[Bill Davis]

[Todd Terry] “And, for what it’s worth, I do relatively know what I’m doing, so I don’t use them out of newbi ignorance. I don’t quite have the “ASC” behind my name (yet), but I’ve been a professional cinematographer for a couple of decades now… and not that I count them (because I sincerely don’t give a hoot about lucite trophies), I do have a closet full of awards for DP work.

Umbrellas do have their place.”

OK,
I’ll stand corrected.

And clearly my “tone” – that ephemeral thing that in text I sometimes don’t take enough account of – must have come across as bristly. I apologize for that. My bad.

What I wrote, however was true. I’ve never encountered an umbrella on a video set in my career – but maybe that’s just about my market and my associations, not about the general practice of video as it’s practiced world wide by everyone. Fair enough.

Lets just acknowledge that there are a zillion ways to bounce light. We’ve been bouncing light off white drop office ceilings for as long as they’ve been in existence. I travel with Scrim Jim frames and Pop ups in both reflect and diffuse fabrics when I need to bounce or diffuse. Those cover all the “broad wash” requirements I’ve ever needed.

My photographer friends (and I have a lot of them since a good half dozen of the best in town have been coming to me for the past year in order to learn to shoot video on their DSLRS – are the only place I regularly run into umbrellas.

I’ve never seen an Arri, a Mole, or Inario light with one of those little “holes” that accommodate the straight chrome stick that photogs use to mount umbrellas. (Yeah, they show up on the Lowell stuff Totas and Omni’s – the “industrial” gear that I’ve never really used – but that’s about it, AFAIK.)

So I’ll accept that they are used in continuous lighting, particularly when guys like you, Terry, say so.

But I’ve been on quite a few video sets in my time. And somehow I’ve managed to avoid running across a single photo umbrella in play. Go figure.

“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] “I’m intrigued to see that you think that “editing in the timeline” is not recommended for FCPX.

To my mind, and I really, really like editing in the timeline (!), it seems that FCPX is extremely well suited to this – better even than FCP Legacy, which is vastly superior in this respect to Media Composer.
“

Hold on. I’m not in any way saying that “editing in the timeline is not recommended”. There’s a timeline (primary storyline) surrounded with editing tools (including the precision editor) for precisely this reason.

I’m saying that in Legacy it was the ONLY place you could edit. Now in X, you can also do basic functional editing (clip selection, rejection, basic trimming, etc) in the Event Browser – and if you choose to do so, then all the decisions you make there are available for use thereafter in as many projects as you like.

It’s fundamental different thinking than was available in Legacy. Knowing when to edit in the EB and when to edit in the TL is a new choice you get to make. But you don’t have to make it. But you should realize that if you DO make that choice, you’re leaving a lot of value on the table.

[Simon Ubsdell] “‘m also not sure that editing is ever best conceived as a “two stage process” – shouldn’t it always be a fluid interplay between sourcing the material for the edit and actually making the edits?

I wonder if you aren’t being seduced by the (relative) novelty of the Event Browser into elevating “organization” to a more more important role in the hierarchy than it needs to have or deserves.
“

Honestly, Simon. Editing as ALWAYS been a “two stage process.” Making a note like Take 1 had the old sign, don’t use it – take 3 was great!” is nothing more or less than the first stage of two-stage editing that DW Griffith probably used. In X, the ability to “pre-sort” – Favorite and Reject – tag with keywords, is nothing more or less than the process of reducing clutter and assembling “selects” that we’ve always used. The event browser in X just happens to give us a whole lot more power and flexibility.

I’ve used the example before of how I import long raw narrations into X. Use the range tool to mark the good takes, and if I do that with some care, I can just drag everything tagged as a FAVORITE to my timeline and essentially my initial “edit” of my voiceover is done. I’m left with nothing I don’t want. I can become more “precise” on the timeline if I need to. But the fact of the matter is that this process has taught me that I can “edit” time based material perfectly well in the Event Browser. So all that’s left is for me to decide when that level of editing is enough.

We can all think of lots of typical stuff where that’s all the editing that a person needs. For instance, making window dubs for client review. They don’t need precision, they just need the dreck removed and a timecode burn applied to the rest. If you do ALL the work in the EB and just use the timeline as an assembly point that work sticks and when the client asked you to make 5 projects (like spots) out of the pool of scenes in the EB – the rough edit decisions you did are alive and well and waiting to form the basis of your “final cut.”

Once again, it’s seeing how a new tool – used in a new way – might make things easier.

“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]

[Carsten Orlt] “For the record I disagree with Bill that the strength of the magnetic timeline lies in the pre-assembly of building blocks. I see the strength in the timeline that I can edit e.g. interviews where they are in the timeline rather than throwing them to the back of a timeline so I can avoid making gabs or jump through hoops not to throw anything else out of sync. Add to this the ability of subframe audio editing and modern high end audio plugin support makes X much better for audio editing for me. Mixing is another issue, but I leave that to the pros in that field.
my 2 cents
Carsten”

Excellent. First off, thank you for disagreeing with me. I say this because having ideas tested through disagreement lets only the best survive and half the time I’m arguing here, it’s because I get a whiff of an alternate way of approaching something, but don’t have time to investigate it fully.

I would agree that if you ONLY see a single-directonal flow – even the one I’ve written about – call it the metadata inheritance trail, if you like – then the “workspace” model I’m promoting is limited.

But new folks coming to X after traditional NLE experience have to understand that if they EXCLUSIVELY work in the timeline, they aren’t getting the entire value of the software.

You can make a compound clip in the timeline, marrying a piece of video and a title (as a simple example) – but that makes it available ONLY in that timeline. However, in X, you can also opt to mary the same piece of video with a title in the Event Browse – and the compound is available for ALL timelines you want to use it in. Same with all sorts of other clip manipulations.

It’s exactly this kind of subtle difference that hides much of the power of X from someone who just opens it up with a head full of legacy expectations and judges it against their existing experience.

Some stuff works better – but you have to understand how to work it.

Again, thanks for the push back – it’s of great value to me.

“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] “Adding magnetism to Motion would create dangerous functional overlap with FCPX. It would encourage editorial in Motion, and that would encourage terrible and inscrutable workflows — imagine stepping through an edit in FCPX, then having to jump into Motion to change an edit made within a Motion project, then jump back to FCPX to see it in context. It’s a far more elegant design to allow Motion to remain shot-oriented so that it can be used on elements within FCPX, rather than alongside it.
“

Once again, I agree with you completely, Walter. (we’re getting dangerously close to making this a habit!)

This arrangement of Motion as linked to, providing services to, and working as a secondary linked sub-application to the editing base in FCP-X makes big-time sense. You can totally ignore it and just use the links in titling that are built between them – or you can expand your cross use – as and when (and as much as you need to) – while much of the complexity of Motion stays sequestered from bothering anyone who wants some of the advantages, but none of the stress of climbing up its learning curve.

Actually, one of the most puzzling things to me was how Motion 5 (with it’s massive internal complexity and nearly bewildering array of controls, choices, and settings) was being offered in a form that people could easily mistake as a “cheap extra add-on” to FCP-X for a trivial $49.95.

But as with the “reverse sticker shock” that accompanies Apple lowering the price of “Final Cut Pro” to $299, the initial reaction (they must have dumbed this thing down to the iMovie level) turns out to have been a massive miss-read. It just reflected the astonishing leverage of the app store in essentially removing the entire supply chain between the company and consumer delivery. It had nothing to do with the value of the software at all.

Click here -I give you copy of my complex bit arrangement – you get my money instantly – turns out to be an astonishingly transformative profit model – and one people seem to enjoy participating in if the 25 Billionth App Sale pending this week amply demonstrates.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if those clever folk at Apple might make MORE per sale on X at $299 then they actually did on Legacy at $999 given how many pockets were removed from the process by eliminating all the trucks, warehouses, distribution centers, and drivers needed to move cardboard boxes of “stuff” around the world.

Imagine that. We’re getting “better” for way cheaper. Because the whole game of delivering IP has changed.

Bodes well for the future, I think. But the barrier is definitely NOT going to be software cost any longer. It’s a reality we all have to adjust to.

There will be more editors. And more Motion Graphics creators. The distinctions will decreasingly going to be “functional proficiency” within the tool, but rather demonstrable expertise at creating value with it and very likely the spread of one’s reputation.

Interesting times.

“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]

Fun and fascinating discussion.

I’ve been doing a lot of talking to and trying to help other editors in my town understand the changes to X (25 or so showed up in my studio last week with barely 48 hours notice!) and one thing I run up against again and again is the the ease of the discussion with other editors nearly always is predicated on whether the person I’m discussing things with is trying to understand X “in context” to Legacy – or whether they can drop their pre-conceptions and approach it with an open mind.

Time and time again, I see them want to start their editing “in the timeline” – because that’s all they’ve ever done before.

It’s hard to get them to think of “two-stage” editing via first the event browser and then the timeline.

Same with magnetism. If you see it exclusively in context of how it operates with discrete clips in your “timeline”, it annoys many. But if they “graduate” to thinking of managing and refining pre-edited clip collections – the magnetism opens up new ways to think about working with group assemblies rather than simply stringing discrete elements (clips) into linear sequences.

I honestly think the folks who have the most trouble with X are those that still can’t break out of expecting it to be Legacy 2012.

Honestly, the most important thing I’ve done in those meeting is to re-assure editors that the real skills of editing remain the same, regardless of the rules, tools, and techniques codified in the NLE. The ideas you express are the key. Regardless of the tools used express them.

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]

[Evan Robertson] “I am looking at several lighting kits, including a 3 way umbrella light kit and a kit with 2 softbox lights.
Overall, which would be best for a casual shooter (really casual)? The 3 way kit has two umbrella lights and one light without an umbrella (and stands). The softbox light kit has just that, 2 soft box lights (with stands).
Also, if I did go with the 3 way kits, there are some with two light bulbs per light and some with one bulb per light, is it advisable to get the type of light that uses 2 bulbs or 1? “

Uh,

In my entire career, I’ve never come across a single video professional that uses “umbrellas” for lighting.

In video we typically turn to “soft boxes” with control grids – rather than bouncing light off umbrellas.

This is partially because it’s technologically trivial to generate a HUGE “flash” of light – enough to bounce around a whole room for a fraction of a second – but generating the same brightness values in continuous light takes lots of power – generates lots of heat – and requires time and effort to shlep the required gear.

If someone shows up with umbrellas on my set, I think I’m dealing with a photographer who hasn’t yet gone too far in their cross-training for video.

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]

As to your quote: “I mean, i think its the first NLE of all time without a drop shadow effect.”

I’ve got to say Huh?

You realize that the titler in X is a subset of the code in Motion, right? If you consider FCP-X to be the sum of the interoperating parts (exactly as we were expected to view the Legacy “suite at barely 1/3 the price, the X “suite” has more (and superior) shadowing available (drop, cast, transparent, 2D, interpolated 3D, etc. etc.) than any program I’ve used prior.

I honestly think you’re just stuck in a mental space where you desperately want X to be “just like” Legacy, so you don’t have to re-learn and change too much.

And sorry, Bret, but that’s not going to happen.

It’s a new program. And for everything you’re stuck seeing as “missing’ there is so much you’re simply not noticing because you haven’t spent the time to uncover how the new process works.

Honestly, until someone stops concentrating on what FCP-X is not. – and starts focusing on what it IS. I don’t think they’ll ever really fully “get it.”

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]

[Bret Williams] “I like just about everything in X except editing at this point. They need to lose this magnetic timeline thing, or at least make it a mode, like the beginner modes in DVDSP.
“

Take away my magnetic timeline over my dead body.

It’s literally one of my FAVORITE things about X.

One of the things I do a lot is voiceovers (I’ve done more than 300 paid ones) pre-editing my recorded tracks in the event browser and using the magnetic timeline to assemble rough cuts – especially in chapterized and multipart programs – rocks.

Yes, I’d learned to to do similar and work fast in my 10 years editing in Legacy, but it’s far easier IMO to rough cut in the Event Browser, and magnetically drop those constructs in X – instead of having only a single space (the timeline) where every element defaults to arriving disconnected and therefore has to be purpose-positioned every time.

In X, timing of each part of my VO is trivial, precisely because I have access to trimming in BOTH directions via the trackless and magnetic timeline and nothing I do in one edit, messes up anything else, up- or downstream of where I’m working.

Plus, the way X is designed, every second you spend in the event browser editing, compounding, and pre-editing gets leveraged across wall uses from that point on.

I find that to be a very superior design construct.

And it’s in this context that, magnetism makes HUGE sense. Once you do your “pre work” in the Event Browser – and then import those prepared “modules” to the timeline they can be handled as semi-finished units which “attach” to each other in a semi-persistent fashion.

I think the people who have the most problem with magnetism in X, are folks who haven’t come to understand the deeper changes in the workflows that X allows.

Until you understand this – and certainly if you try to operate X as you operated in Legacy – expecting to do EVERYTHING in the timeline, the hidden power of magnetism will likely remain a distractive hassle rather than one element of a new system that encourages pre-editing in the Event Browser – rather than seeing “editing” as something exclusively done in the Timeline.

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]

David,

I simply don’t ever capture any video media directly to my machine drives in the first place. When I shoot in the field, I make disk images of my cards. I store a copy on my main hard drive, and a copy on a firewire portable drive.

I double click the disk images (as many as I have cards from the shoot) and open them FROM THE FIREWIRE DRIVE before I start building my edit on my desktop. If I have to “go remote” I simply MOVE the FCP-X projects I need to my laptop using the internal FCP-X MOVE command – and when I open the same disk images from the Firewire drive, my FCP-X projects automatically re-link to the files they need since the opened disk images look exactly like the original cards are once again present.

In X, “proxy media” aren’t clips I have to manage, they’re just alternate versions that X stores in the Event folder at the root level, that let my machine process things faster than working with large original media files. I don’t think of them as “another set of clips” anymore. They always live on my firewire drive. If anything happens to that portable drive, I can use my backed up copies of the original “disk images” to re-populate my timeline from any hard drive that has the copies – since opening those disk images looks EXACTLY like re-loading the original cards. The computer doesn’t care where they’re stored, it just sees the disk images on the desktop and since they looks EXACTLY like the original cards – everything re-connects.

(It’s also comforting to be able to make a THIRD copy of the disk images to a “backup the backups” drive for another layer of protection if you like.

Basically adopting a “disk image strategy” solves a lot of headaches – which might be why Apple essentially built a disk imaging utility directly into FCP-X – tho I’ve become accustomed to making mine via the Disk Utility App that comes with every Mac.

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]

Really?

You find it difficult to one-click grab the audio level line and drag it down to “-96db”?

I just do it reflexively all the time, never even have to think about it.

Unless you’re making videos for bats, result’s essentially the same.

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