Charlie Austin
Forum Replies Created
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[Oliver Peters] “Because….. There are aspects of editing in X where having tracks would be a help, like audio mixing. Some optional track mode (not necessarily universal) would be a valuable feature.”
Mixing is one place where X could benefit from… not tracks, but more robust implementation of roles. Roles effectively are tracks in the organizational sense. The problem is, you can’t organize them yet.
What I hope for is the ability to, firstly, group roles. That’s the biggie. Then, maybe the ability to “collect” groups into subgroups, something like compound clips, which could then be “mixed” overall. Of course you can do this with CC’s and key framing already, but you can’t get into them to edit the contents without opening them in their own timeline, thus losing visual and TC reference to the parent sequence, or breaking them apart, thus losing your overall mix. (there’s a workaround to this last one, but it’s a PITA)
My perfect world would consist of just a couple more selection choices in the Roles timeline index panel.
Next to each role would be Y/N checkboxes for “Group”, “Collect” (or something… Mix Buss?), and “Hide”.So you could firstly Group all your Roles in the timeline. When you’re ready to mix, Collect all your individual grouped roles (FX, MX, DIA, SUB FX… whatever you’ve specified) into individual “containers” which could then be mixed. But you could still see, and edit in the timeline, all the individual clips. And if you had a complicated timeline, you could Hide specific Roles or something, so that all you’d see are the clips you need to be working on.
These aren’t groundbreaking, other NLE’s can “hide” tracks, and assign multiple tracks to master busses or faders or mix groups. The cool thing would be to be able assign 20+ fx “tracks” to a master fader with one click without having to look to see what tracks were what, or do any assigning or patching… Click. Done.
There are some really interesting possibilities one can envision for Roles, and I hope Apple keeps going with them.My fear is that they will try to implement “tracks” to appease people, and f*ck everything up. Persistent I/O points area an example of that. “Everyone” wanted them, and Apple gave people what they wanted. And made a mess of the key wording/favoriting process. I’m sure they’ll fix it, but it didn’t need to be broken…
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Jon Chappell] “Why do people care so much whether FCPX has tracks or not? I think Apple has made its position clear on this. If you want tracks, use an NLE that has them. That’s what I do.”
Exactly. If you want tracks use one of… uh, every other NLE that has ’em. The end.
P.S. Fixed tracks suck. 😉
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Jok Daniel] “What a lot of people don’t realize is that the problems that the magnetic timeline is designed to solve hardly even exist in other NLE:s. Clip collisions, for instance, are almost never a problem on Avid or other NLE:s built around solid trim tools. Once you get used to setting up trims across multiple tracks (and in multiple directions), you can do in one operation what used to take several steps in FCP Legacy. There’s no need to “open up space” or play “track tetris” – tracks ripple at the exact points I want them to, making space and/or extending clips wherever needed. And it’s all real time, which means I can make my edit decisions while looking at the video monitor, and not the little rectangles in the timeline.”
I may be splitting hairs here, but clip collisions do exist on other NLE’s, and the trim tools that have eveloved over the years are the workaround to prevent them. X solves it differently, that’s all. The implementation isn’t perfect, but what solution is? your entire description above mostly describes FCP X as well. Just replace “setting up trims” with “checking your connections”
If you prefer the Avid style tools, that’s cool. I’m not trying to say that X is the best thing ever, just that it can work with complicated edits quite well. I spend all day every day in front of the machine too, and to me, the more the machine can do for me, the better. That’s the whole reason for NLE’s at all right? Otherwise we’d all be sitting at flatbeds cutting film and and scraping mag. 😉
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[David Lawrence] “On a complex timeline like Charlie’s example, I’m not sure how much you really gain in FCPX. Instead of playing Tetris, you have to think about clip connection points. You may have to unscramble the vertical stacking of connected clips and/or re-trim audio. You still have to think about whether anything’s messed up downstream outside the window view. It’s still work. I prefer doing the set-up work first, knowing I’m making every decision, rather than figuring out what the timeline just did to my edit and fixing it afterwards.
True, but not to the extent you lay out above. You need to check the connections to the clip on either side of the edit you’re about to make, maybe some post edit fine trimming, but that’s about it. Not saying it’s *no* work, but you can do the setup work first and anything outside your view will be just fine. I mean, It’s not uncommon to miss a track trim setting on MC as well, especially with a sequence with lots of tracks. X is just like any other NLE in the sense that, if you know your way around the timeline, everything does just what you want it to. The timeline won’t screw anything up on its own. 🙂
[Jeremy Garchow] “There is no equivalent for this in X either, which is really too bad as the magnetic non-collide rules would really help me out here.”
So in X, clip collisions can still happen when trimming? Yikes!”
Not sure what the reference here is to but no, they can’t.
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Looking at your timeline, it seems to me that much of your audio probably has to be reconsidered. Does the audio that precedes the group picture still work (as it did before)? Does the audio that follows the group picture still work (as it did before)? Broadly, these clips are more often than not (more likely “almost always”) going to need to be adjusted, in order to finish this particular “editing decision”.
A comparison in execution between two systems should probably execute the full editing decision in both systems.
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Very true, and as i said, this was a completely arbitrary move in context of the spot I used as a guinea pig, so to speak. However, as it happens, the group I moved did work just fine, with the exception of the leftmost clip, which I could have left behind. The other overlapping clips were J/L cuts relating to the picture.
But, yes, as with any cut, you’d have to probably clean up the audio in most cases. In my experience though, it’s as fast or faster to edit audio in X due to not having to worry about collisions. I was working in FCP 7 all day today, with 24 tracks of audio. It was an enormous pain in the ass now that I’m used to working in X. And not for lack of experience, as I’ve been cutting on FCP “classic” 5 days a week for 11 or 12 years. Tracks get in my way now. 😉
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Charlie,
I’m more alarmed by the fact that you can slip clips within a group so easily – I thought they were more reliable. Grouping is one feature of PPro that I find attractive, but I haven’t experimented enough to discover that shortcoming …
“Good point. As that clip was grouped, you’d think it shouldn’t move at all. :-0
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Yes, I understand; this wasn’t really why I was asking.
I’m sort of fascinated (astonished?) that “video priority, always” as a design choice wasn’t more apparent before (and hasn’t been discussed anywhere).
(If I’m understanding you correctly, then compounding sort of constructs an implied slug video track, even if there is no video track in the compound.)
Fascinating.
Franz.”
Gotcha. And it’s actually the primary storyline which has priority, whether it contains video,audio, or gap, You could rearrange a radio spot really simply by using all connected clips and just cutting up the gap clip in the primary to “contain” each section and dragging them around,
As far as compounding, at least in the way I was specifically describing it, it would just collect all your various music clips and put them in one long clip which you could pin/connect to a primary clip that wasn’t moving thus preserving your overall sync. If you were for example just swapping a few shots or scenes and their associated audio around quickly but didn’t want your MX cut to change. if you were cutting out an entire chunk and pulling everything up, you might want the MX (or whatever) to move so you wouldn’t do this.
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Charlie,
I’m also interested why you chose to use the trim tools to place the clip groups (rather than clicking and dragging).
Also, if I’m reading it correctly, your last trimming action actually breaks the group (or slips sync) (… can’t read it but it might be labelled “Bug xxxx 12″ clip). Is that true? If so, not good.”
No real reason, I’ve just been messing with Pr, which is why I did this in the first place. It would have been a little quicker to just drag everything into place, but it also would have either overwritten some tracks and/or required some track tetris to clear the way. Again, this wasn’t at all scientific. 😉
And yeah, you’re right about that last clip breaking sync. Didn’t even notice. I put it down to my trim tool carelessness. 🙂
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “… also, now that I review this, there’s this question:
I am assuming from this demonstration (and others) that X always prioritizes picture when “collapsing” the timeline – ie it will shuffle sound in order to abut picture elements (and never the other way round, prioritizing audio). Is this true?”
This is true, but, assuming you’ve got audio properly connected, which is trivial, it won’t screw up sync. The exception would be a music bed with a bunch of cut points, which would get moved and maybe you don’t want it to. However, if you just throw your MX in a compound clip and make sure its pinned to the head or tail of your sequence it won’t move. That works with anything you don’t want to move when doing something like I did…
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Charlie,
Were any of the other clips grouped?
Franz.”
Nope. Just to see what would happen I just did the same move, but grouped the “pods” on either side of the point where I dropped the first group. (I was lining up the video clip to the end of a clip FWIW) It had the same result, split all the clips, (including the video clip I was dropping the group adjacent to) that were aligned with the head of the leftmost clip in the group, and cleared everything out of the space taken up by the moved group. Grouping the other clips made no difference…
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~