Chris Harlan
Forum Replies Created
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FWIW, I was able to send a 35ish clip promo over without any problem at all. I putzed around in the program for a good half an hour trying all kinds of absurd things with no crash. I was on a Macbook Pro.
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The Edit World, it is explodin’
With no project sharin’, and timelines bloatin’
Who needs a fit-to-fill, or persistent out/in
When collisions you can ignore,
Because its a magnetic timeline you’e totin’
And even Larry Jordan has Premiere a floatin’But you tell me,
Over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re going to grieve
In post production.No, no–you don’t believe
We’re going to grieve
In post production(With deepest apologies to the great P.F. Sloan)
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Okay. That’s funny.
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[Herb Sevush] “You mean his new MBP or Imac, don’t you? It’s kinda of hard to fire up something that’s been EOL’d. That’s why it’s so nostalgic to fire up Legacy on my Mac Pro.
“Everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back…”
“Ah! I see your livin’ in the future.
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[Walter Soyka] “Are you giving up control — or are you changing how you control it? The magnetic timeline has its physics, and if you need to change them, can’t you just move the clip in question in or out of the primary as required? Wouldn’t that be more or less the same as making a complicated track-based selection?
“But what’s complicated about making a track based selection? Just lasso. If I don’t want to bring my music tracks, lock them and then lasso the rest. But, hey, that’s me. And, as to it being more or less the same–well, that’s sort of my point. I don’t understand the need to re-invent the wheel. Other than just to do it. Now maybe if I had larger, more independent segments to deal with, I’d feel differently. But generally, I don’t. Most of what I work on overlaps and interacts in ways that don’t really lend themselves to easy segmentation.
[Walter Soyka] “I would have thought, though, that clip connections, especially with SFX, were practically made for you. For example:
[Chris Harlan] “The sfx of the hand grenade pin being pulled still has to be cut and placed back where it was taken from to rest under the transition that precedes the clip you just pulled.”
Connect the pin pull to the right frame of the visual once, and you never need to think about that SFX’s placement again.
“No. But this is where it gets difficult for me to articulate, and its not a good day for it. But, let me try. If my goal were to give a specific visual a SFX, you’d be right. Pinning it to a frame would be gold. But that, really, is only a small part of my concern. In the case of a transitional SFX, like we are talking about above, I probably want something like the following to happen: A) I want the sound to match the image at the beginning of the transition. B) I want the sound to be relational to underlying music–say a swell or ramp–so that it sits just so. C) I want to crossfade to a second sfx–say a swish–partway through the transition (lets say the transition is a 20 frame Wind Blur), so that the sound itself is now becoming something else. D) this second sound is probably the one that I am most interested in timing to the beat, so the crossfade between the two sounds is going to be finessed to deal with that beat, E) coming out of the transition–which I have now retimed to 16 frames to make the earlier rhythm requirements work–I might be trying to work in sound (a last minute discovery) from the SOT track–lets say a crossfade from the swish to the rustling sound of the protagonist’s wind breaker as he swings around–but F) I have to retime the entire transition to 24 frames to make the effect work, and retime the other details. Then, G) it occurs to me that the swish might not be needed because a filtered version of the rustling windbreaker might make a better transition. But, I’m not sure yet, so I want to leave everything in place, create a sound from the windbreaker, and then crossfade it with both the first sound and the natural sound of the wind breaker. H) Nope. Back to plan A.
I believe that a tiered (tracks) relationship to absolute time is a far easier way to work this all out than a hierarchical relationships between clips. I have no doubt that I could find a way to cut the above in FCP X, and after much practice I might find it passable. I concede that if my years of work and experience had come through using X, I might find it just as easy.
But what do I gain by completely rethinking the way that I work? And that was the point of my earlier post. I see no value in it. None. Sure, if I have no experience, plopping this glop of stuck together stuff over between these glops is a lot easier, and I’m less likely to make a mess. But for me? I don’t see it. And its not because I haven’t been looking.
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[Walter Soyka] “llision its usually because I have two things that are fighting for a space that only one of them belongs in. So, one of them has to go anyway. I just really don’t understand the fracas over clip collision at all.”
Clip collision is only half of the benefit of the magnetic timeline. The other half is simplified selection.
With a traditional timeline, you have to make a complicated selection based on implied clip relationships when you want to make an edit around that point in time. With the magnetic timeline, because those clip relationships are explicitly defined, so making an edit around the parent automatically deals with the children correctly.”
I certainly get all of that. I guess my point is that a lasso is much more useful to me. It clumps things together in a very temporary relationship, which is far more useful to me than that clump having a permanent relationship. It would be nice to have a command where I could group or ungroup lassoed clumps, at my will, but I prefer a simple lasso over the magnetic timeline any day.
[Walter Soyka] “[Chris Harlan] “Everything still needs to healed a bit, doesn’t it?”
Sure, but FCPX preserves all the original durations for you to massage, whereas FCP7 will clobber some of them in collision.
“Yes, but temporal relationships are far more important to me than any damage done by an overlay. And, when I want to move everything out of the way, using a combo of ctrl V (to split the time line) and the t key is no biggie. It’s a couple of keystrokes and I know where everything is. I also don’t have to worry about a lot of ancillary stuff like which clip the sfx that covers the transition is actually attached to. If its lassoed, it comes along. If its not, it doesn’t.
It just seems to me that the magnetic timeline is giving up an undue amount of control for a modicum of speed in certain circumstances. And, I would further argue, that in my particular circumstances–which requires a high amount of interweaving in a short amount of time–that it doesn’t offer any speed value at all.
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[Oliver Peters] “Cue Shane Ross and the Kiki wipe. 😉
“Kiki Stockhammer!
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[Alex Hawkins] “We bought the Genarts Sapphire plugins. They’re pretty neat. Some good transitions FX in their little bundle.
“Great plug-in pack. I use Continuum, which I like quite a bit. It may not quite be Sapphire, but I have three different NLEs to feed so the price difference means a lot to me.
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[Joseph W. Bourke] “By the way, you fine folks do know about the Gradient Wipe effect? You can customize your own transitions. Here’s the Adobe rundown on it:
“Use it all the time, but usually with a plug-in that that gives me a little bit more control. I’ve still got the complete Pixelan library from back when the world was 4:3 SD.
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[Alan Okey] “[Brian Mulligan] “I hear a CUT is a good transition. :)”
I’m with you there. Trendy and increasingly overused glow/blur dissolves and film flashes are going to look just as dated in a few years as gratuitous lens flares and light rays do now. Maybe sooner.
“Well, hopefully we on this forum will all use our transitions with enough taste and discretion to be shinning examples of our particular period, and not samples of what was wrong with it.