’s actually not nearly that simple in real life.

If you want the protection of the “corporate veil” for your personal assets, you have to be able to demonstrate that you’ve kept the corporation as a consistent and “active” formal business entity.

That means, at a minimum, having a formal list of officers, and regular corporate meetings – with minutes – attended by same. If you fail to do that and/or other appropriate corporate filings and procedures, anyone suing you can “pierce the corporate veil” and come right after your personal assets anyway.

I’m not giving business advice here because I’m not qualified to do so.

I’m just giving general personal advice as someone who’s been in business without problems for about 30 years now.

If you want to risk not paying for and obtaining your own professional business advice – based on your particular business circumstances – that’s your business. But basing any actions on newsgroup postings has never been and never will be an effective substitute for professional guidance.

Want to get a great video? Hire a video pro. Want reliable legal advice? Hire a legal pro.

Period.

“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

[Bill Davis]

Since very few people are reporting anything like this, I doubt it’s a general problem.

One thing I did note was that as with every X upgrade, the changes under the hood have to propagate throughout all your projects and connections. So there will be some beach balling that will occur while X does it’s housekeeping.

The WORST thing you can do is constantly get frustrated and dive out before the software can run it’s upgrades and organize everything.

Be patient. Sure, if 20 minutes goes by and you don’t see any progress – unless it’s a massive project – then you should feel free to dive out and re-start.

Then, in my experience the best path is to start with just the central system and your internal drives. Let X “find” it’s first tier assets and pipes. Then add external storage as necessary, letting X “discover” and re-link to those as needed.

In my case, since I store ALL my work on external drives, I can reboot into X with just a couple of small “main drive” timelines that are very small and easy for X to load – then I bring the big projects back via drive attachment one at a time.

This has always worked really well for me and my overall system doesn’t get bogged down with X trying to communicate with and re-link to so many projects – any one of which might have missing elements, renders needed, or other processor heavy issues that can bog the upgrade process down.

FWIW.

“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

[Bill Davis]

Jeremy,

Thanks. And I stand not only corrected but delighted that re-naming isn’t such a big deal in X.

“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

[Bill Davis]

Oops, double post.

[Bill Davis]

[Rick Wise] “Devolve? I hardly think so. The word of caution comes from experience: don’t think that trying to follow my “recipes” is going to work as well for you as it does for me. There are no recipes, in fact, just general guidelines. It’s up to the shooter to develop the eye along with the technical skills to tackle any and every opportunity.

I agree about the terrific opportunities for today’s students.

Note: my “caution” was directed at SB.
“

It strikes me that what Rick is saying is not just true it’s pretty universal about all the “creative” skills.

Take cooking for example.

Better yet, take two forms of cooking. Meal preparation – and baking a cake.

Cookbooks are legion. Good “recipes” are accessible to all. But we still have a relatively small number of people who truly excel at the arts of cooking.

I mention both, because they require subtly different skills. The chef works largely in the realm of flavors, textures, spice balances, and even eye appeal. The baker, on the other hand, has to have a deep understanding of food chemistry and the effects of temperature over time on ingredients. Not all great cooks are great bakers and vice versa.

In the video realm – having a “recipe” for lighting is not much different in my mind.

A lousy cook can take a perfectly good recipe and turn out pretty lousy food. Not because they don’t know or can’t follow the recipe, but because they lack experience in how the recipe relates to the real world of cooking. A talented chef can take that same basic recipe, and using their decades of knowledge of tastes and presentation and turn out something people will pay serious money to enjoy.

The baker has to approach things differently. They need to work within very strict guidelines in order to achieve success. If the temp is wrong, the yeast isn’t handled correctly of the timing or heat is off by a narrow margin of error, things can go very wrong.

The important thing is to understand that buying cooking equipment never makes anyone a good cook – buying an oven never makes someone a good baker and, of course, buying video production or editing gear, never actually makes anyone competent in the skills of video making. The equipment merely enables your ability to start learning.

All “recipes” are just a set of procedural guides that even if followed very closely – are a beginning point.

You need to add your own special ingredients to make things really special – and that takes a lot of trial, error, and constant learning in order to achieve consistent quality results.

FWIW.

“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

[Bill Davis]

[Tony Sarafoski] “the timeline has already been built…! one would hate to be in FCPX 🙁

Anyway I’m not arguing my point, just saying what if….?

“

I think as we all develop our chops, we’re going to see that the kind of thing you’re looking for is pretty easy via XML implementation.

In the same way Phil Hodgets Event Manager used XML to “hide or show” events within X, I’d almost bet that useful “clip name management” tools will eventually come out that have the same friendly front-end applied to the process.

I am a bit concerned that in a relational database where everything is interconnected, even something as seemingly trivial as re-naming a clip can have reasonably complex consequences. ID info has to be updated not only at the clip level, but across all instanced where that clip might be referenced inside the database.

If, for example, you’re using a company logo that you’ve used across a dozen projects – a change to the name of that asset might have to be “managed” across a wide range of projects, shared files, and links.

I’m just not informed enough about the underpinnings of the X database to know if that’s pretty simple, or numbingly complex.

Always more to learn 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