[Bill Davis]

[Simon Ubsdell] “[Bill Davis] “That the original post “as written” was pretty rude. ”

Call me an unreconstructed Marxist but I choose not to rank one person above another according to their socio-economic status.

I would certainly not rank a bricklayer above a sculptor and I would not think highly of anyone who did.”

Accepted as fair at face value.

I sorta do wish you’d chosen to use the terms “Sculpting” and Bricklaying” in your original post to clearly make it about technique – not people.

Oh well.

Moving on.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Thanks, Richard.

Verbally shared that story with a few friends years ago when the experience was fresh, but never wrote it down until now. It was a big growth moment for me coming to the realization that sometimes the people in the small jobs were every bit as capable of excellence as those with the big ones. (Not to mention the corollary that those doing the big jobs might sometimes be every bit as susceptible to producing mediocre results as anyone spending their time doing less “prestigious” work!)

And Franz, seems to me the relevance is established in the actual title of the linked Stanford piece. Thoughts on the nature of approaches to skill sets, mental orientation and how different people might take different approach regarding their work.

Seems to me pretty directly on-point.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “Where the communications break down in this discussion is that the folks that advocate for only X’s approach don’t want to acknowledge that others have also been using X for 6 years and come to a different conclusion. That’s why it’s unproductive to frame this as an X versus others discussion.”

Well, theres’ actually another equally valid interpretation of this thread.

That the original post “as written” was pretty rude.

And NOT because it was about FCP X.

It was rude on a level beyond that.

The reasoning would be that it artificially divided people who are working editors – into distinct classes (whatever those classes might have been) and offered a clear implication that one of those classes of people was “better” than the other.

If the opinion expressed had been was ONLY those who cut on AVID are trimming “sculptors” and if someone elects to trim in Premiere that makes them a dismissible trimming “bricklayer” – wouldn’t that have been just as rude a concept to express in a professional editing forum?

Rude because if you simply ACCEPT that as true, you would be implying that an entire class of editors is less worthy of esteem than another not by virtue of their skill, but exclusively by virtue of their professional tool choice.

And publicly implying that type of thing is kinda what rude means, doesn’t it?

I’m just asking.

????

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “In reading the comments here, I wonder if the majority of the posters in this thread have missed Simon’s point entirely. It’s right in the title: Always Be Editing. “

Well Walter, I just don’t see this point as consistent with sculpturalists acknowledge that when I started talking about making precision edits inside my event browser some six years ago – what I was doing was an equally valuable form of l “always be editing.” – just in a form more consistent with my desire not to LEAVE the benefits of reproducible decisions behind whilst doing it.

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but if one just dumps everything on a Timeline and then goes all sculptural – EVERYTIME you make a removal choice, you can’t really easily reconsider. You have to go out and get the whole chunk you’ve sculpted from – and start all over with it.

Which, in a sense, it’s kinda willfully adding destructive alongside reductive isn’t it?

Oh well. The sculptor is the ARTIST because he or she must COMMIT, don’t you know.

But of course, silly me in thinking I was building ACTUAL useful constructions before I entered my storyline – not sculpting like the big boys – so I suppose I must remain, merely a bricklayer.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “It’s clear to me that they don’t feel his method is effective. But I don’t think enough people have thought the ABE method through — or heaven forbid, actually tried it! — before making a snap judgement on its efficacy. “

Oh my…

how I yearn to be able to go back 4 years, substitute the word Magnetic for ABE – and post this in this very forum.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Tim Wilson] “But I’m genuinely curious if you’re telling me that you’d rather not have Apple take advice from a customer-selected group of advisors who were bringing Apple a list similar to the one that the CPUG network puts together, and having Apple publicly respond with their take on the requests with a prioritized plan for addressing them. Is that so objectionable to you?”

But Tim, they already DO that!

Apple has a public feedback system built directly into the software.

There are also plenty of professional public facing communications idioms like Richard Taylors FCP X Feature Request lists – that I know Apple tracks. There are a WIDE range of public facing FaceBook groups, both public and private, amateur, intermediate and professional where Apple watches and gains insights into what their actual customers are saying. I’m dead sure they track Twitter feeds with X hashtags and Instagram pastings as well.

With JUST this system in place, the software has vastly improved and evolved RAPIDLY and has contributed highly capable and UNIQUE thinking to digital video editing. And more critical, the MAJORITY of what’s been added is valuable only to WORKING editors, not the low end of the market.

So I’d argue that this demonstrates an effective mechanism for customer feedback at ALL levels is already in place.

So what’s missing except perhaps a system that excludes SPECIFIC types of users who feel THEY should have more sway. And to that idea, I’d respond “What have they done to EARN a place at the table?” Have they engaged in thoughtful discussions of FACTS? Or have they just been more voices pissing on everything Apple has tried to do with FCP X.? If YOU were on the Apple engineering team – would you rather listen to the voices that have at least demonstrated understanding of how the thing you’re building is supposed to work? Or conference tables of those who barely glanced at it and rejected it out of hand?

But traditionally, hey HAVE NOT grown Apple on over-reliance on customer “wants surveys” in the product evolution area – they seem to instead just create and send out what they think is cool, then obsessively track “customer satisfaction” to see if they’re on track. So far it’s worked for them without paying too much fealty to the voices in the industry that might have a bit much vested interest in maintaining some type of status quo.

Maybe it’s an echo of Gil Amelio trying to turn the Mac into just another mass marketed PC? But anything that hints of that approach seems to cause Apple to spasm a bit.

They’ve built this massive platform on a pretty solid foundation of contrarianism in a lot of areas. Not all, but more than most companies that have gone this far this fast. And somehow, they manage to continue maintaining and growing it – even tho they inarguably ARE the status quo on many areas.

I’m just LOATH push them toward acting more and more LIKE an industry leader – particularly in the area of the insufferable tactic (to me) of surveying the same old “industry leaders” in order to suss out what those folks might want in an NLE.

Those folks already HAVE what they need. And the budgets to buy it in truckloads.

It’s OK to have some alternatives.

My 2 cents.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Tim Wilson] “Avid is hosting advisory boards with customer-selected representatives from every major market the company serves. They’re publicly taking input on feature requests, publishing the results, and holding themselves accountable for future outcomes. Apple sure ain’t. That’s not about money. That’s about how the company values customer input or doesn’t.”

Could not agree more with Tim here in his basic observation.

If you think progress in the next decades will come largely from “listening to your customers” – you need to bet this way. Any thing else is silly.

OTOH, if you believe (as I do) that the innovations that will actually move this industry l farther forward will NOT necessarily come from your customers expectations – you need to look elsewhere.

My observation is that when you’re in an incredibly fast evolving arena – letting your customers drive your innovation agenda is far more likely to stifle your progress rather than accelerate it.

Not because your customers are not smart or experienced, but because they increasingly live, work and (quite reasonably) think near the end of a constantly widening Knowledge Gap.

By the time most of us “customers” get a clue about the viability of A technical capability , there’s likely been someone working on that in a lab for YEARS.

So our VISION of what’s possible increasingly lags way behind what is ACTUALLY possible.

And when companies ask “what do you want?” It’s harder and harder or those at the END of the development tail to even know what it’s reasonable to ask for.

If production was Medicine – this would be a little like holding focus groups to ask patients which therapies they feel might be effective for their treatment – over trusting a highly curated group of actual experts at the Mayo Clinic to do a better job of knowing the medical literature and keeping up with the latest techniques in order to help you develop your treatment strategies.

Yes there are areas of life where customer focused surveys do GREAT things for making systems function way better.

But there are also areas where in order to make serious advances you need superior professional expertise that’s NOT generally found in broader survey populations.

You may feel survey-driven advancement is plenty to develop the tools of the future.

I just don’t – based largely on the way all these tools have developed over the past 30 years.

We’ll see who’s right over time.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “Compare this to the attendance at the various FCPworks sessions, which were free. I mean no offense, here, as these were good and valuable sessions. But the difference in numbers is striking. A”

Dude, keep your Apples out of my Oranges.

Adobe spends MILLIONS on CC product marketing. Apple barely spends peanuts on X. Yet somehow, given that, X has SOLD to beyond parity in global seats.

Look, the Supermeet hasn’t been an “Apple” thing in years. The last 5 years you can hardly find a Mac at a presentation there. Last year Steve Martin and Mark Spencer did ONE presentation – and this year Thomas Grove Carter did ONE presentation. That’s IT.

Everything you saw about X at NAB was private, not Corporate dollars talking – the whole thing is is pretty astonishingly grass roots. Heck we didn’t even KNOW we would be doing the LumaForge stuff until about 4 weeks prior to NAB!

I bet Adobe and AVID started working (and spending) for NAB 2018 a few days after we got back from last year.

You remove ALL that money for the big south hall booths, the monster banners wrapping the halls promoting stuff, and ARMIES of booth monkeys (a term of true endearment!) and our Apples start to look a little more like your Oranges.

It’s a very different dynamic.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Mark Smith] “I find it interesting that the editor cited in the second article Oliver posted uses DV tape as grounding metaphor for how she “processes” or gets to know her material”

Precisely. We all have mental constructs that make us comfortable, and what makes ANY process comfortable is repetition.

We are all “stuck in our ways”, because to be anything else means you live in constant uncertainty and inefficiency. Our “normal” whatever that is – is what comforts us. It may be Walter Murch surveying his wall of index cards or knowing how the FileMaker Pro database is structured – it may be Simon imagining his storyline as a big block of Carrara Marble – and it just as easily be me skimming through footage expecting to REJECT everything between the last “cut” and the next “action” – only to see an unexpected whip pan while the camera (inadvertently left rolling while moving between setups) and settles on the company logo on the wall after a blaze of color. I’d probably tag that range as WOW before moving along – secure that I OWN that randomly discovered shot now – even if I have no clue whether or IF it may ever contribute to my work.

But apparently that’s dumb.

Because there’s no way when your being a SCULPTOR!! (Pause here for the trumpet volley) to tuck away a piece of marble that may or may not fit the eventual statue. (That just ain’t how sculpture works, does it?) Once the chisel strikes, the surface falls away. You must KNOW with absolute certainty the shape of your vision hidden inside the Block of stone. Because gods forbid you accidentally chip off Venus’s nipple.

What continues to bother me about much of this thread is the vague presumption that we even need to point out the imagined purported deficiencies in ANYBODY else’s workflow. (Move along dude, there are SCULPTORS working here – Bricklayers meet in the basement.)

It’s pretty overtly arrogant on its face, IMO.

My 2 cents.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “Wait – you guys are trying to sell me on how great the browser organization is, but yet you are willing to mess it all up as a workaround?”

But it’s NOT messing it up Oliver.

Based on my observations, X works with 3 levels of clip organization – the deep machine IDs in HEX never change once any asset is created – that is veiled from the user and essentially unchangeable. That is linked to a more persistent asset database entry that needs to be carefully managed. These are the links that can go “offline” and occasionally need “re-linking so that the database understands where the asset is located if the user moves things at the Finder Level. But there’s a third level that rides on top of these others. That’s the users database expression choices. These can be re-named and re-re-named at will without any damage to any of the database structures.

X allows you to “play” with the editor facing expressions all you like. They are just another form of user metadata that exists to help you tag, find, sort, and arrange things as you like.

Theres nothing to “mess up” with these since they are exclusively the users own decisions. If your shop has multiple editors touching the assets, it behooves that shop to come up with standards the entire team understands,, but X itself is agnostic about this third level. Use it as you like.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.