[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Alan] “Other than as an anthropomorphic metaphor, software does not “understand.”

It “understands” in the sense that when data is structured in certain ways, computer software can manipulate that data in ways that are meaningful to humans.

[Craig Alan] “Pre-designing not only is a very bad model to follow in a profession application, but I would argue in an educational application as well.”

Err… I’m not sure what aspect of FCP X this critique is referring to.

[Craig Alan] “If I have 10 different timelines of a show I am editing – different lengths, different endings, different formats, different compositions, I am not working on 10 different ‘projects’. If someone asks me what ‘project’ am I working on now – they mean what subject, what video, what event, what film … not what version/sequence.”

I agree that FCP X should file off all instances of the word “Project” and replace them with “Sequence” or “Timeline”. But I think you’re reading a little too much into Apple’s word choices.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Editing is as much about rhythm – a temporal account of the relationships between events – as it is about Shot C following shot B. Hence it does actually signify that shot C starts 316 frames in, in the sense of the meaning and impact of having shot C occur where it does rather than earlier or later. The flow of time is not accurately perceived by the viewer, it is true, because editing as we know can significantly compress or expand the perception of clock time, but the sense of narrative “chronology” (in the sense of when events are perceived to occur in relationship to each other as measured by time) is fundamental to what editing is about except at the most crude level.”

I bolded some text there. I don’t think we really disagree about anything here.

Less abstractly: in most of the cases where you drop a shot on V2 in a conventional multitrack editor, that shot is linked to whatever is happening on V1. That’s not to say there’s literally no occasion on which you want to leave that shot in the same absolute position on V2 and change what’s happening on V1, and obviously FCP X lets you do that. But its default behavior is to act as if these shots have some meaningful connection between them, because usually they do.

Most of the new magnetic timeline behaviors are like this. They’re simply about having more reasonable defaults.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “I’ve given this some more thought, and and I can’t figure out how color coding is more flexible.”

It’s more flexible because it allows for an arbitrary number of overlapping clips, vs. “effects go on tracks 5 & 6”, which allows for no more than two overlapping effects clips. It also enables magnetic timeline collision behaviors to function sensibly. With tracks that have rigid meanings, pushing a colliding clip to another track is a terrible idea, because for all the NLE knows it’s reclassifying a dialogue clip as music in the process.

Yes, you could solve these problems by adopting the DAW trick mentioned earlier of overlapping clips on the same track, but that’s not without its own pitfalls in terms of clarify of visual presentation, and it’s not clear to me that it generalizes well to video (I have three overlapping video clips — how do I define which one is visually on top?), which you’d probably want for consistency’s sake in an NLE.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “Of course, the magnetic timeline uses arrangement in 2D space to convey information — but it essentially ignores the principle of alignment as a tool for showing relationships. A tracked timeline can use alignment for visually grouping items, but a trackless timeline can’t.”

Well, it could. It presently doesn’t in FCP X.

[Walter Soyka] “You can add color-coding to a trackless timeline to convey meaning, but you could use color-coding in a tracked timeline, too — so a trackless timeline is still one dimension down.”

But using the vertical axis to categorize clips and associate them with each other (via overlapping) and convey their vertical stacking order for compositing purposes is overloading things a bit too much for clarity, I think.

I run into this all the time doing online edit work. I’ll tell the offline editor something like “Hey, it would be really helpful if you’d put all your Red-originated footage on V1, all your DLSR footage on V2, and all of your VFX shots on V3, because they all need to be handled differently in the online”. Well, first off, this is probably extra work for the editor, because they might have Red-originated footage used in cutaways on V2, that now have to be collapsed onto V1. And secondly, maybe there’s a composite somewhere in the edit, that requires Red-originated footage on V2, because it’s overlaid with 50% opacity on top of Red-originated footage on V1. So now V2 is all DSLR footage, except for this one random Red clip that absolutely needs to be there. I could ask for a track of buffer between each type of footage, not sometimes you need to stack three clips to get a particular effect, etc.

There’s quite a lot of awkwardness caused by trying to use tracks for too many things at once.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Tom Wolsky] “This is just not correct. Tracks are an emulation of time. They are linear and they go only in one direction and events occur on these tracks at intervals of time.”

In a traditional NLE, the horizontal axis represents time. FCP X preserves that entirely.

Tracks are the vertical axis. They’re one way of representing multiple simultaneous events in time. And they’re a way of representing simultaneous events based on the principle that such events have to live in explicit ‘slots’. This was true, as a matter of physical reality, when recording four simultaneous audio signals meant having four heads in a recording device write those signals to four vertical stacked areas of a tape. Traditional NLEs adopted this as a metaphor, but they don’t require its rigidity.

[Tom Wolsky] “What’s important is not that objects at related to each other, but what they represent occurs at a specific instance in time.”

I don’t agree with this at all. If I arrange shots A, B, and C, what’s important about shot C is that it comes after shot B, not that it starts 316 frames into the program, or whatever. Editing is almost entirely about relationships between shots.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Nick Toth] “Background video on primary story line
Fill video on a connected clip above the primary story line
Key source on a connected clip above the fill video. This clips blend mode is set to ‘stencil alpha’.”

Ah ha! Yes, this compound clip trick allows the placement of the foreground element above the background element, which makes much more sense. As an added bonus you can do the key in a compound clip in the event library before even editing the clip into your sequence, which is especially handy if you have an animated matte created in an external application, that needs to sync up starting at the first frame of a clip that’s going to be cut into multiple pieces in the sequence.

Also, the compound clip’s filmstrip thumbnails and viewer preview will reflect the key. That’s a nice touch.

The only thing I’d change is, put the compound clip containing the keyed foreground element on the primary storyline. Attach the backplate as a connected clip under the primary storyline. There’s no technical reason for this, I just think it makes more conceptual sense to have the foreground plate on the primary storyline. Well, generally. It depends on what the foreground plate is. If it’s actors delivering dialog, for instance, it’s definitely primary storyline, conceptually.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “My most basic point is this: tracked editing allows an editor to use 2D space in the timeline to convey meaning. Trackless editing removes that ability.”

I think this idea that tracks are especially intuitive is nuts. Tracks are a digital emulation of the behavior of physical recording devices that were limited in their flexibility by their mechanical implementations. The brain fundamentally works in terms of relationships between things, and in terms of multiple overlapping taxonomies. Clip connections and tagging map to these much better than rigidly defined tracks and strict hierarchical organization of clips in bins.

I agree that there is some value in being able to see visually how various objects are classified. Tracks do allow for some of this, but arrangement in a flat 2D space is a pretty crude approach. For something like tagging audio roles, color coding would provide more flexibility.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Brendan Gibbons] “Oh and while we are there, being able to reset individual parameters in the color board would make a huge difference.
“

You can reset an individual parameter by hitting the delete key with its control selected. Yeah, I know, not exactly the first thing I tried either. But it is in the docs.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I do think, though, Tim hit it on the head. It will be up to codec/camera/whatever developers to write in support to FCPx. If you take a look at Apple as a company and what they have been doing to allow developers to write software, it’s pretty cool. After playing with FCPx for a while this week and reading what hooks seem to be semi present in FCPx it seems that this would be the way it’s going. Time will tell whenever those APIs are released, of course, if you get the API, you’re under NDA.”

FCP X allows arbitrary custom metadata fields. If Apple exposes this to third parties via an API, the possibilities are nearly endless.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Robbert-Jan van der Does] “I’m just wondering what happens if you connect the clips for the composite underneath and above the primary storyline?
I’m still not used to this possibility because in my mind “underneath” means “audio”, but in FCPX it can be video as well.”

You can do it that way as well, but you’re still stacking your background plate on top of your foreground plate. Except now it’s your background plate in the primary storyline, which I think, in general, makes less sense conceptually.

I’m slightly confused as to why the Travel Matte blend modes are gone. I don’t think anything about them would be fundamentally incompatible with the new trackless timeline. Maybe there’s some additional flexibility provided by the new approach that I’m missing.

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