[Charlie Austin]

[Bret Williams] “You can do almost everything in X while it plays back. Pretty cool.”

Yeah, puts a smile on my face every time I trim a clip right before the playhead hits it, or select and solo a clip while it’s playing etc. 🙂 This is a damn good V.1 app, can’t wait for V.2!

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

[Charlie Austin]

[John Davidson] “CES is a real disease. Symptoms include inability to learn new things, difficulty reading words written on a wall, and obsessive visits to this forum.”

You need to use that as your signature. lol

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “Ironic that the examples Charlie has posted completely circumvent the editing design of X by refusing to use the primary storyline at all. Just an observation ;-)”

How is it ironic? I’m not circumventing the design, the design lets me choose how I want to work. X isn’t as rigid as some seem to think. 😉

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Walter Soyka] “Don’t confuse empty space with the lack of information.

Graphic design offers us a few tools to convey information in 2D space — notably here, alignment — but FCPX’s self-collapsing timeline totally disregards them.

I have argued here that the self-collapsing timeline removes visual cues from the edit. Imagine working a nodal compositor that continuously and automatically reflowed — or if your physical desktop did, or if your kitchen’s spice cabinet did. Our brains are wired for spatial thinking, but FCPX fights this.

If FCPX must ignore human-centric concepts like space, it could at least leverage computer-centric concepts like sorting. How cool would it be if FCPX could sort and re-sort your timeline based on user-defined criteria?”

I get what you’re saying, and I agree. I guess that, being a former FCP v1, 2 and 3 beta tester, I’m more forgiving of unfinished software. 😉 Also for that reason, I think X will have the ability to do just what you’ve suggested. It already does in a rudimentary way.

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “No doubt X satisfies your needs, and I won’t question that but I will point out that you have missed some functionality in FCP7 (and earlier).

You can enable and disable any clip in the timeline, individually.

I do know that, but you can’t solo individual audio clips, and add other clips to the soloed group, in 7… and that is a huge timesaver for me

[Franz Bieberkopf]I do spend time on track management while cutting, but from what I’ve read you trade track management in 7 for connection management in X.”

Honestly I never really give connections a thought, but as I said I avoid story lines where I can, so it hasn’t been an issue for me… I do miss sync indicators and hope they re-implement them.

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “I think you missed part of Walter’s point, which can be made by inverting your question: why would you want to get rid of tracks?”

Because they slow me down. When I’m in FCP 7 now, which is what I mostly still use, or MC or Pr, it drives me batshit crazy to have to patch my tracks. If I cut in a video clip, 99.99% of the time I want it to be on top of whatever is there. In X, that’s where it goes. And as far as audio, particularly when I’ve got a shedload of tracks, I just want it to go wherever it fits when I’m cutting. Not tell it where to go, not make sure that only CH2 of my 6 Channel source is assigned to an open track for every single edit. Not to play track tetris when I want to move a group of clips from one part of the sequence to another. Having the ability to solo or mute just the clips I want, not the whole damn track which might have something else on it i want to hear or not.

I could go on and on, I get that it’s totally subjective, but tracks are really limiting to me now. YMMV 😉

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “I’m looking for interesting solutions that have nothing to do with my using X, which does not interest me at the present time for reasons far beyond the visual organization of audio tracks.”

Fair enough. 🙂

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Walter Soyka] “Managing the relationship between clips does not require a self-collapsing system of lanes; … DAW-style layered tracks or track groups would be compatible with traditional tracks.

I’ll beat the dead horse again and say that I think that’s coming in some form or other.

[Walter Soyka] Managing the relationship between clips does not require counting time relatively; that’s just a design decision. The parent/child data model, which gives magnetism/clip relationship management “for free” due to its design, could be based on an independent absolute time container instead of anchoring on whatever the first clip in the primary storyline happens to be — consider David Lawrence’s and Jim Giberti’s suggestion of multiple peer storylines.

Personally, my solution to that is that I don’t use the primary story line at all. Just cut everything as connected clips. Adding transitions to clips requires an extra keystroke or two to make a secondary storyline, but that time is more than made up for by not having to worry about about “patching” my tracks before I cut something in. Just press the button and go. It’s very freeing… like not wearing pants. LOL..

[Walter Soyka] FCPX’s magnetic timeline is a set of related but ultimately independent design decisions including tracklessness, clip connections, and temporal relativity. You could have clip connections without giving up tracks.”

As I said elsewhere, If you could group Roles, and maybe set the vertical (layer) position of a role or individual clip relative to others in the same space, why do you need fixed tracks?

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “What I’m asking about is the use of rolls in a tracked NLE – like Avid or PPro or FCP 8.”

And maybe I’m just not understanding what you’re looking for. Assume for a second that you can color code roles, and group them in the timeline. So all your Roles are vertically adjacent as well as visually distinct from one another. If that was possible, why would you even need traditional tracks?

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

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “No reason a timeline couldn’t have tracks and roles is there?”

Tomato, Tomahto… 🙂 Not to beat a dead horse here, but grouping roles will do just that. I’m testing an alpha version of app right now that exports audio from X. It lets you group roles, and choose each groups vertical relationship to the others. It creates nicely organized timelines for traditional, fixed track apps.

I have no knowledge of what’s coming in the next version(s) of X, but I’ll bet ya a dollar they’ll add that functionality to the timeline.

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