Chris Harlan
Forum Replies Created
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[Bill Davis] “Cuz, in Legacy a blank spot on the timeline is precisely that. Nothing. And you can’t do a damn thing about it.
“Not quite true. It’s Black. And, frankly, the fact that I didn’t have to generate slug every time I wanted black was a godsend. It was always fun to watch someone coming from MC to FCP as they were just starting out, generating slug after slug to be used for black. I, personally, was thrilled to have a timeline smart enough to hold your place in time and auto-generate black.
[Bill Davis] “In X, it’s something. (A gap clip, to be precise) As something it can take on attributes.It can be tracked, it can be accounted for. It can connect to stuff. When it’s nothing – nothing is possible except that it sits there.
“That’s what slug is for.
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[Steve Connor] “D/Vision online showed so much promise, shame it was murdered while still so young. At least FCP had a good life before it met it’s sticky end”
Hey, and it is still breathing. I’ll be using heavily over the next year. But I will, also be working Media Composer into the mix to build up speed–and truthfully, this is something I should have been doing over the last several years–from the intro of MC 3.0–but I’ve been to lazy to do so.
Talking about all the old wild west NLEs, does get me a little excited about FCP X. I totally agree that it is nice to get something out there that shakes things up, and if it had come as a side product or from another company, I’d be completely jazzed about it. One of the things that FCP did to its NLE competitors is that it made them be better. Avid is much better than it was. I know there are die-hards out there that think things went down hill after MC 2.8, but–for me–it was the confinement of those earlier versions that forced me away. So, hopefully, FCP X will preform a similar function down the road. I have to admit that it is quite a bit of fun trying to figure that out.
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[Andy Neil] “You see, this is a matter of perspective. You edit in exactly the way your NLE of choice forces you to. You just don’t see it that way, probably because it’s the way you learned.”
Sorry, Mate; I think you are brazenly wrong here. The actual joy of FCP is/was that it allowed you to pursue any number of editing paradigms at pretty much any given time. I’ve edited on things far weirder than FCP X–say, the Montage 3–which I enjoyed, and I’ve been able to edit using FCP as if it were a Montage–using multiple open timelines as bins, rotating edits between them; or I’ve been able to able to edit as if I were on a Media Composer or D/Vision, with stricter Source/Record; or I’ve been able to work like I’m using Speed Razor, which for its time, was an mazing editorial compositor. There has never been a more flexible, freeform editorial device than FCP. And to paraphrase–if you don’t see it that way, its probably because you haven’t learned on enough different NLEs.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “It is the video paradigm (above) that has been adopted in the “Primary Storyline” model of FCPX and this was the point of my post.”
This is my understanding, as well. Also, Source/Record–which keeps getting thrown around in the world at large as an old filmmaking technique–is unquestionably a video/television technique that developed with offline/online editorial devices like Convergence, CMX, Sony and GVC.
And Bill, there were several early NLE’s that eschewed Source/Record. D/Vision and Avid, however, made compelling use of it, and it became the metaphor of choice. D/Vision–for those who have never heard of it–was highly successful NLE (and contender for the throne) that was eventually purchased by Discreet, and was improved and sold as Edit*. Edit*, of course, was brutally murdered in its sleep, and then dragged into a ditch to die.
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[Scott Thomas] “How about an Immix Video Cube?
“Found a demo video for the Cube!
https://www.archive.org/details/videocube
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[TImothy Auld] “Montage! Yikes. Wasn’t that the one that operated off a ton of u-matic decks rolling together?
bigpine”
That was the first Montage. And I believe it was VHS decks with tape loops. I saw one in action once. It was a beast.
The Montage I had was the Montage3, which was disk based NLE. It ran off of a PC with an Intel Action Media II card. It was a wild thing. Instead of the television’s Source/Record model borrowed by most NLEs of the time, it used a rotating timeline model, where you basically treated the nine available timelines as both bins and timelines. It was funky, but in the day it was a revelation! That was back, of course, when all NLE’s were offline. I think Sidney Lumet used to use it all the time, and I know that Star Trek: Next Generation used to use it. In fact, I was just having a conversation last week with the post super from that show–our kids go to the same school–and we were laughing about the weird bin-less wonder of the thing.
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As Shane says, here in LA FCP 7 still has a lot of life. I see no reason why you can’t get three years out of it. I still use it like crazy, though I am working more Avid into my personal workflow. As for X, I don’t know a single facility here that is going that way.
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If you wanted it that way, but you had sizable Source windows, as well. The Montage, however, which is another NLE I used was very much like that.
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Speed Razor 2000!
I had a Speed Razor with a Digisuite LE. Fun machine at the time. A wild concoction. Opened up so many possibilities. Had to go back and use one about four years ago to help somebody out. It was brutal. Amazing what we now take for granted and argue over.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “[Chris Harlan] “What am I missing?”
That you cannot read a DNxHD MXF file on a Mac without paying for Avid/third party software.”
So what?