[Charlie Austin]

[John Davidson] “Here’s a funny little thing. We totally don’t care about roles anymore since X2Pro pretty much automates everything for us. I suppose if we really cared and had a huge edit we would feel more motivated to work with roles. Then again, even a sizzle that we worked on for 2 months and delivered last week – never touched a role in it.”

There’s no need to touch roles once their assigned, there is a need to be able to organize them in a timeline. I mean, it may not bother you when you make a cut in a music track at the bottom of your sequence and the tail you cut off jumps all the way to the top of the screen. Or worse, cutting 2 or 3 frame bits of dialog or FX together. You may not care about that, but those that do may think Roles really need to be able to stick together, at least loosely. 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Chris Harlan] “I worked with Don a little, but my “In a World…” guy was Percy Rodriguez. I worked A LOT with him. I actually did an “In a World…” trailer with Percy to Carmina Burana back in the early ’90s when such things were still fresh. Yes… In a time where Carmina Burana was still fresh.”

That’s pretty funny, because after I wrote that I started thinking about Percy, and couldn’t remember his last name. Had to Google it. Great voice, great guy. Don was really versatile, and fast. No multiple takes with him. 1 or 2, then move on.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[John Davidson] “X seriously doesn’t care if the clip with the cut up audio is blue with video or green with none.”

Very true but… (in my best Don LaFontaine voice…) In a World… where editors send spots out to be finished on systems that do care about such things, this could create some very… interesting results.

No? 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Jeremy Garchow] ” I cannot, however, add a Role to each of those channels with all of those clips selected in a browser. I can add it to the entirety of the clip (which is all the channels), but not each individual channel. For that, I need a timeline.
“

Ahh, gotcha… On a related note… one little can of worms that gets opened when assigning roles to components relates to our imagined Role Grouping/Color Coding workflow. That being… when using the TL index to highlight a Role.. a clip containing components of varying Roles is *always* highlighted when any Role it contains is selected. Slight annoyance there. So.. If they color code Roles.. How’s that gonna work? Stripes? 🙂 Also, in which Role group does a multi role clip live? User selectable? Who knows.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “You can assign Roles to an entire clip before editing, yes, but you can’t assign a Role to an individual audio component (channel) before it hits a timeline. “

Technically true, but if you right click an event clip and choose open in timeline, you can assign roles to that “master” clips components before you cut a frame into a sequence…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “(unfortunately, you can’t add a Role to an individual component before it hits a timeline),”

Oh yes you can. 🙂 As John said, you can of course assign a clips role in the Event. But… You can also choose “Open in Timeline” for a multichannel source that’s in the Event, and assign Roles to the individual Components. Before you cut it into anything. It’s very nice. 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “man Charlie, I don’t know – this seems really arcane bandage workflow stuff – if 80-90% percent of employed editors (thats a minimum realistically) are operating on systems (avid, FCP, Premiere) that bear no resemblance to this X timeline and these kind of limitations, these kind of workarounds, what exactly is the chance of this kind of macgyver jerry rigging taking off in broad practise?”

Well, I honestly think that what we’re talking about isn’t a workaround or a limitation at all. I mean, to me, the X timeline can function just like any other timeline if you want it to. In this case, you could just cut your stuff in as disconnected A/V clips and work exactly like you’d work in anything else. But, if you think you might like to have instant access to your original sync, without matching back, or clicking a sync marker or whatever you’d “normally” do, just do this one extra 2-3 keystroke operation. This isn’t a workaround at all. It’s a new, and pretty useful, workflow technique.

I really, to this day, don’t get all the fuss about the X timeline. I’ll admit that maybe sync markers would be nice for connected (disconnected) clips. Maybe. And yes, the fact that Clips/Roles don’t stick together, and try to glue themselves as close to the Primary Storyline as they can *is* annoying and needs a fix of some sort. (not fixed tracks though!) 😛

At the end of the day though, now that I know it, I cut in X just the same as i do in anything else. It’s just a freaking timeline. A timeline that I can just focus on cutting, and let the app figure iut some of the stuff that forces me to stop and think how to patch something. Maybe because I’ve cut Film, Tape to Tape, and on MC and get the gap as media idea? I dunno. You can cut like you do in 7, or use the Ripple as default MC style, or any combination you want. Once you learn the commands, which you need to do when you learn anything new, It’s not limiting at all. It’s not perfect either, a lot of stuff needs work, but limiting is the last word I’d use.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Chris Kenny] “There isn’t one standard workflow in the industry, which apps need one standard feature to support, and which FCP X doesn’t implement the same way as everything else.”

I get your analogy, but I think Oliver/Chris etc also make a valid point. In the grand scheme of things, yes, there are perfectly valid, perhaps even more efficient workflows with X. But… The reality is that in a fairly large segment of this biz, one still needs to deliver an EDL, OMF/AAF etc. It probably would be easier for Post Houses to have the latest version of Smoke/Resolve etc and just suck in fcpxml. But right now, they can’t. And right now is what matters for “high end pros'” – and I use that term very loosely 🙂 – when deciding whether or not to adopt X.

I really enjoy cutting in X, it productive, fast, and weirdly, fun. The only thing keeping me from doing everything in it, and pushing everyone where I work onto it, is the lack of “legacy” features. I need to be able to easily swap sequences with other editors. I need to spit out EDL’s that are accurate (which EDL-X does really well) and have notes about opacity/effect names etc (which EDL-X doesn’t currently do), so online editors can easily recreate what i’ve done. OMF would be nice, X2Pro works great, but not everyone mixes in Pro Tools, and FCPXML is still a moving target, which causes issues now and again.

Like Oliver, I still use FCP 7 as a conforming tool, and I wish I didn’t have to. We often get features and separate stems, which I need to combine and export as split masters so we can cut with them. It’s still easier to do this in 7.

So… while in theory, hell even in practice, there are valid, efficient workflows that can be used with X, it can’t exist as an island *right now* in the crazy quilt multi-platform, multi-application, “professional” finishing and delivery world. Apple needs to either add internal tools to make it play nice with all the creaky, old fashioned workflows still extant, or offer much stronger support for those developers making the tools to do so. I get why they didn’t focus on that out of the gate. And I don’t care if i need to spend a few bucks to be able to interact with other workflows.I just need it to work. Because I like cutting it. Especially the sparkly eye candy. ;-P

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I could be reading this wrong – but do you mean that any time you want to do this – you have to duplicate the audio?”

I think you’re responding to this:

[Jeremy Garchow] “This adds another instance of the dialog clip where you want it and is connected to the video above it where it needs to be.

If I ever need to go back to the original sync, I simply trim it back in on the original clip non destructively. “

And I’ll admit to being a bit confused by it, but maybe I get it now. You don’t “have” to dupe the audio, you can just work with connected clips as normal but… I think he’s saying that, if you need to do some dialog upcutting or whatever, rather than disconnecting the audio, simply select the range you need, copy it, disable the component channel (V) Paste the copied audio as a connected track, do whatever you want, but if you need sync audio back, or even just a sync reference, simply reenable the component channel. Essentially once you cut in pix with sync audio you never need to “match back” to get the sync sound back, it’s always there. Nice trick. 🙂

————————————————————-

~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Jean-François Robichaud] “Am I the only one encountering this issue? Is there a workaround?”

It’s a bug. Something broke in 10.0.6 when they introduced persistent I/O points. It works as expected in filmstrip view, but attempting to do anything with favorites in list view now instantly changes focus to the clip at the top of the list. Workaround is to use filmstrip view. Looking forward to a fix myself.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~