[Craig Alan]

Tried to edit post to indicate Canon c-300 Mark II, but site would not let me.
The other day it stopped a post of mine from going through because I used the word “basketball.”

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Canon c-300 Mark II
Super 35mm CMOS Sensor
4K,1920×1080 60/50i, 23.98/25p True 24p
Canon XF AVC H.264 Codec
EF Lens Mount
Dual Pixel CMOS AF Technology
Rotating 4″ LCD Monitor
2 x 3G-SDI Output, 2x XLR Inputs
2 x CFast Card Slots
Timecode I/O, Genlock In & Sync Out
Canon Log 3 Gamma
Short Form films. Looking for the best image for the buck.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

I find that post much more balanced and self reflective than your first. A swimming technique and the debate about editing workflows modified by the strengths and weaknesses of a given editing application has extremely different relationship to ergonomics. Editors and production workflows have used metadata and organization of media from the get go. Apple and FCP X did not event this. There were editors that did everything in the timeline and others that took carefully constructed notes on every shot and its timecode. They used index cards like some scriptwriters do to preconceive what the sequences would become. And others used Excel to do the same. The browser in FCP legacy had columns of metadata much the same as X.
All this has been debated to death on this forum. The ergonomics of constant evolution or just plain changes vs mastery is the thing that I find interesting. In the arts and all crafts, “masters” produce on a high creative level and they know their tools inside and out and the learning curve to the mechanical mastery is way in their past. If software companies keep changing how a program works, then much of the craft and time in it is spent relearning and updating how to use the tool. At some point you want the tool to become an extension of your brain – completely subconscious, effortless, except for the creative input the human brain adds to the equation. In the current digital realm, the learning curve never seems to end and a lot of it is arbitrary and not really evolutionary. But some of it is. The best of both poles would be a return to a set of standards that all apps would adhere to, core basics that you would not need to relearn and develop new motor memories to use. The hardest thing to do in any discipline is to express something in its most basic form in a very simple way that also has layers of complexity. I think the original Ipod’s mechanical navigation nailed it. I think it should be used as a model for home to interface with layers of organization. But it got replaced with screens and a lot of tapping and swiping and other gestures.
On the latest iPhone, which is an amazing device, something as simple as select, copy, and paste can be frustrating. Its a operation which is used in many apps in different devices including FCP. Yet on the iPhone how this basic function behaves and how successfully it can be performed varies wildly within different apps. As Apple once claimed, it should just work. Sometimes the wheel does not need to be reinvented. And sometimes it never has gotten perfected. No one has ever invented the perfect and perfectly humane mouse trap.
The thing that I think would solve this conflict, evolution vs mastery, is to come up with a system that teaches its end users in a simple and easy manner how to do what they want to do including using a standard based vocabulary. The next huge improvement replacing the help menu.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

[Bill Davis] “What part of this implies ANY luddite or dinosaur thinking whatsoever? “

A: your history on the debate.
B: “Classical Conditioning”

You are implying that they are stuck in a certain (dated) mode of editing due to how they have been conditioned rather than what IS the most efficient and creative approach for them.

Further you feel that they are anchored to this workflow based on instruction rather than experimentation.

I didn’t agree with critics that said early on that FCP X was a different way to edit and misguided (though everyone agreed that it was missing needed features) and I don’t agree with your assumption that it is a different way to edit now.

Ultimately, it produces a linear sequence of clips produced in an app that allows non-linear access to media. The mechanics of the types of edits are as traditional as you can get.

My take: The browser and timeline are linked. They work in tandem. They complement each other. FCP X certainly has features in the browser that make it THE most powerful workspace for organization. If it was a plugin, it would sell.

But ultimately its the exported timeline that the audience experiences. It is the timeline in which you fine tune your film. The art is in the details.

If you can see the final composition in your mind and the timeline is just a place to dump (assemble) it after you create it in the browser, then you have an exceptional ability to compose entire films in your mind.

If that ability could be conditioned then all hockey players would be Gretsky, all the basketball players would be Magic, all the composers would be Mozart, all the song lyricists would be Dylan.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

This may be way off but have you tried modifying the storage locations and consolidating all the media to those locations even if they are all to the library which you might have done already by default?
Also have you done a finder search for the missing files to find out where they are?
And reset preferences for FC just in the likely event that something got messed up.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Thanks John and Kannan. After reading it here and seeing it recommended at Ripple training (will be getting their training on color correction) I got a copy of Neat for $100 and applying it to a very grainy short sequence. Time consuming but effective.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Thanks Noah and Brett. Got a handle on it now.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

Thanks. I was able to remove the effect from the clip but not the keyer itself I think they may have accidentally set to make the messed up settings the new default while maybe thinking it would return it too the keys default. If that were so would I reset everything and then make that the new default? I even tried unchecking all variables in the inspector but It didn’t change anything.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

yeah that would be the closest except there was no highlighted edit point the vertical lines looked thinner without the boxes around it and everything was frozen. Trying to move the vertical lines did nothing. the ESC key did nothing. So it might have opened that view and gotten frozen. I was able to highlight all and trash the timeline and start again which is not really a crash.

Haven’t opened a precision editor in 10.3. Has it changed its look or behavior at all?

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.

[Craig Alan]

actually no. I did a search for roles mixing view. It din’t look anything like it. the roles title and color coding would have given it away even though I haven’t gone through a tutorial on their use yet. This had no labels. it was just a blank Track for lack of a better term. sandwiched between a frozen primary and a couple of connected clips above. The only thing in the blank track were little vertical lines.

Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.