Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Michael Hancock] “If the guy in that thread is just holding it wrong, how does he get around the problem? Markers can be very valuable – best practice to just not use them, I suppose?
“That’s one spin.
An equally valid one is to simply realize that “they’ve changed how the thing shoots and if you hold it like you used to – you’ll get shot” In that context, you re-learn pretty fast how to hold the thing differently and you’re incredibly happy you learned the new stuff at the rubber-band gun stage and not with a loaded pistol!
It’s also helpful that the loudest yellers who seemed to think that Apple was about to come to everyone’s house and de-install all working copies of 7 were a bit premature, huh? Here we are months after the “end of life” scare – and most folks are doing just fine, thank you very much. Plenty of time to look around and decide when and if it’s time to make a move.
Yeah, markers can be useful. I’ve seen people who have built ENTIRE workflows that are totally dependent upon them. (timelines with so many that it looked like somebody with a bad cold sneezed markers everywhere!) Personally I never did. I used them rarely, on maybe 10% of my projects. And with my new workflow in X, where “marking” stuff is more a matter of range selection and key wording, rather than littering my timelines with markers that point to things, but don’t do much else – I’m pretty happy I never came to depend upon them overly much.
But that’s a personal thing. And I totally get it that it’s annoying for someone who’s become addicted to how they worked in Legacy. And all I can say is if you liked markers – you should LOVE range selection and key wording – since takes the concept of “this area of my media is important to me” and applies a warp engine to it.
Thankfully I had plenty enough to re-learn with my migration to X – and I’m delighted that new marker use habits wasn’t amongst them.
“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] “Accuracy means you know what your colors actually are, and that comes from a good, well-profiled monitor.”
Well, to be more accurate, Walter, it “used to come exclusively from a good, well-profiled monitor.”
I’m not convinced that is going to be the case for all the much longer. They’ve already proved they can build traditional VS and WFM scopes into software. I’d welcome some new tool that lets us dispense with the pixels on an external display and just gives us something that intelligently displays whites, blacks, skin tones color distribution,s and heck, why not throw focus maps and audio levels in as well — and makes it all simpler to understand than the vectorscopes built for a bygone era.
You know, now that I think of it, my Marshall field monitors have edge detection for focus, and color exposure mapping algorithms that are killer useful in field production settings once you learn how to use them correctly — essentially making up for inconsistent pixel displays in their relatively inexpensive LCD screens.
It takes a simpler, more modern approach to the traditional process of picture judgement – and works great.
It would ROCK if the FCP engineers could come up with something similar for signal judging.
One thing I DO know is that I’ve already had about 3 pieces of very expensive Tektronics gear hauled off to the dump in the past 12 years of my career – and I’m decidedly NOT anxious to go through anything similar to that ever again!
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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[David Roth Weiss] “Correct color is easy, it’s insuring that fields in interlaced video are interpreted properly that absolutely requires proper output to a video monitor or TV.”
David,
Repeat after me. Fields are critical if an only if broadcast is your holy grail. But it is increasingly NOT. Have someone pull you the latest Nelsons. The TV audience is continually shrinking. It peaked toward the end of the last century and has been in steady decline ever since.
Nobody cares about you “fields” on the internet. And that’s where the eyeballs are migrating.
As I noted in a post above, as a parent of a 19 year old, I’ve got a house full of teens hanging out here most of the time. They probably watch 1-2 hours of TV for every 8 hours they’re on-line. If you think that’s going to reverse itself. Fine. Keep your broadcast centric view.
I can’t.
I’m trying to see where things are going. Even in my own life.
Believe it or not, I’m likely to watched more episodic TV via iTunes subscriptions while I’m working out on my treadmill than I watch in real-time anymore. Yes, there’s a cost penalty – but it’s one I happily pay since I get to avoid the constant shilling for crap I don’t really need via commercials, and the story arcs are more engaging when you don’t have to leave the show flow for 4 to 8 minutes 4-6 times an hour.
TV will be ONE player for a long time – but one among many. And if I, or Apple, let that be the sole determining factor – opportunities will be massively missed, IMO.
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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[Jeremy Garchow] “but if I can’t get a singnal to our rather modern client plasma display, then they don’t want us.”
But is the problem FCP-X (or legacy for that matter) or the fact that nearly every “plasma display” I’ve ever encountered has colorometry that might as well have been set by a 60’s hippy high on LSD?
Don’t tell me you’ve never walked into a sports bar with five different “high end” plasma screens, only to notice that each of them displays the same broadcast signal (presumptively from the same distribution amp) WAY differently.
That’s the real world we’re trying to live in. One that also, I might add, increasingly specifies – that broadcast files be delivered as “first to last frame of video – no bars – no tone.”
Look I was trained in the era where blue gun and color bar adjustment was step one before you ever trusted any picture anywhere.
I’m just saying that world is going away. I don’t like it any more than anyone else. But it’s reality.
And sorry, but I can see where the wind is blowing. If color processing doesn’t become more “automatic” and less a function of something you export to “monitor X” to judge, the system is going to fail. Because fewer and fewer people in the jobs up and down the real world of end to end broadcast can tell you the difference between PLUGE and plum pudding.
More bad change? Yes. More lowering of standards? Also yes. But it’s the market talking – right or wrong.
I’m migrating three of my clients libraries to Vimeo Pro right now. These are companies who’ve been doing traditional broadcast commercial work for years. What happens when they get more hits on their web channel than they do on the local NBC affiliate? They’re smart enough to understand that in a world moving to PULL from PUSH – they have to change. So do we all.
That work requires internal standards that are as much WEB consistent as they are broadcast safe. And X has the basic tools build in to accommodate that. The harsh truth is that if enough people truly need the kind of export monitoring that you (and many other pros here do – than someone will fill that need. Possibly Apple, but equally possibly someone else like BlackMagic or InVidia, or maybe the folks at B&H for all I know (someone who’s making enough money at least to keep their doors open and look for new opportunities – its sure not likely to be Kodak or HP!)
That’s the reality I see out there, like it or not. I don’t know if you have kids at home, but measure the amount of time they spend on-line verses watching broadcast TV or going to the movies.
That’s the really scary shift.
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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Those clips play back EXACTLY like some footage that I imported early in my experiments with FCP-X.
Those were clips that started out as plain DV-25 Mac Quicktime files, but that I had re-wrapped as AVI files to make them accessible to PC based clients. When I imported them into X as an experiment, I got the same color snow that I see in your clip.
I guessed that X couldn’t quite figure out what to do with them since the nature of the compression and the ID tag were in conflict.
I solved the problem by transcoding them to clean Quicktime files in Episode – and they worked fine in FCP-X from that point on.
The experience is leading me to guess that the problem is that the original clips are encoded in a format that X can’t decode without a parser and that X isn’t set up to use such a parser during the import stream. (my problems existed even tho I have all sorts of transcoding utilities installed including Flip-4-Mac that theoretically “should” have decoded my AVIs into Quicktime before X saw them – but I guess that’s not how things work anymore.)
Core Video and AV foundation just don’t work the same as we’re accustomed to coming out of the Quicktime era – something we have to get used to, I guess.
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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giles.
All macs come with Time Machine.
You specify a hard drive, and a time between backups – and the system records a “picture” of your system at whatever interval you choose. It’s pretty efficient, since it really only records the changes once the system is initially imaged.
Calling up Time Machine after a problem, lets you virtually “walk back” in time to recover the data state of all your programs and documents as they evolve over time. So you’re never more than a few clicks from where you were at the last auto-backup.
It’s build into the Mac OS.
Unless you absolutely can’t afford a dedicated backup drive to hang on your system (and at today’s prices, that’s pretty rare) it’s the simplest and surest hedge against data corruption you can find.
Hopefully, someone who knows a lot about the FCP-X XML structure then I do can help you recover the data about your edit prior to the crash. (I personally have never had to do that (knock wood) since FCP-X rev 1 was released.
Try the Apple FCP-X forums on the official Apple site. There may be someone there who can help. Or even try your local Apple Store. If the data is important. The more avenues you explore, the better your chances will likely be.
Again, good luck.
And let us know how things turn out.
“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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[David Lawrence] “Agree that the big 2012 update will tell us a lot. But I wouldn’t use broadcast monitoring as the main indicator of Apple’s seriousness. I’d also look at the project bloat bug.”
I’m not sure I understand what, exactly you mean by “bug”, David.
As I understand it, the main problem with “project bloat” in X is people who are doing something they think works one way – only to come to the understanding that the “bloat” is the natural result of their failure to understand how the software functions under the hood.
As I understand it, it’s kinda like if I have a word document, and as I make my changes, I’m not noticing that instead of being sensible by dumping all my revisions and false starts, I leave all that crap at the head of the main file. Then with that overly bloated and complex document (timeline) to start with, I then start doing a “select all” and copying and pasting that bloated document so that it concatenates over and over increasing it’s size wildly. That’s not a BUG in the program so much as it’s my ignorance of what I’m doing.
Maybe there’s an actual “bug” in FCP-X that I don’t understand, but I read here pretty regularly, and after following the discussion as well as I can, that’s the understanding I’ve come to.
When X users start making compound clips, cutting and pasting the results – and otherwise truncating them not understanding that they are actually pointers to larger files, and so, they end up duplicating big files by a factor of 2, then 4, then 8, then 16, ets – they’re getting really big files – precisely because their specific actions have told the program that’s what they want.
The solution is to change ones actions. To learn how not to inadvertently double your file sizes.
If there are actual memory leaks causing files to blow up – that’s one thing.
But if users are just mis-understanding the nature of how the program works, and adopting bad editing habits – how can that be the programs fault?
Just wondering.
“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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Takes me back.
PRECISELY the same thing happened to me back on FCP-1.0 about six months after it’s release.
Unlike today, however, the neighborhood wasn’t over-populated with jerks who were more interested in gleefully pointing out how superior their world view is – and more with people (Like Jeremy here) actually reached out to help me survive.
Actually, back then, the late, great Ralph Fairweather used to slip onto the boards (usually in the middle of the night) to shepherd many of us through the shakeout of FCP in it’s early days.
Got to shake his hand one year at NAB and it stands among my fondest memories of that era.
I miss guys like Ralph. They made a huge difference in helping many of us turn into the early successful FCP editors of the turn of the last century – and they certainly bred an atmosphere where HELP was considered WAY more valuable than SNARK.
Oh, and don’t give up hope, Giles. If you have meta-data files you can see. It’s possible that you can re-build some or all of your EDL from them.
Even if not, take seriously the Time Machine backup concept. I learned after crashes just like yours that even solid software (and FCP-V1 was remarkably stable – can become less so after software updates and features are added. So the more “crash proof” a workflow you can adopt – the better you’ll fare in the long run.
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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[Jeremy Garchow] “Except I can’t string or patch a DVI/Thunderbolt/displayport signal in to the machine room for dubs (digital ones, not necessarily tape), or to other monitors for clients, or to other computers for capture.
This theory falls down very fast. if Apple doesn’t give us baseband video out, then it’s truly game over for a lot of people.
Jeremy
“Jeremy,
I feel your pain. It’s the result of many people doing important work being stuck in situations where they are surrounded with gear that requires adherence to standards that are rapidly changing.
For years I’ve had to purchase and maintain expensive “Q” phosphor color accurate Sony monitors for my studio – and now I have literally no way to drive them to make the same kind of broadcast judgements I could in the past. And it sucks.
It reminds me of many years back when I migrated from analog to DVCAM. All the knowledge (and gear) I relied on for tasks like not “crushing” my blacks and keeping colors legal – ended up getting tossed out as I realized that the analog pedestal levels that were so critical for everything weren’t being digitized in the same way anymore.
The bad thing was that my Waveform monitor lost it’s place in my desktop rack (replaced by the same capability in FCP.) But the good thing is that even on lowly DVCAM – my black levels went from dull grey to ACTUAL black on the screen – RELIABLY!
If the QT to AV foundation keeps evolving – and we learn when to trust that our pictures are what we need them to be (and that they are maintained downstream) then what’s the point of worrying about WHY that is happening?
It’s like a new highway being opened that no longer forces you to drive through a town.
If the point is just to reach the right place, how much does the path we take really matter.
(I guess I still stop in Blythe on my rare Arizona to California drives – but more from nostalgia than need. And so it goes.)
One hand taketh away – and the other hand giveth.
Story of so much of life!
BTW, my real hope is that someone invents a BETTER process than WFM/VS – that lets us somehow “visualize” how our colors and luminance levels work in the new digital space. And prehaps a set of “drag and drop conforms” that simultaneously insure that the output files look precisely like the camera files (or a corrected versions that you trust) and that their levels are legal and appropriate for their intended use. Wouldn’t that be a nice improvement over twisting potentiometers to get the glowing dots back in the little squares on a thing that might not be working right since the tubes aren’t fully warmed up yet?
; )
“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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[Ray Wang] “After marking “rejected” in a clip, how do you actually delete the rejected parts only?
I have one 30 minute clip in the event which I only need 30 seconds of footage. I would like to delete the rejected parts to save disk space.”
Actually, if by “delete” you mean to remove the content itself from the drive – then the others are correct, you can’t do that easily.
The best way I know of to avoid cluttering up your internal drive is to use disk images (or as FCP-X calls them “disk archives” to access your cards by mounting or un-mounting them in the finder. That way your footage (cards) stay off line until you need to work with them and the content isn’t clogging up your internal drive space.
If, on the other hand, what you actually want to do is simply remove the visual clutter from the Event Browser so you can concentrate on working with your “selects” — you can”hide” the clips you’ve marked as “rejected” by going to the upper left corner of the Event Browser window and change the display from “All Clips” to “Hide Rejected.” (shortcut: shift H)
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