[Carsten Orlt]

yawn |jɔːn|
verb
1 [ no obj. ] involuntarily open one’s mouth wide and inhale deeply due to tiredness or boredom

[Carsten Orlt]

And it’s great that FCPx caches those files because if I change edits, play around with other options other than optical flow, I never have to re-create the analyse file again. Maybe the only good option would be to delete all caches. But wait isn’t that what ‘delete render files’ does?

Happy editing

[Carsten Orlt]

Hi Daniel,

Out of curiosity: what do you need to do, and can’t, that forces you to do the ‘workaround’ of pasting as connected clips in the first place?

Cheers
Carsten

[Carsten Orlt]

Please Apple do not look at his work 🙂

I actually tried it and though the quality of the correction looks good I do not think the UI is that good.

If you want the power of more controls might as well get the FREE Davinci.

Apple actually did an amazing job by getting rid of the clutter in the app 🙂

Happy editing

[Carsten Orlt]

I would:
A. Dave / Masculinity = Keywords
B. The complete answer that contains “girls dress up for celebrations, me and my mates are more laid back” = Mark as Favourite and put “girls dress up for celebrations, me and my mates are more laid back” in the note field of this favourite.
C. The reel should be entered in the reel field of the clip. Since using FCPx I don’t use reels as a search feature anymore. Much better to go by Keywords for scene or location or date or the combination of all.

Basically think of Keywords as global search criteria that go beyond the specific of a single clip. Dave will appear in more than one clip. Same goes for Masculinity as a theme. BUT “girls dress up for celebrations, me and my mates are more laid back” only appears in the single section of one of Dave’s interview clips. If you would make a Keyword for all of those single events you get to many and defeat the purpose of Key-wording. Therefor Favourite is the best choice. Don’t get fooled by the word ‘Favourite’! It is just a name for a range marking function. It could have been called ‘Marked Section’ or something similar. In fact you can rename a favourite to anything you like.

3 additional tips:
A. Collect keywords by themes in folders (create folder in Event list and drag Keywords in) e.g. People / Locations / Themes etc. They are just an additional visual help to find what you are looking for.
B. As Bill said use Rejects to get rid of stuff that is unusable.
C. Make use of the view filter to only look for Favourites or Hide rejects etc.

Hope this will give you some ideas.

Happy editing

[Carsten Orlt]

It’s really all the same complications in all NLE. There are things that need some fiddling.

The argument you made I could easily make for track based editing where I would need to select multiple edit points of clips on multiple tracks to make one simple trim on the video track to not throw things out of sync. I remember when FCP legacy got the feature to be able to select multiple edit points on diff tracks, something Avid had I think from the beginning.

I prefer the new method because it gives me the possibility to edit something in fine detail and then forget about it and never be worried that I might destroy it by trimming something else 30 min before or even just above it.

I like the new world and I don’t want to go back 🙂

[Carsten Orlt]

Speed is relative 🙂 As Michael said: I find the process of building the edit to take roughly same amount of time. That process tends to work at the speed of my brain making mental connections to what I need to place in the timeline.

BUT to organise my footage and finding things is lightyears ahead of Avid’s and FCP7 I worked with.

I edit mainly natural history. Unscripted hours of footage. Before FCPx my only way to bring sense into the madness was to describe every single camera start stop with words using the ‘notes’ field. Therefor I had to come up with sensible description of what the action is within a clip. Not easy specially when a clip could hold stuff usable in many different context. After that I had to make select sequences to cut down the amount of possibilities and start to see some structure. If I needed some other bit to make it work back from my browser I had the sift through a lot of descriptions and double clicking clips to look at them.

You have no idea idea how much easier this is now. First I do a rough pass just creating keyword selection based on logical differences. I approach this as if I would create keywords for a stock footage search. I have location keywords, animal keywords, technical keywords, people keywords, activities keywords etc. as much as I think. Once I have done this I go through every clip and make favourites and rejects. favourite sections I like and reject stuff which is unusable.

After that Michael’s quote comes into play. BUT if I ever need to find something I have multiple ways my brain can reach it. I might think of the location, or the animal or the person I’m looking for, or I even remember that is was a GoPro shot. Skimming through the result is quick and easy and aided by using ‘hide rejected’ show favourites etc.
If I find that I keep coming back to a combination of keywords I make a smart selection for it.

I as an editor couldn’t be happier and the tiny little quirks FCPx have are like the quirks of my best friends: I do love them too because they make the whole person so much interesting!

Happy editing

[Carsten Orlt]

Just did a test:

edit 2 clips or more in secondary.
add additional audio at edit point as connected clip.
selected all 3 and made compound out of them.
done 🙂
when you open the compound the clips in the secondary moved to the primary and the extra clip is connected as before.
because it’s now one clip in your timeline you never loose your beautiful work again.
need to lengthen the music: break apart compound, do the edit and compound again.

nothing could be easier, well actually a lot but that is another story.

[Carsten Orlt]

For example, a song that has been cut down and has two overlapping clips with a fade-in/fade-out on the audio. In order to keep an overlapping cut point on two connected clips easily editable and locked in time, you have to add gap on the second clip and stretch it back to the beginning of the first audio clip… Kinda sorta faking tracks.

Not sure I can follow you here? When I want to do what I think you are describing I put the 2 or more music sections of the clip in a secondary storyline and if you double click on either the audio opens the same it would open on a video with audio clip. I can then extend the audio of either side underneath the other without shifting the cut point. 2 things are brilliant about this. A I can line up beats in the waveform perfectly by just looking at them and are not restricted by frames! and B I can overlap the exact amount of audio (music) to make the transition more seamless e.g. fade out the strings slowly that are not there anymore in the sections of music I go to. And because all this is done in a secondary I never have to worry about keeping all the good work because something is shifting somewhere else like in the old days.

I’m with Charlie. Once you freed yourself from the shackles of laziness you’ll wondered how could you ever live with tracks. They truly suck!!!

[Carsten Orlt]

I can’t say that having many events has any disadvantages for me, I would actually say it is the opposite.

Having events available doesn’t mean they will be loaded in full when you launch FCP. I have 60 events for our doc. Each location is one event. And music is separate from SFX and VFX etc.

FCP only loads the full event that is needed in a given project, or if I select the event in the event browser. FCP keeps managing the memory perfectly and I only occasionally have to wait. I’m on a Mac Pro and just upgrading to a SSD as my system drive made a huge difference. I noticed that FCP uses the system drive quite a bit to cache stuff (or whatever it does – guess it puts memory content there temporarily) and the super fast SSD speeds up this process dramatically.

Same goes for projects. I have a new project for every little seq I edit. New version of same seq = new project. I do not create compounds to edit in. I maybe only would create a compound to apply a global effect or mix bus. So far no crashes – no hiccups.

Ah yes I do actually edit in proxy mode. I feel its faster, specially when working with non Prores originals. And FCP handles all the conversions under the hood. I couldn’t be happier!!!

And while I’m at it, boy do I love the new timeline. Once you get a hang of it you never go back!!! And audio editing is 100% better than it ever was. Kudos to Apple for having the vision and sticking to it!

Happy editing