Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
-
[Tom Wolsky] “No composite modes in secondary storylines. No transitions on connected clips. It’s like each connected clip is entirely separate from the clip adjacent. Not very magnetic if you ask me.”
No transitions between connected clips (that aren’t grouped into a storyline) makes sense, because they have no fixed relationship to each other. They could be pulled apart or caused to collide if the primary storyline clips they were connected to were moved, at which point what would happen to the transitions? A secondary storyline avoids this problem, because the whole storyline has a single point of attachment to the primary storyline, rather than each clip having its own point of attachment.
But while transitions between connected clips are problematic, they could (and probably should) still let you add transitions to the head or tail of a single connected clip, to transition from or to the underlying primary storyline clip.
Blend modes not working in secondary storylines seems like it’s just a bug, because the menu is still available, and opacity still works.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Simon Ubsdell] “I couldn’t agree more – it really offends to have had to pay to beta test a rushed and shoddily put together release, but to hear that I’m going to have to pay unspecified extra amounts to Apple and third parties to get basic funtionality implemented is genuinely repugnant.”
I think they were probably just clarifying that at some point they’re going to charge for an update, which is something worth clarifying, given that it’s not something Apple has ever done yet with an app sold through the App Store.
Possibly they might also sell certain functionality though in-app purchasing (which the Mac App Store supports in Lion). This would be annoying to folks who thought they’d get everything they needed for $300… but, well people did comment that $300 was pretty cheap for a serious NLE. It could actually be fairly brilliant long-term if Apple sold the base package for $300 (or even less), and then users with more specialized high-end needs could add modules via in-app purchase. This could provide a lot of flexibility for scaling to different use cases, and would probably make it easier for Apple to internally justify adding features for more niche markets, because they’d have a way to directly generate additional revenue from the users who needed those features.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Simon Ubsdell] “It does seem as though the FCPX editing model is predicated on an essentially simplistic view of the process.”
I think it’s more along the lines of the famous Alan Kay quote, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” Traditional NLEs make you micromanage clips in the sequence even when you’re doing something simple. FCP X relieves you of a lot of this, but still lets you get in there and perform low-level operations if you need to.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Tapio Haaja] “I’m scratching my head. I understand you can create compound clips for syncing audio to video in event library. But the thing that you can actually copy paste your whole projects to compound clips in events is strange. Or is it? And what is the point that you can open every video clip in events in timeline and modify those, even break whole clips so you have to reimport them?”
These features let you create source clips that are more complicated than just raw camera clips. For instance, maybe you have a leading roller that you attach to the front of a lot of different sequences. This might contain several clips with effects applied and titles layered on top, of whatever. You can create this as a compound clip in an event, so it’s easily accessible from any project, and when you edit it into a sequence, you don’t have to see all of its internal complexity in that sequence.
The ability to open even regular clips in their own timelines is useful for things like fixing audio sync problems.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
This one is kind of counterintuitive. Place your foreground plate on the primary storyline. Don’t do anything special to its blend mode. Now, place your matte layer above it as a connected clip, with its blend mode set to Stencil Luma or Silhouette Luma (depending on whether you want black or white to be transparent). Finally, place your background layer above your matte layer, with its blend mode set to ‘Behind’.
Maybe someone has found a less counterintuitive way to do this.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[John Pale] “Not entirely true.
Lion will run on the Mac Pro 1,1 (2006) using a 32 bit kernel. That model Mac Pro cannot run a 64bit kernel.”But it is 64-bit hardware. Apple just hasn’t provided 64-bit drivers for some older gear.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Andrew Richards] “Snow Leopard didn’t default to the 64 bit kernel except on certain machines. Will Lion be different? And wouldn’t the only dependency then be for 64 bit kernel extensions (kexts)?”
Lion defaults to a 64-bit kernel, and actually drops support for 32-bit only hardware. (Of which there isn’t much in the Intel Mac world. Just the original Core-series processors. Core 2 and everything later supports 64-bit.)
And yes, the only new dependency this change directly creates is for 64-bit kernel extensions.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Walter Soyka] “The behavior could be the same with a tracked model as it is with the trackless model — promote clips to other tracks to avoid collision. It would then be up to the editor to manually resolve the proper track assignments.”
Sure. But that’s the thing — track assignments, in a traditional track-based NLE, are often meaningful. Bumping things to other tracks is, therefore, an action that can destroy organizational structure that the editor has imparted. Trackless design avoids those sorts of side effects.
[Walter Soyka] “Having direct control of track assignment does make some sense when your NLE is also a compositor.”
That just requires you to be able to set the stacking order of connected clips, which of course you can do without tracks. Connected clips are overlapping clips — stacking order is one property that determines how they overlap.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Marvin Holdman] “OK, I just re-read my post. Meant to say 32 bit apps. Sorry.”
No 32-bit apps will stop working on Lion because they’re 32-bit apps, but of course Lion, like every OS update, has the potential to break apps for other reasons.
Also, Lion may break some drivers because they’re 32-bit. A 64-bit kernel requires 64-bit drivers.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Herb Sevush] “I wasn’t talking about routines built upon previous experience with specific tools, I was referring to my way of conceptually approaching media. This is true for my work whether on an upright moviola or in a digital NLE.”
I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but this just isn’t true. I’m certain you didn’t decide, before ever learning how an an NLE (or a Moviola) worked, on some sort of purely abstract way of “conceptually approaching media”, and then figure out how to use these tools to implement that. Your approach to these things has inevitably been a consequence of an interplay between your brain and the tools you’ve used. This is simply how humans function in the world.
And this makes very hard to objectively judge a tool that works in a significantly different way.
[Herb Sevush] “I’m glad FCPX adds tools that go counter to the fundamentals of the design, but it seems odd that one would have to use a special tool to do that which was natural to an editing systems before. I guess what I’m saying is that other NLE’s have never needed a position tool, and there’s the difference.”
In other NLEs all of the tools are like the ‘Position’ tool, in that they cause the software to perform some particular low-level mechanical manipulation on the timeline. FCP X tries to provide tools that use the explicit shot relationships the editor conveys to the app to perform higher-level functions, but still provides the Position tool as a fallback.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.