[Bill Davis]

[Mark Raudonis] “I could go on, but this “split personality” is what frustrates so many long time users. I don’t care how many times some die hards on this list say “But you just don’t get it!”. There were some choices made during the
design process that just make me ask “What were you thinking?”.

mark
“

Yeah, but what if “what they were thinking” was: “finding simpler ways to express complexity was how we’ve made this the largest company on earth.” so let’s keep doing that.

As every creative learns at some point, it’s a lot harder to achieve simplicity while still dealing effectively with complexity, than to just slap every single creative idea up on the screen and plumb them all together.

In fact, there were some discussions of the coming Mountain Lion interface on AppleInsider today. In it, there are examples of the window title bars compared between the Mac OS and Windows. The approaches are startlingly different. The Windows Word title bars are awash with tiny icons for everything to give the user the feeling of a dashboard full of countless choices – that are always there whether the choice makes sense at the moment or not. The Pages title bar is elegantly stripped down to essential choices, arranged more beautifully and if you’re doing a specific task – there’s the capacity for modal change – much like the inspector in FCP-X that shows titling choices when you’re titling, and sound choices when you’re working with a sound clip.

Both empower the user. But differently. I bet the simpler approach took a LOT more time and effort to perfect.

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]

[Lance Bachelder] “This is a feature and workflow that can be awesome but needs refining. I’m sure this will get better in future revs as long as Apple is listening to their users.”

I agree with this – but also feel that this is an excellent example of how trying to operate X “just like’ you expected legacy to operate will bring you some grief.

Understanding the metadata “flow” is one key to understanding why it’s more powerful to do some operations upstream rather than downstream – in the X metadata flow, your decisions at “upstream” points can flow downstream – where can add, delete or just change them.

If you dive in at the last stop on the train, you can’t go back and get the benefits of the work you did at earlier stops. And I see a LOT of people coming to X and trying to do exactly that.

They try to edit exclusively on the timeline, and when things don’t “reflect” back up (and they largely don’t) they get frustrated.

This is one of the most central issues, I feel, of how people coming to X with strong legacy experience are getting tripped up. (I know it tripped ME up at first.)

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]

It’s not technically a “sequence” nor a “timeline” nor a “project” in FCP-X.

The formal term for the timeline construct in X is the “primary storyline.”

That said, if you call it a timeline, or a sequence or even a “project” if you like – as long as you’re communicating successfully, I don’t think it makes a whit of difference.

The true point is that if you “use it” exactly like you used the timeline in Legacy – doing all your editing by dragging clips there first – without understanding the power of pre-work int the event browser – you’re leaving a good chuck of the flexibility of the new workflow on the table and won’t be building the persistent data connections that can leveraged into much greater organizational power later.

But that’s totally up to each user.

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]

Who can argue with this?

“Magnetism” (which I enjoy and enhances my work) remains…

And in a circumstance where someone want it off, they can turn it off.

Everybody wins.

(Probably there’s an engineer somewhere at Apple reading this and groaning while thinking how “non-trivial” this would be to implement, but the dream is sure nice!)

“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]

At the risk of getting yelled at more… : )

There’s a reason that Google went from obscurity to global prominence so quickly.

They understood that in a world where access to information is expanding so rapidly, the key enabling technology that makes sense of the world is … search.

In X, that’s precisely what’s been elevated by the re-build.

A “search engine” was grafted in front of the editing interface.

If they keep expanding input and output in the future, and X comes to be seen not exclusively as “an editing application” but more as an editing enabled “gatekeeper” providing access to storage pools of “edits” and “exports” – it will be a major player in a somewhat new ballgame.

I think they’re building the “editor” today. I suspect they’ll continue to build on that tomorrow, but also keep an eye on whats happening in increasingly disperse image creation (the Go Pro to Red spectrum) and increasingly diverse output (the smart phone to movie screen spectrum.)

That’s the world X is moving us toward – hand in hand with the other “A’s – who all, IMO, will continue their already started journeys to widen capabilities at BOTH the small and large screen ends of the production spectrum.)

We’ll see.

“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]

[Steve Connor] “I’m just about to finish the first cut of a feature I’ve been working on. I planned to organise all the media before I started, but once I began playing with shots on the timeline, things just moved quickly and I’ve ended up hardly logging any of it!

Steve Connor”

Steve,

I’m all for you working the way you like. And I’d never stop you for a second concentrating on what you need “now” to get your work done.

But I want all the editors reading here to keep in mind, that while X won’t requireyou to pre-organize anything – at some point when you look back at it after you’ve cut 10 more programs – you might start to see that doing clip categorizing and similar organization from the beginning – compounds in usefulness as you go along.

That’s nothing but the simple truth of all databases. The more info they hold, the more useful they are as a class of constructs.

The overall arrangement of X – and the split between the Event Browser and the Timline is an excellent example – encourages you to think about what I want to do now that I can subsequently call upon later – and what I want to do now, that I will likely never want to use later.

Put simpler, there’s no penalty for not applying the keyword “Jenny” to a clip of her. Drag and drop the untagged clip of her it to the timeline and rock on.

But hours, days, or perhaps even years later – if you want to “find all clips containing ‘Jenny'” the fact that you got caught up in doing the necessary work of “diving into the cut” and decided to forgo applying any Keywords to your clips in advance, means you can’t ever benefit from that nice “search” capability that is built into the very fabric of X.

You have to KNOW it’s in there. Learn how it works. And implement it to benefit from it.

But it’s totally up to each editor how much to value it.

“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]

Ok, Michael. I’ll bite. Explain it to me.
How is the Fairlight approach superior? How would you reflect those ideas as not just an audio editing system, but one to handle visual content of all types – video as time streams, stills, titles, et.

It seems to me that sound based systems always deal in streams unfurling over time. But in video targeted systems, we have to deal with all sorts of content that must persist over ranges of time. Titles, stills, bugs, etc. etc.

What is there in Fairlight that those engineers were able to give you that escaped the designers of all four primary video editing approaches?

When Apple’s engineering staff looked for inspiration and ideas to use in X, as they must have with access to plenty of audio folk with a Logic, and Soundtrack Pro teams in house, why do you think they decided to craft X like they did rather than more like a DAW?

I’d honestly like to know your thinking.

“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]

[Walter Soyka] “I know you’ve been working with FCPX for a while now. Can you think of another everyday example that was dramatically easier (organizationally) in FCPX which would have been nightmarishly difficult in FCP7? I believe that FCPX has great advantages here in theory, but I’m curious as to what they are in practice.”

A month ago. Corporate client. Two days of field interviews in San Diego. Dozens of subjects discussed. Everything gets imported into X. Linda sits and goes through things in X doing nothing but labeling all the total dreck as “Rejected.” Hide rejected. Then one-step drag everything else to a new storyline. Slap the timecode filter on it and output a window dub for the client. Done.

The look it over and want a New Project. A 2 minute piece on a single topic that was discussed in multiple places in the overall sessions.

Since we can “hide rejected” we no longer have to audition anything but the “first round selects” – we go through those. Decide to keep it simple. Whenever we hear something “on topic” we keyword it as Favorite.

Yeilds 40 or so clips out of 200 plus.- WAY too long. We put them in a bin, Drop a “subject” tag on all of them to keep our choices separated. strip off the “favorites” tag and replace it with “Selects” (in case we want to use “Favorites” again for something else from the dashboard.

We decide to “quality assess” the clips using the simplest possible rating system – numbers 1 to 5, 5 being best. We re-assess the group. (remember we don’t even HAVE a timeline at this point. Everything is being done in the Event Browser. We zero tag a bunch of clips as duplications with better alternatives.

The Event Library now shows us we have 6 clips tagged “4” and 11 clips tagged “3” and zero in any other category! (you never know how an arbitrary rating system will work in advance, do you?)

Click on our tag “4” in the Event Library (SNAP – all the 4’s are displayed as pre-trimmed clips)- drag them all into a new Storyline (they are already come in “rough edited because we trimmed them during the original clip selection process!) At a glance I can see all the best stuff (the 4s) add up to 1:32. To fill the 2 minute request, we know we need another 30 seconds or so. We call up the 3’s and listen to them.

In a minute 3 of them that say something different and gets us to around 2 minutes.

We re-arrange them for a couple of minutes (that magnetic thing!) until we’re happy. I tweak beginnings and ends. Then decide I want the VO to lead the visuals in the transitions between the clips. So the precision editor lets me do “L cuts” so the VO change leads the visual change in all instances.

Title and Closing slate and the edit is done. The total time is completely dependent on how much time you spend discussing and deciding and comparing, but the actual editing operations have been kinda trivial. At each stage, I kept the benefits of the time and effort I’d put in during the stage prior.

The point is that the Event Browser was an integral part of managing, rating, rough trimming, assessing and assembling my story before I ever opened up a timeline.

Now I suppose you could do all of that in Legacy using color tags, bins, and such – so I’m not saying anything here is “impossible” in what we had before.

I’m saying its all easy, practical and FAST do do the above in X. And in fact the interface encourages the tagging and sorting by elevating tagging to equal prominence in the workflow of X, where in Legacy you would have been working in “bins” that many people think of merely as “dumb storage” constructs – rightfully or not.

I presume I’ll use “search, sort and find” every time I open X because it’s a huge persistent part of the interface by design.

To me it’s elevating selection and clip judgment functions to near equivalency with timeline arrangement functions by design.

Something I think it should be in the new searchable world.

Sorry to go on so long. But that’s a quick example of a typical X workflow I’m finding very valuable these days.

It also kicks butt to know the next time that client asks me to re-cut stuff from that event – since Events are persistent storage – I can setup as many projects as I like, and all the tagging, trimming and similar work I did last week will be waiting for me across all projects I choose to link to that event.

So I feel like I’m “building a system” rather than just “working an edit” when I use X.

I guess that’s it in a nutshell.

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]

[Michael Gissing] “I would love to give you a race Bill, to select, fit and mix a voice over track. With a tool like Fairlight I can sort, select, trim, globally adjust levels, apply EQ and fit to a guide narration all in the timeline at a speed that would surprise. I can also stack alternate takes in preference order on the one track so the director can audition in place during the mix.”

Sigh,

I think so many people are still missing the whole point. Let me try to be clear. FCP-X isn’t the finest tool for all jobs on the planet in every case. Purpose built tools of all sorts will out-perform it every time. That’s not the point of X in my estimation.

I’ll try to explain it in yet another lousy metaphor. We’re coming out of the age of steam train editing. Those hauled people and cargo amazingly well. They were what we needed at the turn of the last century. Big solutions to big needs. They’ve changed the whole planet. Then along comes this new “automobile” thing. It’s useless to say “it can’t haul freight like a train. Because it can’t. Nobody’s saying that it can.

And if you’re moving big stuff between places where there are tracks but no roads, a car might even be a really stupid thing.

But what happened with cars in the early days? Some folks used them in cities. Some used them cross country. Some knuckleheads even RACED the darn things. Some of those folks got hurt, failed, drove into ditches, scared the horses, etc.

Eventually, because the fundamental idea of a fast, affordable, general purpose mode of transport that an individual could own and use for a lot of “individual” things – the ecosystem built up so it was a general use tool that everyone valued.

The parallel is only instructive, IMO, because editing has traditional been an “industrial” game – only recently in history an individual one. Now that is CLEARLY changing.

I think X is a fine early tool for a new era of personalized editing. And know what? It wasn’t long before the smartest guys adapted the basic idea into everything from postal delivery vans to Indy race cars.

X is NOT a Fairlight. And putting it in a race with one is about as relevant to my thinking as putting a tractor in a race with a Kawasaki Ninja.

if you do 90% VO work, doing it on X is probably as silly as trying to harrow a field with a motorcycle.

I do 90% corporate video editing, and probably 25-50 paid VO gigs plus another 50 for my own projects a year. And for that. X is a fine tool, just like Legacy was. I didn’t use it because it’s the “best VO tool in the world.” I use it because it does a competent job and I didn’t have to waste my brain keeping up with FCP and something like ProTools.

Simple as that.

“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]

[Simon Ubsdell] “”prepping” or whatever other term you want to use. Almost by definition, editing is what happens on the timeline … or is that an preposterous thing to say!??”

Simon,

It’s not preposterous at all. I’m probably over-emphasizing the joys of the event browser – but I’m doing so with intent.

Everyone who edits understands the conventions of the old way. One thing about X is that it challenges us to consider new ways to interpret and view old conventions. Walter S. (in another thread) is pushing back on the fact that one could do much “pre-organization” in legacy. And he’s right. But it’s no where near the same. (I’ll address why I think so in that thread.)

For this thread, I’m trying to challenge people here to break free of some of the conventional thinking about the structure of editing and what you can do in the new X interface. Not everyone will need, want, or be comfortable with thinking about the new tools in new ways. But for whose who do – I want to encourage them to look at the structure and see what it “might” be good for.

A good example is my VO work. It was the very last thing I migrated from Legacy to X. I was completely happy and totally comfortable cutting VOs in Legacy. I was fast, sure, and had everything I thought I needed.

I do the VO recording and rough edit. The clients do the final layback.

It took me a few weeks of tinkering in X to get up to near the same speed, but by that time, I started understanding how tagging and the database structure and auditioning could create some new possibilities in VO assembly. It’s not that Legacy couldn’t do that really well, It certainly could. But X’s unique capabilities kept me asking myself “with these new tools” how can I use them to perhaps make this job more interesting and effective. In the past, if I had four “reads” of a line, I’d just pick the best. I seldom swapped them in and out since the differences were marginal in effect and it caused me to have multiple takes of the same thing cluttering up my timeline. (and honestly, I pretty much know I’m just pick the take I “like” best nearly all the time anyway and doing too much “auditioning” can be a waste of time!) And the client typically doesn’t want “multiple takes” just the final VO as a unit.

But the “capability” for auditioning in X had me asking myself if I ever got in a quandary with a piece of important work, and have a few nearly identical reads for “paragraph 3?” Would the “auditioning” space built into X help me pick the best?

What I’m saying is that I can’t tell in advance if I want to use the new process, until I both know it’s there – and have explored it well enough to uncover it’s utilities and weaknesses. That’s what all of us are doing with FCP-X right now. Exploring.

Which I enjoy.

And I firmly feel that the best way to uncover it’s strengths and weaknesses isn’t helped by just focusing on what’s missing or different, or what’s “kinda like” what we had in Legacy. It’s uncovering the reality in this particular piece of software. Something I’m enjoying doing (and discussing) with others.

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