Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Jeremy Garchow] “This will happen especially for younger folks for which computers and tagging are quite literally a way of life. They communicate by metadata, even if they don’t know what that word means.”
I”ll pop in with the kind of “real world” example I’ve run into maybe 50 times in shooting corporate stuff.
On location, you’ve put five takes in the can with a talent that learned the line “our new 120 count boxes of Weezies” whereupon someone from the client side runs in and screams “The manufacturer has just changed the shipping spec. The boxes are gonna be 130 count!”
So I have a bunch of clips that are now partially “toxic” (containing bad info) but not necessarily without some value since some part of the take might be useful before or after the bad into.
In post with X, the FIRST thing I’d do is refer to the field note, locate takes 1 thru 5 and decide whether I need to “hide” the entire bad takes or just mark the actual references with HIDE tags – my choice) by using the “rejected” command (along with “hide rejected” function) to “disappear” those takes from the event browser. For the primary edit, the problem remains out of sight, out of mind.
This “always in the display” show/hide function is a lot simpler than “hiding” rejected clips by stuffing them in folders in Legacy and its more powerful since instead of whole clips, it works equally well on ranges of clips – which gives me more choices on how to use it. That kind of tagging WILL make my editing go faster since I don’t have to go “finder diving” anymore to retrieve rejected material. X has a built in way to show/hide not just whole clips, but even parts of clips based on the metadata tags.
As with much of X, that’s different in a way I find “better” – YMMV.
“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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[Walter Soyka] “And wait a minute — are you suggesting that FCPX might be better suited than other NLEs for our brave new world, and that this might confer some advantages onto its users? Weren’t you just trying to school me last week about how irrelevant the tool is when you have talent?”
Yeah, I actually think that right now, it is. It was the first of the “majors” to strip down the code to what’s needed for the largest common group of editing functions. Unlike the folks here who keep asking “how will it let me work with the sound department, it acknowledges that the vast majority of editors don’t HAVE a sound department. Or a dedicated color correction professional. Or a compression team. They just want quality tools to get their day to day projects done to a solid, professional standard – which in most cases means a quality picture, clear sound, and engaging graphics – the tools for the creation of which are solidly built into X right now.
As to “schooling you” that’s never my intent, Walter. You clearly don’t need “schooling” from anyone. All I can do here is raise my small ruckus (they make wonderful pets) and tweak those who are hide-bound in their belief that the highway is the sole existing alternative to “their way.”
And the tool is “irrelevant” only so far as you have access to a choice of tools. I’ve never argued that something ancillary to function – like form factor and portability – can’t be a significant advantages to deployment and use. If that wasn’t true, we would have seen generations of harmonica players lugging pipe organs to concerts. The point is that X as it stands is a very sweet combo of tight code (making the app store deployment reasonable), solid capability, and laptop-friendly performance. There are other similar tools, but I’m comfortable with it’s place in the editing choice firmament – and am enjoying it’s use. Simple as that.
[Walter Soyka] “Further, how does a change from push to pull consumption actually change the production process? Isn’t there still value in a production process that collects raw assets, curates them, and presents them meaningfully for consumption?”
Yes, but that’s one of the places my thinking is evolving. I’m considering that “an edit” might not be the same as I’ve considered it throughout my career. It’s always been a thing with a “finished state” like a painting on the wall. But we’re all seeing the “screenification” of the physical world. Where bars, galleries, offices and yes, connected people toting smart phones and iPads are increasing in numbers. Right now, most of the content they consume is “fixed” at the point they purchase and consume it. I’m just dreaming of some possible “drift” towards a world where, like an RSS feed, a news channel loop, or the constantly updating screen at the information desk where it might be beneficial if you could “curate” conent over time more easily than finishing, publishing a file, and then serving that as a packetized fixed resource for update. I see some potential for that in X, outside the traditional video screen drivers like Watchout or it’s brethren. That intrigues me. And I do think that X has some tools – represented by the Project Library and it’s dynamic connection to whatever changes are made in the Primary Storyline that might cause it to become useful for tasks like that over time. They’re not fully formed right now. But I think the pipes are in place. That simple ability to “scrub” through projects in the Project Library is a fine example. It’s a new kind of “quick display link” right into the timeline. A single button “refresh to Vimeo” macro with email notification is about all it would take to turn that into something that updates a cadre of clients with one click. Tha’ts probably not transformative. But it is interesting in a product with such a modest entry point.
[Walter Soyka] “Since you’re seeing big benefits from FCPX for your business, I’m curious about your opinion on that 4x claim: has FCPX let you complete your work 200% to 400% faster? Can you get what used to be a two-week job done in between a half-week and a single week?”
Maybe. I’m not totally comfortable quantifying it in that way – tho I certainly understand why Phillip noted that. In my experience, the change from Legacy to X has mostly enabled me to dive more fully into the editorial process quickly. Where before I was always waiting for composited assets to render (the big weakness in Legacy) X stripped that away. I think I noted the visceral annoyance I felt after I used X for a couple of projects than went back to Legacy. It was truly annoying. And I didn’t expect that. Since then, i think I’ve maybe launched Legacy twice to look at older projects. I’ve found NO reason to go back to it for a project so far. But I know that’s just me. Other people with other project profiles will surely find plenty of reasons to do that. Folks already working in Premier or other “background rendering capable” apps might not notice such a big change. But for me, it was palpable. Also, I have to say that because it turned out to be so “laptop capable” it changed my work habits literally overnight. I seldom did rough cuts or worked out ideas in the field even tho I had Legacy on my laptop for years. Capture scratch management was a part of that, as doing “reconnect media” and “proxy” work wasn’t particularly satisfying to me on the road.
The X process with disk images seems to me much more slick and psychologically penalty-free since it feels like I’m working with full-rez files on the road and the work I’m doing there is “finalizable” in a way that my workflow wan’t in Legacy.
But that might just be a reflection of the fact that I developed my workflows starting in 1999 with FCP-Version 1 back when it could barely handle DV and drive storage and firewire 400 were seriously limiting factors in a laptop world. So i’m not any kind of test case for a FCP “power user.” It’s never represented more than perhaps a fifth of my work since as primarily as a producer with full project responsibility for so many years, editing came to be ONE thing I did – not the main thing.
All I know is that the convergence of my i7 MacBook Pro – Installation of X – and having put in the better part of two years trasnitioning from shooting big Sony Shoulder Form cameras to shooting a 5d – was a pretty powerful convergence all at one time – and one that still seems to be paying off for me in increased image quality and low equipment overhead – while providing me the ability to produce finished project results that my clients seem to appreciate.
I know that many folks here are exclusively “editors” but, I’ve been doing my “end to end” production for close to 20 years now. From writing scripts to delivering finished programs. And FCP-X is part of my current tool package for precisely the same reason I relied on Sony Cameras for the first 15 years of my work. They just work well every day with few hassles. I consider FCP-X to be in the same class. I’m sure I’d feel differently if I was trying to edit TV shows on deadline. But I’m not. And I think my type of work is likely more typical of the 2 million FCP legacy seats than the guys upset because they can’t interchange properly with an outside color correction team.
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
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[Cameron Zohoori] “For my education, do any of you know why this problem was extremely noticeable over the terrible computer speakers but wasn’t noticeable at all over headphones or better speakers? Do the laptop speakers mix together stereo tracks in a way that headphones don’t?
“Cameron,
It could be classic phase cancellation. When you’re listening to two separate signals via headphones, the sound paths are discrete. If whatever cable or device you are using to drive your “computer speakers” is summing those two channels into one MONO feed – and those signals are out of phase they can easily cause bass cancellation.
This same concept is pretty much why every pair of speaker wires properly manufactured has a little ridge, or a color stripe running down one connector – if you wire the positive line (with stripe) to the right terminal of one speaker of the pair – and wire negative line (without stripe) to the right terminal of the other – BINGO – diminished bass response via polarity cancellation!
It’s amazing that so many of our young folks who grow up just “plugging stuff in” don’t have a clue about fundamental wiring stuff like this. But you’re learning and that’s what counts in the long run!
Good luck.
“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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[Russell Hossain] “Can iMac Play Canon 5D mark II footage (1920 – 1280) real time in FCP X and Apple color 1.5?”
Generally yes. (knowing that “an iMac” is a thing of variable configurations!)
FCP-X works best when you allow the recommended “transcode to ProRes 422” upon ingest – which re-wraps the fundamental H-264 5d footage into a form that FCP handles really well.
But I have popped “native” 5d files on a timeline and they work fine unless you muck them up with bunches of filters and overlays and such. If you want to do that, you’re better off going the ProRes route, since it’s something X “speaks” even more fluently.
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
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[Herb Sevush] “Sometimes the world just sucks.
“Nothing more true that that.
But it’s equally true that some people still value dated concepts like “manners” – that social lubricant that means one tries to be cognizant of the differing sensitivities of others rather than simply operating as if “my” standards are the ones that must rule all interactions.
That was my “lesson” when I screwed up with that kid. I wasn’t trying to – but I made him feel crappy (or better by being able to vent on me, who knows!) I can give myself a free pass knowing that hurting him wasn’t my intent – or I can try to learn from the experience. It’s not so much “political correctness” as it is using life’s “feedback loop” to try to act in ways that don’t cause unintended hurt. And what is wrong with a goal like that?
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
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[Walter Soyka] “By the way, Bill, if you really like the false color filter and would like to use it in FCPX, it’s pretty straightforward to replicate as an FCPX effect with Motion.”
Walter,
I didn’t see this when you originally posted it. (the penalty of a very active group is that interesting stuff gets pushed down too rapidly many times!)
Anyway, I really appreciate the time you took to tell me about this. I’m archiving your comment to return to when I have more time.
I’m trying my best to find more time to learn Motion as many of my clients seem to want the kind of “kinetic type” projects that it encourages – but as with many things, I’m learning more about my personal limitations than I’d like to confront. (Formal art classes rather than music study might have helped me long ago – but water under the bridge!)
I am enjoying learning the Motion interface. The power of drag and drop “behaviors” is truly enticing. And it’s my first real foray into 3d space. It reminds me of my parallel study of still photography concepts after so many years of video making — I can see that I’ll likely never develop the true deep competence that separates the pro from the amateur — but I’m having fun learning the basics.
Your generous techniques post will help me explore even more.
Thank you for that, sincerely.
“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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[kim krause] “glass in the left hand on the close up. then half full glass in the right hand on the wide shot. shirts open, shirts closed..it doesn’t matter what you edit on if the material is flawed. why don’t people ever bitch about that.”
Largely because the people trained to notice and catch that stuff were people with experience. And they were the “expensive” ones tossed out when the industry “suits” focused on maintaining margins in a shrinking cash flow.
BTW, only a fools fails to realize that those very “suits” are as necessary as any other group in a stable enterprise. But as with all other groups, in times of stress they tend to see the world with the narrow eyes of their discipline, rather than how their practice “fits in” to the overall health of things.
It’s going to take a long time to regroup after an era where “right-sizing” came to mean “starve the enterprise to make the bank/shareholders short-term happy.”
As Vonnegut wrote: And so it goes…
“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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[Herb Sevush] “You don’t want it to handle too many cameras in multicam, you don’t care if it can’t handle markers without bloating file size, the list goes on and on about all the things you don’t want Apple engineers to bother with because it will take time way from the features that suit you, and by extension, the vast majority of professional video editors. “
Well, there is some truth in this, Herb.
But it misses the larger point. Which is that the features that will satisfy the larger and wider video production world of tomorrow, simply may not be the ones that satisfy the needs of guys like you today.
I’ll grant that editing itself – at least as you currently practice it – might not need to change for quite a while. But whether that’s a broad trend or a calm island in the midst of a storm is increasingly open for debate. I still think there are massive shifts taking place out there. One of which reflected by the X rebuild is the “datafication” of nearly everything.
Internet search used to be the province of university folk. Today it’s something grandmothers regularly do to find recipes. That’s powerful change.
FCP-X “fits” that because I see it as an alternative we didn’t have before that’s more closely targeted towards a new world where video is just another form of data. And organizing it, searching for it, and manipulating it, may actually become as important as “editing it” a process that used to be the end of the manipulation chain, but that I think is moving more toward being one “state” of the data grouping that increasingly is expected to evolve over time.
I embrace that concept since it means I may be called upon to constantly monitor and update work, rather than just delivering it and that’s the end of the process. I think that may turn out to be a better sustainable revenue model in the future for content creators – but we’ll see. It’s never really been possible to look at “deliverable work” as a fluid thing before this internet connected era. But look at how “refreshing content” streams like RSS feeds and site updating increase SEO rankings because a site is in constant change and that is reflected by the web crawlers.
In a “pull” centered world. That’s valuable. If some future rev of X can help me leverage SEO results by making it easier to refresh my published video content – goody.
Just thinking out loud 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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I do think the “shallow depth of field” look is still in vogue, and not just in video. It’s also following the practices of the “large chip sensor” still shooters who are commonly using long lenses to limit light, open apertures, and compress depth of field even in outdoor daylight shots that would otherwise be tack sharp in a much wider range – and the propagation of this gear being carried more often is now defining what modern “imaging” looks like to the public in BOTH photos and video.
Here’s an example from USA today last week.
I don’t remember seeing “publicity” still shots like this all that often before.
And I think it’s partially just the result of increasing sensor size geometry.
Remember, the 5d deal “as video camera” is just using a small part of the total sensor area. Imagine what will happen if the still cam processors follow Moores Law and they can eventually read the WHOLE sensor array fast enough for “full frame” motion video.
Those new aesthetic “possibilities” are going to change popular camera looks even farther – like it or not.
Shot by Stan Godlewski for USA Today.
https://preview.tinyurl.com/73vtnet
“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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[Shane Ross] “I thought that FCX dealt with more formats natively…including H.264.”
I think it depends on how you define “dealt.”
If that means allowing them all to reside in a single timeline and doing the transcoding in the background so that you can manipulate video streams that originally were encoded differently – then yes, X “deals” with a wide bunch of formats “natively” (defining natively as without requiring external transcoding first.)
If you mean that it actually “edits” a host of differently encoded streams in their native format I don’t think X can do that – nor do I think that any other software can.
Unless I mis-understand things, you can’t actually co-mingle different types of data streams in a single interface unless you transcode them into common denominator types first. Good systems do this “on the fly” but at some point when you’re, say, dissolving between two clips, those two clips have to be represented by data that mathematically aligns in order to be combined thru calculation.
I could be wrong, but this is how I think all NLE’s operate.
I do know that the FCP-X process is to “sequester” any originally imported clips in their original format – and from that point, everything done to them is via layered meta-data manipulation. So applying effects, corrections, cuts, etc is never “destructive” simply because the program always “references” original clips but never actually changes them. (FCP-Legacy, did this as well, just differently.)
This also may be at the heart of the issues people have with the program not easily “dumping” the unwanted parts of captures. That ability to “kill all instances” of footage from ones storage is cool when one persons is the sole “owner” of them. But what happens when workgroups, or maybe even remote individual workers “log into” pools of assets on-line? The same ability to “dump” files, could conceivably lead to one clueless editor “erasing” fundamental assets – which would be a very bad thing indeed.
This is speculation. But speculation born of seeing more and more hints of the structure under X.
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