Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Tom does work that’s very different than what I typically do.
As you can imagine, his source material is typically of the highest caliber. With far more excellent shots that compete for his attention. And more versions of those shots – since in Music Videos, it’s so typical to run the music track over and over while shooting different options.
As the above video illustrates, he might have a wealth of artistically relevant choices to go to for each measure of the song.
In editing terms, he likely has a lot more well loved babies to kill than most of us.
In the Supermeet video of his demo from NAB 2017, as he’s working with the Ed Sheehan piece, he explains some of his process for untangling what I’d term a “complexity of riches” far better than I ever could.
So I watch him to analyze how he deploys all of X’s unique features (connected clips, auditions, etc) to keep his creative focus. Keyword strategies are just one that I’m particularly curious about.
(Discussed after the Trim Editing demo reel that starts his NAB presentation)
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Setting the import to ignore silent tracks doesn’t seem to help much.”
Why would it?
In digital cloning, the most efficient process will always be bit for bit copy of the original digital file without any change.
Asking the software to “un-mux audio, separate two out of four or six audio samples, then digitize ONLY the rest” would probably be massively more processing work than simply the “see a bit – clone a bit” thing it does now.
In X, once that signal is parsed by the database, it’s trivial to go in and just tell it to disable “all but tracks one and two.”
It’s just a metadata adjustment that you can batch apply to 1000 clips in two seconds.
Much smarter the way they do it, IMO.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Michael Gissing] “Actually you forgot about all the editors that no longer have a Mac and switched back to PC and all the editors that never had a Mac. Hard to imagine but that’s life outside a bubble.”
—FCP X – the Debate—
A forum supposedly about software that runs exclusively on Macs – needs the input of NLE jockeys on machines that can’t actually RUN the software?
Of course, brilliant.
Please direct me to a nice scriptwriting site exclusively in French – so English monolingual me can learn more about scriptwriting!
It’ll be fun.
????
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Jeremy Garchow] “So we can agree that there’s issues beyond being “traditional editors” even though we use FCPX daily?”
I’ve never ONCE said that X has “no issues” for any user of any class anywhere.
All I’ve tried to do is meet negative comments with what I see as “balancing” ones.
Key concept – balancing.
To me, that means a 100% negative post ABOUT X, whether that one post is factual or imaginary – it should be met with one that’s 100% positive for balance.
Read both – then the reader gets to make up their own mind.
Have some of mine been totally positive? Sure.
Want me to recall posts that were totally negative about X?
(I bet I could go 50 to 1 in the first years of X and still probably 3 to 1 in my “across the web) reading about X today. )If I can get the overall “things written about FCP X” to just be closer to neutral, overall, I’ll be happy.
People are smart enough to choose for themselves. So long as both sides get aired in a balanced fashion.
It would actually be nice to be able to bitch about the things in X that I think could be improved.
But I’m not holding my breath. Cuz the scale is still not even close to equal, IMO. And adding my water to a still running hose of negatives, only works after the results of the negative flood is quelled and things have dried back to a neutral state.
And overall, we’re not even close to that yet, IMO.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “Yet this problem doesn’t appear to exist with the *ancient* Media Composer. Why?”
No clue.
But some folk watching early “electric ignition” cars probably railed against those too – opining that their hand crank model T’s never failed to start due to a dead battery.
Point is that over time, smart changes in approach aren’t ALWAYS without bumps.
Simpler, seemingly foolproof and effective processes always have there adherents.
Magnifying glass and dry leaves, wooden match, or butane lighter tech. They all start fires.
Pick what you prefer – and have fun burning things up.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Instantly, but I don’t “review” so much in the sense of skimming large swaths of stuff just to satisfy my curiosity about it.
Instead, I start with day one and immediately start my REJECT pass, pretty universally.
That reject pass IS my review. I’ll go through EVERY frame of the content. Most at 4 or 8x speed during the typically large “this is crap” sections and start REJECTiNG all that crap.
Slowing to 2x or 4x when “candidate” footage appears. (So I can monitor audio to watch for useful stuff)
When in the “useful” sections, I typically bucket it into either unrated, or FAVORITE (if i see gold) and then instantly go back to REJECTING more obvious crap.
This “reductive review” of the entire body of field footage is something I see as carving massive amounts of complexity out of every minute of work I’lll do from that point on – so it’s where I typically live for the first few days of the edit.
And since I’m spending time “working” the footage from the first minutes it arrives on my machine – in ALL those small pauses, breaks and delays that come up in a typical work session – the auto render kicks back in and essentially my computer is working “ahead” of me on waveforms and all the audio processes – so I’m never slowed down.
I understand that everyone’s preferred workflow is different. And some might feel the need to have everything “touchable” from the first minute – but TO ME – that defeats the way X can be operated most efficiently.
One issue is that this workflow can be interfered with if you get large batches of footage in a raster or encoding that your machine just can’t handle efficiency. And that’s a real concern. It’s likely why 10 editors will be working a project just fine – but another one will be struggling. The way the footage was captured may be making it vastly more challenging to work – and steps may need to be taken to fix that before you go too far into prep.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m currently working with a drive that was drop shipped to me that contains 9.5 terabytes of project files – two out of three cameras were Ninja recorded and set to MXF with 4 channel audio – even tho there’s only actually audio on 2 of the 4.
In my first hour of work (and with a client that wanted to “see a bit” ASAP, I did some window dubs that took WAY longer to handle than I expected. That experience sent me looking at the attached audio. Seeing those empty track was a red flag. I batch disabled them – and it was a HUGE difference in throughput efficiency.
X in that way is like every other piece of software I’ve every used. You have to understand the idiosyncrasies of your system to make it sing.
FWIW.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Jeremy Garchow] ” The XAVC footage has 8 channels of audio on it (2-4 active), and if I don’t mute blank channels, performance literally goes down the tubes.”
Ding ding, ding.
IME, lots of used (or unused but still registering) imported audio channels will KILL the time it takes to get to work in FCP X.
I’m currently cutting a project that has 9.5 terabytes of field footage shipped to me on a big drive.
3 camera multicam on ALL the interviews, two of which on each have 4 channels of audio. It was a dog initially – until I went in and took the time to disable everything but the two tracks of audio I actually needed on all those sources.Then the whole project started to act normally.
X opting for maintaining the most precision possible in audio waveform accuracy – and needing to generate the screen representations of that – is IMO, the number reason X will get bogged down and perform slowly in the initial days of an edit.
Fix that early – and things typically get orders of magnitude more responsive.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “When I first start an edit and import a ton of media, I have to wait for thumbnail, filmstrip, and waveform generation. FCPX is virtually unusable during this stage to try to do any editing”
So Oliver, is this lead paragraph under the original post “accurate” – or is it your intention to tell the legions of people who might not have ANY experience with X, that it’s an “unusable” system for working with “a ton of media” because that’s the pretty explicit impression from your writing here.
“Unusable?” Really?
Cuz I “use” it during the import phase every day.
Just a week ago I was shipped a 10 terabyte drive filled to the brim with 4K Multicam interviews – various cameras and codecs – and had absolutely no issues turning out heavily edited targeted timecode window dubs for client review in a day.
How can I get my work done so easily – when in virtually every one of your posts here – the impression you are leaving is that you’re struggling mightily to get even the simplest things done fluidly?
THAT is what pushes me to feel there could be something “not understood” about your X workflows.
It just seems weird that tens of thousands of us can get this tool to work highly productively, day in and day out, yet all you seem to experience (or at least post about) regarding X, is extreme frustration.
Pardon me for trying to explain the workflows that I typically employ – that might reduce your angst – I thought it might help.
And also pardon me for reacting snippily. But terms like “unusable” applied to, processes that I find perfectly “useable” every day – just seems highly disconnected from the reality I experience.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Claude Lyneis] “Anybody have a rule of thumb?”
It’s all about the raster, Claude.
Video is still fixed at 72dpi. So if your master is gonna be HD at 1920×1080 – and you want to be able to do a 2x push – importing it as larger than 3840×2160 at 72dpi is wasted.
If you’re doing a 2K or 4K project – the math works the same – but that basic 72dpi raster standard means a 24 megapixel raw DSLR raster is still almost always SERIOUS overkill.
If you want to do a Ken Burns thing and do a 10x zoom to pick a single face out of a graduating class photo – it’s OK to do a few big rasters by scanning at 300 or 600 dpi and let that pixel density scale. But as you’ve discovered – doing 50 photos like that will likely choke X because it’s default is not to “dumb down” any raster, but to try to preserve and manipulate every dot you feed it.
How I’ve come to see it. Good luck.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
At the risk of having everyone accuse me of shouting “you’re holding it wrong” – a part of the issue might be that you guys are STILL seemingly trying to use X like an old style system.
Know what you can do INSTANTLY – literally right after everything shows up in your Browser? You can start to move your edit forward via all the many database preparation tools X pioneered that do not need ANYTHING to be prepped to function. Including audio travel management, roles assignments, and Reject/Favorite tagging.
Every traditional editor I’ve ever walked through X has this same bias. They don’t think their edit has commenced until they have clips on a timeline. It’s maddening since I’ve been talking about this for six years now.
Removing ALL the crap from your view via Reject saves sometimes whole days later on. It clarifies editorial thinking EXACTLY like a string out – except it’s 100 times more flexible.
After Hide REJECT – the shape of your raw materials starts to emerge – telling you precisely where you have options and where you might have content holes.
And it works with the instantly accessible finder text feedback, so nothing needs to “process” before you get working.
Remember – all this with Background Rendering off and nothing to process except waveforms and transcodes if you need them – And THOSE can be stopped at will and re-started to run overnight!
And this stuff also doesn’t slow down the most powerful prep of all – keywording – something I’m doing throughout the entire prep process as I go.
After six years on X, I’ve truly come to see Tagging AS editing. It’s a “first cut” in everything but name. Those not comfortable with X thinking just miss this because it happens away from the “timeline” but it’s as palpable to me as using a motor to fix an AC rather than starting with magnets and wire and assembling the motor from scratch. Precision range keywording creates useful custom “parts” I can use to build more efficiently with later.
If clients are antsy to see something immediately, I can do exemplars as I identify them – and let them automatically background process during short breaks.
The point is that there is lots and lots of effective edit prep that can take place during the first few days of a typical X pre-edit period that lets me move my edit very much forward – they just don’t take place on my timeline.
And in my experience, after a few days on this stuff – Making and syncing Multiclips multi-cams prepped, batch re-naming internal assets for organization, prepping reference clips like Sync and Compounds – 100% of the time all that background stuff like waveforms, transcodes, and ALL those background processes are typically done and I’m ready to CUT .
With that prep properly accomplished, the edit itself is usually pure joy, since everything is sorted, rated, searchable and I feel like any change or request a client lobs at me will just make me grin.
Once again, if you try to drive X using non-magnetic prep thinking and expectations (the “the edit happens only on a timeline) approach) X will probably slow down to about the efficiency of any other NLE.
It’s only when you embrace its complete gestalt – that things start to really fly.
My 2 cents.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.