[Charlie Austin]

[Bret Williams] “Heck, in FCP legacy, you could delete all the clips from your bins and the timeline would still work. I wonder what happens in X? That would be interesting. Would answer some of those link questions earlier…”

Here’s what happens. LOL

It warns you…

and then…

Undo fixes it…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “You cannot place them into folders and tuck them out of the way, like you can bins in a single FCP 7 or MC project. Thus you end up wading through them to find the one you need.”

Again.. semantics. X Events are like FCP 7 or MC Projects, not bins. You can open 100 projects in 7 or MC, well, in 7 you can… 😉 but you can’t tuck 100 projects into a folder in the UI right? KW Collections are the analog to bins. And you can stuff them into folders or subfolders or whatever you like inside the Event (the object formerly known as Project) 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “No problem. I didn’t mean that you had. In re-reading my response, I guess it sounded harsher than I meant. We’re cool.

Phew… I hate to think I come across as a jerk… unless I’m trying to. lol

[Oliver Peters] … I work differently in X than I do in other NLEs. Some good, some bad from my POV. As far as multiple Events, I was merely expanding on ways that it made sense. In fact, ways that seem to coincide with Apple’s ideas for why they named it “Events” (and not Bins) in the first place. ;-)”

Yeah, I started out trying to work exactly the same in X as i did in FCP7. And it mostly worked. I’m now at the point where I’m starting to try and work the “X way” for lack of a better term. Sometimes i really like it, and sometimes it drives me batshit crazy… but usually because of stuff that lacks polish or doesn’t work quite right yet, or because I’m used to doing stuff in a way that’s different… not because of how it works… if that makes sense. Also, I equate collections to bins and events to projects. So I can have as many “bins” in a “project” as i want, just as I’m used to doing… Semantics right? -edit: FWIW, I don’t import anything into my events once I’ve created them. I make a bunch of keyword collections (bins) and drag stuff from the finder into the collections. The fact that those clips all show up in the Event as well is an afterthought…

Other than that… color code-able/group-able Roles, match frame replace Edits, maybe some sort of Z-Index for video clips so they’ll stay put when compositing and I’m a happy camper. I mean, there’s a lot more I’d like to see added and or improved/fixed, to me that’s all just icing on the cake… But again… that’s just me and how I work. 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “Yes, I understand how to organize in the Event browser, too. Collections are simply like Bins/Folders of sub clips. It’s not the same. The clip in now duplicated in the main Event as well as numerous Collections. Plus the more clips you have in an Event, the longer it takes to open and update changes within the session. Even in your screen grab you are showing 3 Events.
“

It was absolutely not my intent to imply you didn’t know how to organize things, I just posted that because it’s exactly how i would have organized it in FCP 7. Same with the amount of Events. I always have my FX and MX projects open in 7, in addition to whatever project(s) I’m working on.

I really don’t see how it’s any different at all, other than the way it looks and what things are called, and the fact that the actual event can be selected to list everything that’s in it. In 7 it would just be a tab. I guess it’s probably a workflow thing… I never make sub clips or sequences of selects in FCP7, just shitloads of markers in my source.

With X I can work the same way, but also mark favorite ranges which effectively makes sub clips for me, which I can view if i want to. So… for me, it’s way more efficient. I also have to disagree about the load time. It really doesn’t take long at all. The events load way faster than projects in FCP 7. In fact the FX Event was exported from FCP 7, and loads about 3 times faster in X on the same machine. The projects take a little longer to load, but it’s not really much worse than if they were all in an FCP7 project when it was loading. YMMV… 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “You can’t simply move clips from the main Event into ONLY the folder. That’s a lot different than organizing clips within Bins and Folders inside FCP 7 or MC. Correct me if I’m missing something.”

This may or may not address this, but I rarely look at what’s in the event. Everything goes into folders or collections(bins) within the event. I look at the Event sort of like the project tab in fcp 7, it just tells me what “project” I’m working on. Unlike 7 I can highlight it and see/search everything in it, but I never use it for editing… FWIW… here’s a couple screenshots… my events library from a “project” I just finished up, and the project library with one folder open. All the other folders have on average about the same amount of projects in them. Sorry it’s so long, but you get the idea…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Bret Williams] ” I think everyone just became an expert at manipulating legacy’s shortcomings and now they’re confused as to why the app would actually have a mechanism for doing it itself.”

Agreed. I really don’t get why folks thing the event/project management in X is somehow inferior to that of 7. It’s just different. It’s like saying I don’t like new cars because I can’t manually advance the spark and adjust the choke when I start it. And it shifts for me? 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Bret Williams] “No, changing a master shot CC in an event doesn’t change anything at all in a project. The project is linked to the master event file. You open the project and the project looks at all the master clips in the event. If they’ve been transcoded or switched to proxys, it doesn’t matter. It links to the event, the event keeps track of the media.”

I hear ya, but changing the contents of an Event CC changes all instances of that object wherever it’s used right? At least it’s supposed to in 10.0.6, I haven’t played with that yet. Maybe it is just a one way Project to Event link, but who knows? It just seems to me that the “in what projects is this clip used” info exists somewhere in the Event database, at least if the project is open. And if it does, maybe it’ll be accessible at some point. Or not… 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “So how does it handle this when all 100 of each have to be online and accessible? I find that when this is the case, the amount of buffering to RAM that X has to do becomes really cumbersome. So it’s not simply a matter of hiding things in a folder, because when you open it (like projects) it takes a long time. Everything has to be ready and skimmable.

Well, YMMV, but in my case X handles it just fine. I agree about the time it takes to load project film strips in the Library… to an extent. But I actually find that it’s gotten much faster with 10.0.6. And, once they’re open they’re open. On a slightly related note… They do need to work on the whole timeline browser back/forward button thing. It gets a little weird sometimes… 😉

[Oliver Peters] Event Manager X is fine, but now you are constantly in a situation of exiting and relaunching the app.”

True, but opening X takes no time at all really, at least compared to 7 and, in my limited recent experience, MC and Pr as well. And to me, it’s much easier to organize giant piles of projects in multiple folders separate from the Event(s) they reference.

In 7, I have projects that take forever to open because they have so many sequences in them. So I have to duplicate the project, trash all the stuff I hopefully won’t need, and move on. Leaving me with 2 or more projects to hunt through if I find I need something old.

And by hunt through, I mean like maybe I had cut a specific shot or little sequence into a spot . 3 months later, I need to find it. In 7, i need to not only find the project version the sequence is in, but if I can’t remember which of the multiple versions of multiple spots it’s in, I need to open them all one by one ’til I find it. In X, just skim through them in the Library. For me, that’s faster and easier…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Bret Williams] “In fact, legacy could tell you which clips had been used in sequences with a find used command. In X, the even has absolutely no idea if a clip has been used in a project anywhere. It’s pretty much a one way road.”

Actually, I’m not sure the event doesn’t know, it’s just that, as Craig has said, the front end to get to that info isn’t there yet. Based on the new compound clip behavior, it’s clearly possible for X to know in what projects an object in an event is used. And changing a “master” CC changes all the instances of it in multiple projects. Maybe they can not only put in a Find in projects command for event clips, but also be able to replace them. … a kid can dream right? 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] ” a production that would generate 100 Events and 100 Projects. I don’t mean the software can’t handle it (though I have my doubts) – rather that the interface does not effectively support it for the operator.”

Not really a reply to the thread topic, but on the above point, the 5 bucks spent on Event Manager makes managing projects and events *way* easier than in FCP 7. And FWIW, I’ve got at least one event that has close to 100 projects (multiple spots with multiple versions) associated with it. The software handles it just fine. It’s trivial to organize projects into Folders/Subfolders in the Project Library, and use Event Manager to open and close whatever is needed.

Now you could argue that FCP X can’t do it alone, but it;s kind of like complaining about an NLE because it doesn’t have every plug in on earth built in. Some people don’t need to manage huge piles of projects and events. Those that do, buy the add on…

One more point re: metadata, Roles in particular. I send out OMF’s/AAF’s for post mixing. Due to the nature of the trailer/promo biz, I really don’t have the luxury of being able to take the time to maintain perfectly split audio while I’m cutting. Just cram it wherever it fit.s ‘cuz the client wants to see it *now*. (this is why I don’t miss tracks at all, but that’s another topic…) And since, once again, OMF/AAF export isn’t built into FCP X, I gotta spend some money to get that functionality.

But… In other NLE’s, I need to spend X amount of time splitting out my tracks before I send it to a mix. In X, since I’ve assigned Roles metadata to my audio – which, BTW, takes way less time than patching tracks and playing track Tetris while I cut – all I need to do is tell X2Pro what order to group my Roles, press a button, and it’s done. Based on my hourly rate, X2Pro on paid for itself after using it twice. And I never have to do splits again. 🙂 *That* is an example of a cool feature of X as a database.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~