[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “If the team had struggled with the workflow for Focus, I suspect they would have changed this time around.

But they didn’t.”

Quite the contrary.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve started working on a story with Glenn Fiacarra, one of the directors of both focus and WTF. In fact, the interview was ostensibly going to be about Focus, but he was so excited about what they were able to do with FCPX on WTF that that was pretty much all he wanted to talk about.

His excitement was positively leaping through the wires, and not at all in some fanboy way. He was just THAT excited about what he and the team was able to accomplish, and already dropping hints about how much further they’re taking to take FCPX workflow on the feature after this.

Make no mistake: FCPX was in no way peripheral or incidental or anything other than precisely at the heart of what embodied their on-set vision.

Now that this trailer is out, I’m going to go ahead and put this article at the very very top of the list of things I’m not getting done. LOL Look for it next week.

[Tim Wilson]

[Charlie Austin] “The browser in X is exponentially more efficient than dozens of hierarchical nested folders. As I’ve said before, I keep X open with a mirror project when I’m in Pr because it’s much quicker to find/audition stuff in X and then just go right to it in Pr. “

Paging Dr. Lawrence!

David started a terrific thread in June 2014, FCPX Is Now A Universal Logging and Organizing Tool For Any NLE.

Is that still the case?

Anyone else using X this way?

[Tim Wilson]

Time to tell them that it’ll cost EXTRA to redo it. LOL

“Guys, I could do it from scratch faster than I can re-create something. Let me know if you’d like to also pay for the project files for the new project, and I’ll invoice those separately.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “[Scott Witthaus] “Does the “I would have built a faster horse” analogy work here? ;-)”

Yes, but then you have to establish that you are clearly much faster.”

At least we have a way to assess the speed of horses for the tasks that mean the most when one is talking about “speed” and “horses.”

“Well, he runs about the same speed as any other horse, but you should see how fast he eats.”

[Tim Wilson]

tim at creativecow dot net will be dandy. 🙂 Thanks!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Michael,

Apologies for the delay replying!

At the moment, no, I don’t foresee much action there. Here’s the story, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

The COW long predates YouTube of course. We predate Google. We actually went online a couple of months after Yahoo did, in 1995! Video on the web was impossible, and for our first years, our video tutorials required downloading the movies.

In the early days of YouTube, we were still a much better platform for this industry’s tutorial creators to be actually be seen, but in the past 5-ish or so years, this has obviously not been the case. YouTube matured as a platform, and with self-promotion becoming increasingly easy, people have been able to present their tutorials to wide audiences without our help.

Not that we can’t and don’t still provide more focused audiences, but the days are gone in which we could provide bigger audiences than YouTube.

We find ourselves now in the position of tutorial authors asking us to repost videos, but only when those videos remain on the author’s own channel, so that the authors can build their own followings. We completely support this, and regularly post such videos on CreativeCOW.net.

But we haven’t had the organizational bandwidth to maintain a (you’ll pardon the pun) stable of authors who are excited about distributing their work under any banner but their own.

Again, we support this, but it leaves us with YouTube and podcast channels that are nowhere near as up to date as we’d like. We’re having ongoing internal conversations about this, but any solutions I’ve considered are beyond the reach of our very small team.

I’m certainly open to suggestions! And heaven knows that if you’d like to make any tutorial videos, I’d be happy to post them. 🙂

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Louie Beckham] “Anyone donated to the BFI, the Eastman House or the Film Foundation yet? I put in a good three weeks’ work for this.”

Wait, YOU did this? That’s amazing! We gotta know more!

[Tim Wilson]

[David Lawrence] “AE is not an NLE. I wouldn’t dream of doing editorial cutting in it. And I can’t imagine changing it to make editorial cutting viable.”

Sorry, I said that wrong.

I completely agree with what you’re saying more clearly than I was able to. You and I have been among the folks who’ve spoken here over the years about things like the relatively horizontal nature of editing and the vertical nature of compositing.

With such fundamental differences in purpose, (sometimes, as both you and Oliver note, reflected in different lengths of typical projects), having one application really REALLY do both is inherently going to be a mess. Too much time to develop, too much time to launch, inevitable modal bottlenecks, on and on.

I was trying to dig down a little deeper into Simon’s observation that After Effects feels like it has fewer limits relative to an NLE.

So, rather than asking what makes After Effects feel more extensible (scripting, expressions, robust plug-in architecture, interop with other application environments….??? You tell me), I was thinking more along the lines of, okay Simon, what would it take for your NLE to feel like it had fewer limits?

I really hesitate to use the word “open” in this context — almost as devoid of usable rational content as the word “intuitive” — but I think that may be where I’m heading. As Simon put it,

There are interfaces that are designed with a very specific way of working in mind and it’s great when you stick to the designer’s notion of how you should work, and everything will feel fluid and easy. But the rigidity will quickly lead to frustration as soon as you want work in a way that the designer didn’t envisage

A bit of a Rorschach test, that: is FCPX the first NLE you think he’s thinking of, or Media Composer? Premiere is obviously not exempt from criticism, but I don’t often hear “rigidity” listed as one of its most characteristic shortcomings, when it’s vastly more often than not one of the top two for X and MC.

Simon then asks, “If you can to some extent “rewrite” the application to suit your needs, are you going to hit fewer of those sticking points?”

Spoken like a compositor, I think, no? Other than Alan Bell in my interview with him for Hunger Games, where he spoke about customized project sharing among his team using some Python scripts he wrote, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard an editor outside the Sony Creative Software world talking about scripting their NLE.

In any case, that level of finesse seems rare, but in After Effects, it’s been baked in from the beginning, and in some areas, Fusion and Nuke open their range of possibilities for shaping the application in your workflow’s image even farther.

I’m rambling, but that’s what the direction I’m trying to ramble in. What are the different things that we want from these applications that make different degrees of flexibility more or less acceptable to us for editing relative to compositing/mograph/VFX/whatever the hell it is is that people like you, Walter, Simon, et al are doing in AE/Motion/Nuke/Fusion….

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] ” I didn’t know that OFX plugins weren’t supported in the free version.”

Interesting for the context of this thread, but one of the things BMD holds back from the free version is extensibility: OpenFX, a custom SDK for building your own features, workflow and asset management, Avid integration, network rendering, etc etc, all require the paid version.

I like this idea. It’s not just that you’re paying for specific features. You’re paying for a wider range of possibilities, including custom development and distributed creativity.

[Simon Ubsdell] “Seeing how someone like Walter works with After Effects (simply amazing!) makes me think that there are applications that in a real sense have no actual limits because of the means they offer the user to build out beyond the core in any direction. (NLEs are fundamentally not like this, although I can see that it might happen with Premiere at some point.)”

This raises a cluster of related questions for me.

1) How/why do you feel After Effects is different from NLEs? Extensibility in general gets at some of it, but it feels bigger than that to me.

2) Is the idea of “doing everything” in one application that “does everything” appealing to you?

That is, Simon, I understand that you were originally speaking about the frustrations of using multiple tools for the SAME task…but since you mention After Effects and Premiere and FCPX/Motion, and Resolve/Fusion comes up too — are there limits to how far you’d like to see an NLE extend?

And Herb, do you find yourself able to live in one environment because of the range of your tasks, or because of how extensible your NLE is (whether with native structures, plug-ins, or whatever)? It’s obviously a mix of both, but what’s the dynamic between tasks and tools for you?

BTW, the title for this thread immediately made me think of the fantastic 1971 single by The Persuaders, “There’s A Thin Line Between Love And Hate.”

And because it’s mid-day Saturday as I write this, I’m thinking of Soul Train (what? It’s mid-day Saturday and you’re NOT thinking of Soul Train?), and in fact the performance of this very song on that very show that I watched on January 22, 1972.

I remember it as clearly as if I’d just now seen the video…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULuHJgCos7A

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “It just seems to me that the opinions of the working “editors” who have used it would be the most germane to the editors who come here trying to determine if it might be useful to them”

Hey, germane is in the eye of the beholder. LOL I think the forthcoming article is newsworthy, and to Steve’s point, will be FUN, but I heartily encourage everyone to avoid reading my articles as studiously as they avoid reading my entire posts. LOL

And I assure you that the article will be plainly labeled, to give anyone so inclined as many reasons to avoid reading about the editing speed of FCPX on a Hollywood feature as possible. LOL

Kidding aside, this is always a risk on a long thread, that we’re responding to different parts of a conversation. I think that’s the case here.

WHO’S ASKING?

My first problem with the part of your post that I quoted though is your certainty about who’s reading the threads and who’s not. Likely not high-end editors, because we’re not very high on their list of places to visit. And apparently not directors either?

My FIRST point in relation to Glenn and Focus in particular was in response to the query of “How’d it go for them, and what are they doing next?” The answer is that I spoke to ’em, it went great, Glenn told me about the next project AND teased the one AFTER THAT.

Here’s why the germane-ity of my conversation with Glenn knocked me over. I’ve thought of myself primarily as an editor for 40 years now. I’ve edited thousands of hours of stuff in that long, long time….

…and I never once had the pleasure of working with a team of editors and a script.

Instead, for the majority of projects I worked on, I also did some combination of shooting, directing, finishing, graphics, writing, audio, etc etc., roughly in that order.

My ears perked right up when Glenn was talking because even though, no, I never directed a Hollywood feature, his experience as a director who touches every part of the process INCLUDING the shoot and the ENTIRE post process is VAAAAASTLY more similar to the concerns I had, and much more in keeping with the roles I played, than “just” an editor.

So if the question being posed is solely, “Can X be used on a blockbuster-scale feature by an editor whose historic chops are Avid?” then that’s one thing.

But the question is…..

“WHAT IS EDITING SPEED?”

Herb said, really, let’s stop talking about keystrokes and timelines, and talk about what we we MEAN by EDITING SPEED.

And if somebody says that the EDITING SPEED of FCPX is transforming the way that he produces, directs, shoots, and writes mainstream Hollywood entertainment….well, slap my bottom and powder me pink, NOW you’ve got me interested in hearing what you have to say about EDITING SPEED….

…because otherwise it’s just another thread about keystrokes and timelines, and we played that one out pretty quickly, yes?

[Bill Davis] “But isn’t the central focus HERE on how X works as an EDITORIAL engine?”

This has been my long way of saying, no, not to me.

Perhaps you and I can shake hands on “Not necessarily.”

I’m not the judge of what “speed” means. I’m not the judge of what “editing” means. If there was only one answer, we wouldn’t need this thread. We wouldn’t need this forum. We wouldn’t need ANY forum.

AND I’m not the judge of who’s asking

AND I’m not the judge of who has a stake in the answer.

The thing is, we have over 305,000 members here, and I’m willing to bet we might have at least, I don’t know, maybe SIX, maybe SEVEN, completely different answers to the question. LOL Who knows? Maybe MORE than six or seven answers.

Because, kidding aside, I think there are more than six or seven kinds of editors here.

Some of ’em aren’t JUST editors, even if, like me, they might be PRIMARILY editors.

So some editor’s answer to the question of “what is editing speed” might NEED to encompass a global network of shared storage of multiple features being simultaneously shot and posted (cue Media Composer on Mockingjay), or part of a graphics-intensive post process anchored by After Effects (cue Creative Cloud for Gone Girl), where FCPX would have been a mess.

Just as neither MC or CC would have met the needs of Focus or Whisky Tango Foxtrot (aka WTF) even barely as well as X did.

EDITORS ON EDITING

Not that I disagree about the intent of your question, Bill.

It’s why I’ve said many times that, as much as I enjoy Mr Murch’s movies, and as much as I enjoy hearing him think aloud about editing, I can’t say that any of it APPLIED to me any more when I first read interviews with him in 1975 about The Conversation (still my fave of his in many ways) than anything he’s said in the 40 years since then.

I mean, for that matter, it’s not like Cioni actually CUT these last couple of Fincher pictures, right? Nor for that matter did Fincher. But you better believe that when I see that either of these fellas has something to say to me about EDITING SPEED thanks to Adobe Creative Cloud (and, for that matter, Quantel Pablo), I’m going to stop what I’m doing and listen. Plenty germane for ME.

But I do get what you’re saying, Bill, and I agree. I really do.

That’s why when Joe M. and Herb both added the observation that, even if we shared an understanding of “editing” and “speed” — which we absolutely do not — that the relative values in the equation all shift when we move from features to docs….

…. that I mentioned that, indeed, two of said three upcoming X stories are about lower-budget, higher-volume indie documentaries that have production profiles very much more in keeping with the work that Joe in particular is wondering about X’s added value for.

Which is also why I keep asking people to be specific, and why I love threads like this so much. There’s a lot of people posting here, but they’re a mere fraction of the nearly 1.8 million people who came through here in the last 30 days as readers.

Some of ’em are editors.

Some of ’em are directors.

And some of ’em, I swear on a stack of Blonde on Blonde vinyl records, are gen-yooo-wine high end folks.

I’m just looking for a good story, by which, as often as not, I mean a story I haven’t heard before. I’m trying to get MORE people telling WIDER stories, not fewer people telling narrower ones. But hey, within that, the more specific, the better. HOW was it faster? What could you DO BECAUSE it was faster?

In other words, the EXACT the questions that you and I agree are ultimately the only germane ones. 🙂

So yeah, most of the THOUSANDS of editing stories here in the COW are by and about editors, full stop –but no matter how high end we climb, or how deep down we drill, if you have a story about editing, I want to hear it.

Yr pal,
Timmy

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief*
Creative COW

*They tried to give me the title Vice President once, and I said “Nope, I don’t want to be president of any such goings on.” Then after they explained to me what a vice president actually is, I said, “Okay, awesome, LOL thanks for clearing that up, but still, no thanks. I’m an editor.”

NOT THAT YOU CAN TELL FROM THESE FFFFGINK POSTS lol Aren’t editors supposed to make things SHORTER?

PS. I try really, really, really hard not to cross the streams between “a-hole with an opinion” and “a-hole who works for Creative COW,” so I appreciate your gracious latitude in allowing my opinions to be held separately.

Although one thing both roles share is a pretty loose understanding of the words “on topic.” LOL

PPS. Dude, check your email. I’ve been trying to write you all day. 🙂