Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[David Roth Weiss] “Did you miss the work “all” in my question? I asked if the 2-million were “all” wrong. That’s far from stating either that 1) they are all in agreement, or 2) they agree with me.
Is this over your head? Or, is it just another one of your superfluous arguments?”
Asking me if they’re all wrong implies that they all disagree with me, because obviously I wouldn’t consider the ones who agree with me to be wrong.
By the way, I can’t hep but notice that you completely ignored the substance of my post in favor of picking a fight over a single word.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Aranyshev] “Well, I guess you have different FCPX than everyone else.”
What does option-R do on your version? On mine it performs a Replace from Start Edit on the clip selected in the timeline.
I really think about half of the “FCP X is designed for consumers” stuff would go away if more people just opened up the command editor….
There isn’t one by default, but you can also assign a shortcut to Replace from End. Plus, of course, you can perform various types of replace edits by dragging a clip from the browser and dropping it on a clip in the sequence. Add in Auditions, and smarter rippling behavior when you want it, and it’s hard to argue that FCP X isn’t substantially better at replace operations than FCP 7.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “You have 2-million editors using a tool that’s flexible and adaptable to anyone’s style or to a style dictated by a project if that’s more desirable, and you replace it with a tool that requires all 2-million users to adapt to a new and more rigid style that bears no resemblance to what they “need” or think they need, and the 2-million are all wrong?
“It’s really kind of ludicrous that you constantly try to call me out for supposedly using shady debating tactics, and here you are implying two million people you don’t know all agree with you.
In any event, I do not agree with your contention that the new editing paradigm FCP X introduces is ‘more rigid’. If anything, it’s substantially less rigid. Keywords are much more flexible than strictly hierarchical bin-based footage organization, and the new timeline is much more freeform than a traditional multitrack timeline, both in the sense that it’s harder to ‘break’ the edit because of new ripping and collision behaviors (which makes it easy to freely rearrange clips), and in the sense that clips don’t have to exist on rigidly defined tracks.
You’re making what I think is a very common mistake in this discussion. Exposed to a new paradigm, it’s common for people to notice what’s worse about it, because they expect to be able to do X and find out they can’t… but not notice what’s better about it, because they don’t think to try Y and Z, which are now supported, because they’ve never been able to do Y and Z before. And even once people are told about Y and Z, they don’t see the point initially, because figuring out how to use Y and Z effectively takes a while.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “There you go Chris, ignore the context of the thread and try your best confuse the message by making the discussion about semantics and the history of word processing if that’s what it takes to make yourself look and feel knowledgeable. “
The thread context was the value (or lack thereof) of using positioning on the vertical axis of the 2D space provided by a traditional multitrack timeline as a way of organizing different types of clips. There is nothing WYSIWYG about ability, because the timeline itself does not show up anywhere in “What You Get”. Calling this WYSIWYG is like calling writing HTML code WYSIWYG, because, hey, I can see the code for a header there, and when the page renders I get a header.
This is not a meaningless semantic distinction. It is critical to be able to control every aspect of the appearance of the final program, because otherwise it can’t reflect the creative intent of the editor. No such concern comes into play with the arrangement of the timeline.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Aranyshev] “Sure. Now please tell me how many keystrokes will it take to change one take for another in an edited scene keeping the overall duration of the shot and the scene in FCPX?”
One, assuming the clip you want to replace is already selected.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Aranyshev] “Oh, crap! When so many people say “this app doesn’t fit my editing style” and all those people have very different editing styles it means “there is something very wrong with the app”.”
That doesn’t follow. All of those editing styles, pretty much, are adapted to traditional project-based footage organization and multitrack timelines. A car doesn’t fit any of the different horseback riding styles.
FCP X hasn’t been around for long enough for anyone to really have a fully developed editing style that’s adapted to the way it works yet.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Alan] “Come on, Chris. In FCP1-7 you scrub through the timeline as shown in the canvas and pretty perfectly wysiwyg if you play the canvas on a broadcast monitor.”
Yes, the canvas is (mostly) WYSIWYG. The timeline (and, particularly, the track-based aspect of it) is not.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “It seems the people sequestered from the outside world inside their Cupertino campus forgot that WYSIWYG is meaningful to most editors.
“Timelines are never WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG came out of the print world: you make a page look a certain way on screen, and that’s how it looks when it prints. Nothing of the timeline appears in the finished product. The timeline is an abstract symbolic representation.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “No, it can’t. The self-collapsing trackless timeline inherently prevents you from using the spatial position in the timeline.”
It stops you from using solely spatial position to categorize things, but given metadata tagging the app could (but, admittedly, probably won’t) offer a spatially arranged view of that metadata.
This is one of the great things about metadata — it allows the software to “understand” enough to present or organize the same data in many different ways.
[Walter Soyka] “By the way, you could mimic all this in FCP7 today. Just constantly collapse your timeline as much as possible and use color-coding. Would anyone really prefer to work this way?”
This is sort of a silly point. The new paradigm is something that all hangs together; the trackless design, the use of metadata, the clip connections. Obviously nobody would want to give up this kind of spatial organization in FCP 7, because it would be more work for the editor to manually collapse everything, the environment does not have a toolset designed with this in mind, and you wouldn’t be getting any of the magnetic timeline’s benefits in the process.
[Walter Soyka] “This is a strawman argument, and a terrible use for tracks for all the reasons you’ve defined. The origin of the footage should be metadata already associated with each file and clip. What the NLE needs is a tool for selecting clips based on that metadata, not to force the editor to double-encode that metadata in the project.”
I thought you were arguing that the use of tracks to arbitrarily categorize footage was on of their benefits.
[Walter Soyka] “Further, the offline editor’s job is not to make the online editor’s job easier.”
In an ideal world the offline editor could do whatever they liked, and the online editor would figure out how to replicate in the online, however long that took. In the real world (of indie film, at least), an offline editor can easily cost the production silly amounts of money by not taking steps to make the online editor’s job easier, and online editors are consulted about how sequences should be delivered, by productions that wish for that to not happen.
[Walter Soyka] “The timeline now has one track divider, which separates the audio tracks from the video tracks. Let’s add user-definable track dividers, so the editor can separate groups of tracks from each other. The editor could manually move a clip across the dividers, but the software would honor the track dividers in the event of clip collision, adding tracks into the groups defined by the dividers as necessary.”
This does solve some of the traditional problems associated with track-based categorization, but to me, anyway, it seems like a lot of complexity to add just so that you have snap things into rigidly defined vertical slots. And it does still have a few issues when it comes to picture. For instance, presumably you’ve got your text track group that’s over your camera footage group. Now there’s one shot in the whole program that requires camera footage to be composited on top of text. You have to create another camera footage track group on top of the text track group, to hold one clip in a two hour long sequence (or whatever).
Another nice (related) bonus of having a freeform timeline + metadata is that metadata can be attached at any time without worrying about changing the edit. Some creative editors aren’t great at organizing things. When it comes time to organize them in preparation for the online, tracks make this a very hazardous process, because when you move something to a different track to (change its categorization), you may be unknowingly changing the picture as well. You have to keep checking. Simply going through and tagging things doesn’t have this problem.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Hancock] “What exactly does a trackless timeline do that you can’t do with a tracked timeline? Clips still have a vertical relationship don’t they, essentially giving them a tracked status of sorts?”
Clips have a stacking order, but it’s local, and it’s not used for categorization the way tracks sometimes are.
[Michael Hancock] “If you want all Red footage grouped for an online but you need some Red footage composited over some DSLR footage don’t you run into the same problem as a tracked timeline?”
No, because in this hypothetical you’re now using metadata to separate different types of footage, not their vertical position.
Of course you could use metadata to do this with a track-based system as well, but the argument was that tracks were better because they allowed categorization based on position within a 2D space; if you have to fall back on metadata anyway, tracks can no longer claim that advantage.
[Michael Hancock] “For example, if dialogue is on 1 and 2 but it turns out i need a 3rd track of dialogue, insert a track. Then everything else is still on dedicated tracks but the track number has increased by one. Is it because you might end up with 30 tracks?”
One of the other benefits being touted for tracks is that sometimes deliverables requirements ask for certain elements on certain tracks. If you’re working to such specs, you can’t just add tracks like that.
It seems like FCP X is going to address this problem by using metadata to identify different types of audio clips, and then mapping them to tracks only on export, presumably mixing things down as necessary.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.