[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “The only opinion that matters to me, is the collective opinion that is used by manufacturers that participate in the VIDEO industry”

This is so, so, so important. The needs of video storage are completely different than typical storage needs in business, medical research, finance, and all the other fields that rely on massive arrays.

As one example, enterprise storage on the scale we work with is still being used to store lots of small files, largely being accessed randomly, with not much relation to each other. They can be pulled up in pretty much any order, as fast as possible, and nobody will be left wondering where the hell their file is.

Video and film production is almost exactly the opposite. Dramatically fewer files, dramatically larger files, and they MUST be delivered in a specific sequence, at regularly spaced, uniform intervals.

Storage designed for these environments are not even trying to do the same the thing, so treat them as if they are will always yield bad results.

Making things even more complicated is the need for large amounts of metadata to also stay attached to camera and render files, which is why large VIDEO storage will often include a separate metadata server. There’s a lot of overhead to making sure the right files are being pulled up in the right order, at the right time.

We RELY on that overhead. The enterprise needs that overhead GONE.

Balancing the needs of feeding DATA and feeding METADATA is a specialized task. Most vendors don’t need to do this, so they don’t.

That’s why some of the biggest companies in the STORAGE business do not advertise here. Their offerings simply aren’t suitable for our business.

This is also why Avid is not trying to sell ISIS storage to Visa or Amazon. It’s massively redundant, reliable, fast, scalable — but entirely optimized for fewer, larger files.

This is also why some IT guys look at the advertisers in Creative COW, say “Who the hell is Facilis?” and insist that you use EMC or something. Storage companies that IT guys know. GOOD storage, even GREAT storage.

But the WRONG storage, because it doesn’t even attempt the most basic, core task that Facilis, MAXX Digital, and all of these other fine companies build into their foundations.

Bob can usually take care of his own rants, and while my temperature may be turned down a degree, I want to underscore that this is a case where his rant may be understated a degree too. 🙂 This is, as Frank Zappa used to say, the crux of the biscuit.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “I am not the least bit surprised he favours a track based NLE, simply because he knows that it is a better approach for complicated sound workflows”

For what little it’s worth, at IMDb, the “Sound Department” listing is on top, and “Editor” second. Some of the biggest movies he’s worked on were sound, rather than picture. Not that he hasn’t done plenty of both. He was nominated for picture AND sound editing on Apocalypse (how often has THAT happened???), winning for sound.

In my head anyway, I rank the achievements of Apocalypse in order:

1) Writing/directing (inextricable to me in this case)
2) acting
3)a) “sound montage” 3)b) Carmine Coppola’s score…of course integrated into the sound montage, but having a degree of independence
4) cinematography,
5) picture editing.

Visuals at the end of list? Yes. Just for grins, watch it sometime with the picture turned off. His work and Carmine Coppola’s score will make you realize the extent of his mastery of every aspect of sound. Then watch another time with the sound turned off. Not even vaguely comparable.

He’s done other great stuff obviously, but the only way he could have pulled off Conversation (worthy of a much longer “conversation” on its own) and Apocalypse in particular was if he was willing to try everything, regardless of whether or not it was conventional….

…getting back to my thinking that an awful lot of ALL of this has mainly to do with predisposition, not “technology.” If Walter wasn’t ready to just “roll with it” he’d have never lasted with Francis, regardless of the editing platform.

That’s why I think it’s especially interesting to keep inner dynamics front and center for these discussions.

It’s a shame that discussion of deep, inner motivations are so often framed as pejorative accusations about the other side of the debate, rather than held up to the light alongside our own.

Migration and settlement are fundamental, equally important human social behaviors. They work themselves into our own choices, too: do we prefer our skills to migrate, or to develop a richness of expertise that constant migration doesn’t allow?

Not that these are either/or states of course, any more than X or not-X is binary. Many people here (most people?) use both. I think that some X-philes find this perplexing, if not distressing. If we are more than a monoculture, we must surely be anti-Apple!

Uhm, no. Not that monocultures are bad. It speaks to the richness of expertise of “settlement” rather than “migration.” There’s an awful lot to be said for getting reinforcement from people who agree with you. It’s what most of us covet, most of the time. You can move more quickly when you minimize friction.

To get back to Andrew’s point about Fincher and Premiere Pro, I remember reading that pretty much every shot in his recent movies has gone through After Effects at some point in the process. From what I hear, Premiere offers some nifty affinities for just such an eventuality.

One reason why After Effects is so important to Fincher is that he’s inclined to change framing in post. For nearly all of his shots iirc, but I’m sure plenty of folks here can correct me.

That’s anathema to most directors I’d think, and surely even more cinematographers. The DP has historically been the owner of the frame, and I think David’s revolution in this respect is no, I’M the owner of the frame, and I’m not through framing shots until I’m through editing.

Hence, AFTER effects. So, yeah, Premiere is the best tool for him, but as much the best tool for his personality as his his approach to technology….which is also driven by his personality.

And to swing back around to Murch as philosopher, not that he goes as far as they did, but he’s quite like the early Russians that way. Maybe the first American to popularize among film nerds the things that Russian film nerds have been talking about for nearly a century. The cutting itself reveals a higher truth that exists separately from story and above it.

Philosophy, truth, ownership, personality — technology takes a back seat. (CARS!) A seat in the boot. Bound and gagged in the boot. Thrown bound and gagged from the boot at high speeds.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “It gets down to preferences, so whether or not X has superior database tools (which I don’t believe it does for feature film editing) is irrelevant, if that doesn’t mesh with the editor’s style.”

Quite so, which is why I’ve been pushing so hard on the idea that choices are made for personal reasons at least as much as technology reasons, and frankly, the reason why one tech choice is more compelling than another is probably mostly personal. Entirely personal? Maybe.

But my point was about takeaways from Walter’s specific example, even if I stated it more broadly than I intended. (Who? ME?)

My point about Walter is that an NLE’s database approach is irrelevant to him. He doesn’t use them, for exactly the reasons you mention, to which I’ll add that no matter how good a bin is for METAdata, index cards probably work better for tracking DATA. 🙂 At least for Walter.

I’m glad to hear that he still uses index cards and FileMaker. The other thing I’d been thinking about this is that it means his workflow isn’t affected by things as trivial as NLEs. Honestly, that’s the least interesting part of the process. LOL

Instead, he has a team that’s on top of what he wants from FileMaker and index cards or what have you, and almost none of those people experience much of a blip as he moves from one editing platform to another. I’d think that their input and output process hasn’t changed all that much in decades, right?

Once Walter is editing using the blink of his eye in his Google Glasses, I bet he’s still going to want to see index cards on the HUD of his self-driving Tesla.

[Tim Wilson]

[David Lawrence] “Got that covered ;)”

Awesome!

But not even close to a consensus answer. LOL

This got me thinking about the dueling scholars and guitarists who’ve written about that note, savaging other people’s research, the forensic science involved…but I don’t think that anyone has written a book about the controversy yet. I’ve started work on a little essay about it, but as it’s turning into a big essay, I really may yet turn it into a book.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Even with FCP Legend, Apple was making the NLE that it wanted to make and it just happened to jive with many pros. “

This ^^^^^ You and Tony are dead right. “It’s not about you.”

I still think that iMovie is where the work was being done to make the NLE that Apple REALLY wanted to make. Not to dig up the iMovie Pro argument that I’ve rejected since Day 1…but Legend always struck me as one of the least Apple-like applications to ever bear the Apple name.

(The others were Shake and Color. OOOPS.)

X, on the other hand, has Apple and nobody BUT Apple written all over it, as has the VERY Apple-like iMovie.

(It’s also always worth recalling that Apple only bought Final Cut when Adobe refused to sell Premiere to Apple, to fulfill Steve’s vision of a consumer video editing application on every iMac.)

So maybe call iMovie the skunkworks for X. Not exactly the right word, but it’s clear in retrospect that significant parts of the core development for X was “secretly” being done in the full light of day in iMovie.

Which is still not for you, me, or anyone else, except to the extent that Apple will do what they do for their own reasons, and you’ll either like it or you won’t.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “If you take anything away from reading about Murch’s workflow, it’s all about the meticulous, really meticulous logging, studying, tagging, and setting up of the raw footage, storyboarding shots all over the place. If I had to speculate, I’d say Walter would love the FCPX system for organizing and intake of the footage, because of all the metadata access. “

I doubt that it’s relevant to him. If metadata inside an NLE was critical to him, he’d never have left Media Composer for FCP.

Here’s the thing. The sources of metadata aren’t mysterious. Some is generated by cameras, but most of it is collected by production assistants. You’d be astonished how much of it is hand written. An assistant editor then type type types all that information into fields.

But not fields in an NLE. Because you know who has the best database? A database. An actual database.

I don’t know what he’s using these days, but historically speaking, his favorite database is FileMaker Pro. There’s a terrific story about Walter’s use of FileMaker Pro on the FileMaker Pro website.

Did I mention FileMaker Pro? Because he used (and may still use) FileMaker Pro. So take a look at the story about Walter using FileMaker Pro at the FileMaker website.

There’s another coupla takeaways for you from Walter’s story, going back to Cold Mountain with FCP, The English Patient with Avid Film Composer, and many years before that with film:

1) Need a database? Use a database.

2) Gonna use a database to manage metadata? You need assistance from assistants for both collecting the metadata and managing it.

3) Not using databases and (not “or,” but “AND”) assistants? Nobody is more articulate than Walter about the inner truths of Editing than Walter, but vast swaths of his actual experience editing may not be as applicable to you as you thought.

But then again, the applicability of various analogies and examples has never slowed us down before. LOL No reason to start now.

[Tim Wilson]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “in the blink of an eye is one of the more ludicrously interesting books you could ever read as an editor.”

I think the point that you and Oliver are making about him as a philosopher is on the money. We talk all the time here about calcification. Well, Walter is one of the smallest handful of guys who’s willing to try anything. Every project gets evaluated in the context of every tool.

The only other guy in this category is Fincher, who’s admittedly not as publicly philosophical about such things. He moved from Final Cut to Premiere, but the danger in invoking both him and Murch to ratify one’s own choices — “See? I was right! FCPX really IS straight legit for high-level film work” — is yes, true, but the thing that neither Walter nor Fincher feels is legit is sticking with the same thing just because it worked last time.

That’s a luxury that most of us don’t have. We just don’t. And if we do, THAT’s the lesson to take away from both Murch and Fincher — whatever we’re using today, we’re NOT going to be using in a few years. Not because the old thing stopped working, but because there’s something new that works better.

The X-philes will point to that and say “Woo-hoo! Tolja so,” and miss the point. The point is that somebody like Fincher isn’t sticking with it — not necessarily because of any deficiencies, but because of Premiere’s advantages. AS AN EXAMPLE. Not saying that Premiere is better for you…

…but if we’re going to talk about lessons to learn from Walter or David or anyone else, let’s be clear on the lessons. Even if you’ve adapted to X or anything else, this step in your development isn’t complete until you adapt to the next thing.

Never forget: the first NLE that Walter “legitimized” was Avid Film Composer. The NEXT one that he legitimizes has perhaps not been invented yet.

So c’mon kids! Don’t settle on X forever! Follow the example of the much more flexible OLD GUY and keep looking for the NEXT thing. LOL

++++++

Which again, might not be a luxury for you, or more important, might not seem fun.

As has been noted here many times, X-philes tend to talk about non-X-ers as having personality deficiencies of some sort (set in their ways, don’t get it, etc) without acknowledging that for an equal number of people, chasing the next new thing is every bit as deficient, and arguably more inefficient.

+++++++

The last thing I’ll note about caring about what other people do: it’s human. It’s built into us since the days when we first began forming tribes. Just as wise elders look for the next new thing (or place to live, or, yes, tool to use), the fact is that people who follow the lead of communal wisdom have traditionally been the ones to live to tell the tale.

After all, the wise elder in question might be Steve Jobs or Tim Cook, neither of whom were/are all that old, but elders nonetheless.

Variations abound, and innovation becomes tradition, and the cycle continues — but the primary thrust of the human social evolutionary imperative has been written into our genes for 3 million years.

+++++++

Where’s “3 million” coming from? I’m picking Australopithecus afarensis as my starting point, just because that’s the oldest one whose name I can remember.

Even if your worldview leads you to some Babylon-ish starting point with no room for biological evolution, the social evolutionary imperative is the same. Your mileage may vary, but the drive doesn’t.

+++++++

My favorite story along these lines, as many of my favorite stories are, is about my wife. A truly rock and roll girl, she skipped her prom to go see Led Zeppelin on the 77 Tour of the Americas. Best decision of her life I think. Marrying me is maybe third or fourth on the list, but this is why marrying her is #1 on mine.

She had no respect at all for anyone whose attachment to Zeppelin was for Robert Plant. She was all about Jimmy Page from the instant she heard him in 1969. But when it came time to choose a guitar for herself, she chose the Les Paul Junior that Pete Townshend first played on Who’s Next in 1971. (He still has it, btw.)

But she didn’t choose it because Pete played it, per se.

Jimmy was a wizard who bent space and time to his will, but Pete spoke to the simultaneous isolation and quest for insight that drove her too. Jimmy was the GUITARIST she admired more, but even more than sharing Pete’s inner demons and angels, at the end of the day, she responded to the roar that Pete was uniquely making, and wanted to likewise roar.

Not that another guitar couldn’t make a proper racket of course. Certainly not that this was the only guitar Pete played. It wasn’t even his primary guitar. But she started with the SOUND she was looking for, spent time with her fingers on the frets of a lot of different guitars, and kept coming back to the Gibsons.

She didn’t want a lot of folderol, so she went with the Junior for the same reason Pete did: one pickup, so stop talking, stay out of my way, I’m spending my time focused on what I’m playing instead of finessing the gear, and I’m turning it the fug up.

+++++++

And THAT’s why we care what Walter says. That’s why we read stories about editors or VFX artists at the COW or watch behind the scenes featurettes. We want to explore the passions that drive the masters, to see what their quest can tell us about our own.

We eventually still have to put our own fingers on the frets, but the roots of this drive are in a part of our humanity that existed millions of years before our race formed its first words.

+++++++

(And if Bill or anyone else is still reading this far, I have a LOT more to say about guitars as analogues to choosing NLEs, and arguments about guitars being a thousand times hotter than anything here, maybe hotter than anything you can even imagine. LOL

Politics? Religion? Feh. Ask a roomful of guitarists about the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” and watch the dugouts empty.)

[Tim Wilson]

[Robin S. Kurz] “That of course being anecdotal.”

Of course. 🙂 Exactly my point. Anecdotes are of limited use, but there are a million of ’em. The idea that any one experience is “THE” experience is nonsense.

I’ll go further and say that they’re entirely useless for anyone besides the one telling the anecdote. That’s why statements like “young people choose X” and “only old stubborn people stick with what they’ve been using.” Absolutely, entirely false.

Unless it’s true for YOU. In which case it’s entirely true. But mostly, in the way that most people use such generalizations, absolutely false.

[Robin S. Kurz] “To date I have yet to see a single one choose Avid. “

Except for people who would like to work at the highest levels of Hollywood-style workflows. As has been noted MANY times here, the market share of Avid has gone UP.

Anecdotally. 🙂 But that was certainly the trend that was actually, verifiably counted — ie, NOT merely anecdotally, but surveyed and counted — by ACE, a group at the heart of those workflows.

Don’t want to work in Hollywood/Pinewood? Maybe don’t bother.

It is all very good to pick on Avid, but having worked with thousands, yes THOUSANDS, of Avid editors when I worked at both Boris FX and Avid itself, I can assure you that nobody is more familiar with the limitations of Media Composer, or complains more loudly about them, then full time Avid editors. If it had not been for Adobe After Effects in particular, the avid ecosystem would have collapsed many years ago

But it also doesn’t change the fact that there are contexts where Avid works better than others, as indeed contexts where Premiere, and yes, X, works better.

I just find it…let’s say “interesting”… that the only people who tend to say “one tool to rule them all” are X-philes. And for them, perhaps it is.

And perhaps they are skipping over a tool that could work better if they could get over their a priori objections on principle.

Rather like they suggest everyone else do.

And which, in fact, most people have done. Very few of us live in an either/or world.

Anecdotally. 🙂

Note again that I was a very early advocate not just for FCPX, and ALSO for the immediate EOL for FCP 7. It was long past the point at which it needed to die, imo (not that it’s dead for the many people still using it), and I am in fact a “burn the boats” kind of guy. 🙂 If you believe it’s the future, go all in, and don’t look back.

So please don’t take what I said as in any way critical of FCPX or your feelings about it…which was also my point. None of these choices should be taken as a judgement on one’s own self worth. 🙂

I just don’t think it furthers the discussion to overgeneralize to the point of demonstrable inaccuracy. Talking about what works for each of US, though — that’s the heart of the matter. The more of that, the better.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “FCP.co’s blurb about the interview is more provocative than anything Murch said, but I guess they wanted to do something to drum up more clicks. ;)”

Exactly my feeling. Any conversation with Murch is worth reading — his work with Coppola is some of the best that human eyes have seen — but…

I’m not surprised to hear that audio is part of why he still relies on tracks. Watch, and LISTEN, again to The Conversation. It’s easy to understand why he worked for a year on the audio, why he was nominated for an Oscar for it — and it’s easy for me to believe that he wouldn’t have necessarily have saved all that much time with having it digital.

(I’ve noticed that we never talk about that two of his three Oscars are for SOUND. Or that his only picture Oscar was on The Avid. Not that it matters, but not that it doesn’t. Because if it doesn’t matter, why are we still talking about it?)

Even his use of FCP was in the service of a workflow that had been around for dogs ages — not THAT much changed for 100 years, and ZERO changed from his work with Avid.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Murch effectively describes how Premiere Pro is being shaped and altered, on a month to month basis, by front rank directors and editors, right down to the buttons we see.
that’s almost crazy. Adobe take it under consideration and he says that, but that’s editing software alive like no one has ever seen. Even Murch himself says he’s never seen anything like it.”

THAT to me is the takeway. Yes, he gets all the way through the interview without unzipping and urinating on FCPX. LOL This is not news. He doesn’t do that kind of thing.

But to Walter, the entirely revolutionary, altogether unprecedented thing is Adobe’s responsiveness to the requests of editors.

(As EDITORS. We’re talking about what Walt says about EDITING, not financial models.)

Heaven forbid that “Walter is nice to FCPX but says that Adobe is responding to editors to an unprecedented degree” be the heart of the introduction.

[Tim Wilson]

I have a 1 TB pocket drive with some odds and ends. Music, video, various doo-dads I’ve downloaded over the years. Little USB 3, bus-powered thing you can rest in the palm of your hand. I got it free with a copy of MSFT Office.

Works great, but it failed to mount recently – new cable, problem solved! Woo-hoo!

But it made me think, wow, might be time to migrate to Dropbox or something. My db holds 2 TB, my files are maybe 600 gigs, so let’s go for it.

I figured that I should do it in pieces so that I didn’t choke my bandwidth. Well, I’ve got a pretty decent 20 megs up….but even if you leave Dropbox unthrottled, you get somewhere between 600 kb- 1 mb. You can do the math. I was looking at roughly a MONTH.

No kidding. A MONTH.

I looked around to make sure I wasn’t do something wrong and nope, that’s about right. And Dropbox is FASTER than some solutions.

Folks like Signiant really will shock you with how much faster they are than FTP or any of this other nonsense. It’s so fast it looks like a mistake. “How can it possibly be ALL my files in so little time?”

But that’s TRASFERRING files from one place to another. AFAIK there’s not a way to “Signiant” something to just be parked to a cloud service. Very simply, none of those guys is optimized to either receive or serve your content in anything resembling a reasonable time.

So what am I doing instead? Spending $75 or $80 to have my 600 gigs of nonsense files on another teensy 1TB drive.

If you need to back up your phone, some Word files and Excel spreadsheets, some project files WITHOUT media, some finished clips for client approval….the cloud is fine. Anything bigger than that, anything is better. ANYTHING.