[David Lawrence]

[Tony West] “My point is that I believe if they listened to Ronny’s company they would listen to Murch as well.
That’s all.”

If I may inject myself into this subthread 😉 I think the larger point here is even if Apple did listen to Murch, it wouldn’t matter; because the fundamental design decisions behind the FCPX timeline don’t work for Murch’s needs. Unless you think they’d add audio tracks if he asked 😉

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[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “Out of curiosity, what is the last 10% of the challenge that you can’t cover in Premiere? Maybe someone here would have a suggestion, or maybe there’s a good area for a feature request.”

Great question! I’ll start another thread for that because it really deserves its own. It’s actually two feature requests – one for Pr (which would eliminate the need to go into AE) and one for AE, which would eliminate the crazy workaround I currently do to get it to work! 🙂 More soon!

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[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “In Ae today, you can emulate a transition by modifying properties, or you can transition with an effect on one layer that takes a background input from another layer and mixes them. If the Ae architecture were to be modified [link] such that effects had access to other layers’ post-render output instead of the pre-render input they have now, then the Premiere cross-fade could produced by an effect such as GenArts Sapphire S_Dissolve, though the UI would be quite different. (FYI, it can be handled by S_Dissolve today if you alter the render order by precomping the masked blue solid in one precomp and the masked white solid in another.)”

I think I’m starting to appreciate why people like nodal compositors 😉 The ability to reconfigure render flow at will would be handy here.

I’m going to experiment with an effects dissolve and see if that translates better. One nice benefit of precomping the dissolving layers is that it collapses the AE layers into a single pre comp that mirrors the corresponding track in Pr. This makes things a bit more manageable to work with in AE.

Great post, Walter, I’m learning so much. Thanks again!

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[David Lawrence]

Kalle and Walter, thank you for your replies!

[Walter Soyka] “In this case, there is no need to use a track matte; since it’s all the same mask, you can simply mask a precomp of unmasked blue dissolving out to unmasked white.”

Nailed it! Pre-comped unmasked blue and white layers with the opacity change on blue, then mask the pre-comp over the black bg. Works perfectly.

[Walter Soyka] “Note, too, that Premiere defaults to compositing in linear color. To get the same results in Ae, you’ll have to open your project settings and enable “Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma.””

Yes, sometimes I turn the “Composite in Linear Color” setting in Pr off depending on what it does to transitions. But it makes sense these settings need to match.

[Walter Soyka] “A true cross dissolve, which is easy in a video application, is somewhat harder in a compositing application. You have to separate the alpha from the RGB, fade the alpha and RGB separately, then apply the alpha fade to the RGB fade. (When alpha is full-on for both, as in the case of unmasked, full-frame video, you can simply fade out one RGB layer; it’s mathematically identical.)”

This makes total sense, thank you.

Dynamic link is great but I guess I’m doing something that pushes the boundaries between video and compositing that dynamic link doesn’t cross. Figures. 😉

I know the AE development team has their hands full right now, but in the future, how hard to you think it might be to have a composite preference setting that would tell the AE render pipeline to act like Pr? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would find this kind for setting useful for dynamically linked comps. Worthwhile feature request?

It’s too bad because Pr CC’s masking tools get me 90% of what I need but the extra 10% is critical and can really only be done in AE.

I’ll have to see how easy it is to integrate these AE extra steps. It might be fine, actually. Time to test with the real video!

Thanks again!

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[David Lawrence]

[Tim Wilson] “So within the conversationally acknowledged 10 year product life cycle, we’re probably within a release or two of everything currently on the whiteboard. Have the last couple of releases reflected any hurry to cross off some big requests as having been fulfilled?

I’m not asking rhetorically. I honestly don’t know, but as a spectator, it doesn’t appear to be the case.”

Agreed.

For example, since we’re talking about sound and DAWs in this thread, I really wonder how likely it is we’ll ever see a roles mixer. I would say this particular request is a pretty big deal. Especially since it’s always proposed as the solution whenever someone brings up the deficiencies of a trackless timeline for complex audio mixing.

It’s year five and we don’t even have color-coded roles yet. And that’s an easy change. Integrating an automated roles mixer is a lot more challenging.

I really hope it happens but what you see may be what you get. I would like to be surprised but I wouldn’t bet my business needs on being happily surprised by Apple.

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[David Lawrence]

[Kalle Kannisto] “To cross fade, the white layer should go from 0 to 100 percent as the blue layer goes from 100 to 0.”

I tried that but it doesn’t work.

It gets rid of the halo, but it’s not a correct crossfade. As both layers reach the 50% opacity point, the square briefly darkens, i.e. in the middle of the transition, the top and middle layer both become transparent to the black layer for a brief moment.

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[David Lawrence]

[Bill Davis] “Oh wait, Maybe someone can be assigned to snap cel phone photos of the cards tacked to the wall with every change?”

Actually, that’s exactly what they do at IDEO. Cellphone photos of the 4’x8′ boards emailed to team members after a session. I’ve done many edit sessions from emailed board photos which I would print out and tape to my wall. Why print them out? Because it’s so much easier than scrolling a screen! You may laugh but your USB second screen will never match what’s possible for group collaboration with wall space as big as 24’x 8′ or more.

BTW, everyone there uses a laptop too, but collaborative content and process happens on Post-Its on the wall first. Sometimes the best tools are the simplest tools.

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[David Lawrence]

[Oliver Peters] “Actually this is a very common practice for many editors – not just Walter. You can shuffle around the index cards and see the affect of these changes on the story flow in a far better fashion than first doing the manipulation of those scenes within the NLE. It’s a form of shorthand. Walter’s approach is more detailed than that of many others, but the use of a scene wall with index cards is a widespread practice among film editors.”

Not just editors, but writers too. Filling a wall with notecards and moving them around at will is a great way to get an overview of a story structure. It also enables collaboration at this level in a much more fluid and interactive way than any software I’m aware of.

One of my favorite past clients, IDEO is legendary for their use of post-it notes and 4’x8′ foam core panels to quickly document and iterate ideas. No matter how big your monitor is, it can’t compete with 4’x8′ foam core. Metadata is hard to share if it’s kept in a proprietary database and hidden on a tiny screen. Murch’s system works well for him for the same reason IDEO’s works well for their teams.

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[David Lawrence]

[Tony West] “Apple didn’t just change that on their own. They would have just put it out that way to begin with if that’s what they intended from the start right?”

Actually, I think what happened is they released an alpha-level program with incomplete Q/A testing. The initial library structure was flawed. Remember the compound clip bloat issue? (link) That was a result of the library structure. They had to redo the library to fix it.

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[David Lawrence]

[Bill Davis] “Let’s be clear here. I am NOT in any way saying that subscription is bad per se, and definitely not that any particular company is necessarily bad for employing it. There are plenty of companies that deploy it in a way that also respects customers wants and needs. I AM saying that subscription is a rapidly growing corporate “thing” that many consider a financial power play designed to shift economic leverage away from consumers and to the businesses that make it mandatory. And I find that unacceptable.

While we debate the edit functions – the executives are delighted. Their real play is sticky subscription lock in. Period. Could they provide options? Sure. Will they? Don’t hold your breath. The model isn’t about the product. It’s about the subscription model period.

Others will surely disagree and find nothing wrong with it.
But just like the music industry history is rife with business people screwing artists. There ARE in my opinions lessons there to take as we move forward in the creative arts. “

Well said, Bill!

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