[Bill Davis]

Well, Andrew –

Regarding learning X.

If you get stuck anywhere – at least you know a few people who can help you over the rough spots!

????

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

[Bill Davis]

Ignore the gear as long as you can. The biggest challenge you’re likely to face is product shots.

Cars are a PITA to shoot well.

Big colorful reflective assemblies peppered with glass and chrome? And interiors in enclosed spaces with little room to light or shoot? Holy heck.

Unless they want you to just re-purpose marketing stuff from the manufacturers, I’d start looking for a location big enough to set up as a shooting space and prep that. That kind of money might work if they give you access to enough rent free drive in space someplace in their system.

Good production shots of cars are hard.

Get the shooting sorted first. A great NLE setup won’t help much if the product shots drag everything down.

My 2 cents.

Good luck.

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

[Bill Davis]

[greg janza] “In the editorial realm, serendipity is finding accidental gems that can be incorporated into a final cut. These items might be camera mistakes, nat sound finds, music tracks that might be placed in your timeline in an accidental way but which work well. “

What in the world makes you think X can’t work EXACTLY that way?

Any stringout is a subset of everything, right?

If an editor likes, in X they’re free to reject only what they think is pure crap. What’s left IS a stringout EXACTLY as if it had been done it in a pancake. In their NON-rejects – serendipity can arise EXACTLY as it does in any other NLE.

There is a difference In that the X system allows one to designate as many virtual string-outs as they may like – (should they elect to) and access and navigate between them instantly.

Add Favorites and they have a subset of their stringout – just with more focus – AND if they want to troll their footage for more serendipity – switch to Hide Rejects and more connections reveal themselves. Not enough? Show ALL and every frame including their rejects re-appears to let them mine the entire body of frames for connections at will.

Saying the X approach restricts the ability of an editor to make intuitive leaps across categories or concepts is patently stupid, IMO.

A contention like that says to me that an editor NEVER understood or explored how the database actually works and IMAGINES that it’s forcing them into some restriction that simply cannot exist unless they build it into their work habits via mis-applied effort or misunderstanding.

In the X database, the editor is given a box of information pastels, suitable for creating nearly infinite arrangements of data.

If an editors conditioning is such that given an organizational tool like that, all they can figure out how to do with it is to use use a few colors to write shopping lists – I don’t know what to tell you.

Except to say that they are missing a HUGE array of possibilities here.

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

[Bill Davis]

[greg janza] “The issues that remain for me with FCPX:

sluggish performance overall. Zooming in and out of timelines/projects is slow as is a variety of other basic tasks. It could be my mac but again, I’m using Premiere for comparison and I experience none of the sluggishness performing basic tasks in Premiere.”

Fair enough.

I’ll just note that the above runs counter to the general universe of independent performance testing videos that clog the internet these days. Overall, X on it’s appropriate hardware – tends to best Premiere on it’s appropriate hardware time and time again in those.

And I can say that communicating with a worldwide group of X editors near daily, I don’t hear widespread tails of sluggishness or poor performance.

At least not from other than relatively new users who haven’t learned their systems very well to date.

FWIW.

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

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] ” I can have a “master” sequence in one timeline window, and then tabbed sequences for the component string outs (now whittled down) in the other timeline window. Moving between the two is effortless and Premiere deals with this process very fluidly.”

Wait, this process sounds very much to me like laying bricks???

Bring them out in a bin, take them one by one and add them to a separate construction.

I thought that was bad?

I thought the Premiere gestalt was supposed to be more “sculptural?”

And yet in X, what do we have?

Snapshot and “carve away” on the work until you whittle it down to the essence. Want another pass? Go back to your original, new snapshot – and carve a different shape out of the material.

I’m more confused than ever.

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

[Bill Davis]

[Andrew Kimery] “14hr long broll timeline.”

You know enough about the FCP X workflow, Andrew, to understand why the above sounds like a nightmare step backwards to any qualified FCP X editor.

FWIW.

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

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “2 external displays (each takes a TB port and a USB port)
Broadcast monitor (fed via SDI)
USB-connected extended keyboard
Wireless mouse (requires USB key, which can be plugged into keyboard)
Resolve Studio dongle (can be plugged into one of the displays)
Ethernet connection
BMD UltraStudio Express for SDI video to video display (this also supplies audio to a small mixer)
Small Mackie audio mixer
Powered audio speakers (connected to the mixer)
TB-connected local Pegasus RAID
TimeMachine drive (loops off of the TB on the CD dock)
Camera card reader (connected to USB on one of the displays)
CalDigit dock (connected via TB)
Raw drive dock (connected to the CD dock)
HMDI to the flat panel display (which is also the third Mac display device – connected via the CD dock – Mac itself won’t support 3 displays)
TB-to-10GigE adapter for the QNAP NAS connection (connects via TB)
CD dock is also used to connect various external USB/USB3.0 transfer drives
Printer (connected wirelessly)

So as you can see, a laptop – even with an external dock – would run out of spigots. ☺

– Oliver”

I guess my response would be to put a red check next to the ones that are necessary rather than merely for convenience. There are LOTS of preference choice/options there. And a HUGE reflection of a production process that was necessary years ago, but entirely optional today.

I totally get the path that got you there. It did the same for me up until 2011. That was when I started migrating to simpler setups leading to closing down my haybarn suite a couple of years ago. (I wrote a couple of times about how shocked I was to find I had something like 130 edison outlets in use surrounding my desk.)

That was then, this is now.

I’ve cut that to about 30 – and of those, only FIVE are day-to-day mission critical: one computer, left and right powered speakers, one wall wart for the recorder for my VO Stuff – plus an AC connected backup Time Machine drive inside my firesafe.

Actually, thinking about it, the powered speakers don’t go on the road, and the H4n does fine with batteries – so I really can sustain my entire editing operation off one AC Outlet for battery charging.

So many of the things I needed discrete powered devices for are now simply done either in software or via a powered buss where the computer AC is rectified and passed to the tool.

This is part of the heart of the digital signal revolution. The deck motors and pullys and huge transformers I once had to drive all day are largely gone now.

The fact that USB 3 carries robust (100w) power on ALL the ports using it – suggests to me I’ll need fewer and fewer wall warts, power plugs and power exclusive connections as time goes on.

But we’ll see.

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

[Bill Davis]

[Ben McCarthy] “How about pay per use, i’ll go for that, $1 to open the program each tim! Resets everyday…$20 a week sounds about right if you’re making money off of it :)”

Not “secure” enough.

Hey, how bout we incorporate one of those “pinprick” blood glucose monitors on the keyboard?

The software takes a simple “drop of blood” each time you launch the software, and does a DNA scan to make sure the individual with that DNA is properly licensed to use the software?

Enables consistent auto-pay – prevents piracy – and allows for lots of add-on sales!

And with the medical data, we can maybe sort out the healthiest editors and sell them low cost insurance policies right in the app?

Incremental revenue, here we come!

Winner winner chicken dinner?

/s/

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

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “That company got its start on Quantel gear – and continues with it – and workflows for the high end film community. In the end, when you absolutely need to get the job done…”

Yep, Pablo Rio FTW.

That said, when I interviewed the Quantel guys at NAB a few years ago, the cards you needed to instal to get Rio to actually function were about $10,000 apiece – and you needed more than one IIRC.

Those same cards – a year and a half later, were worth a fraction of that – having been vastly outpaced by newer models.

So make sure your depreciation schedules are in order.

Definitely a deep deep pocket players game there.

; )

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

[Bill Davis]

[greg janza] “If all of my problems are a result of my lack of FCPX knowledge then perhaps this critique isn’t quite fair. However, I’ve scoured the features of FCPX enough to know that there remains a list of things that are virtually a no brainer in Premiere and previously the old FCP, but in FCPX require either helper apps or workarounds to accomplish. That continuing lack of basic professional features remains so frustrating that it cancels out the positives.”

And after several dozen posts, it turns out the OPs entire problem was an extremely simple to fix in X.

Can we all just agree that anytime anyone comes here for help – can weplease leave the diatribes about how something doesn’t work properly – until there’s a bit of investigation as to if it ACTUALLY doesn’t work properly – or a particularly user just doesn’t understand how to make it work properly?

While I’d contend, X is still the most widely mis-understood NLE here – I would think this approach would be valuable about ALL the NLEs under discussion in the forum.

My 2 cents.

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