[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “FCPX is assuming that you are using the position tool to create a gap”

Is it assuming I want to create a gap or is it assuming I want to position whatever I’ve selected anywhere I want on the timeline? Those are two different things, right? I’m using it to position objects on the timeline. Gaps and clips are both objects so shouldn’t it treat them the same?

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[David Lawrence]

[Mark Morache] “Was that clear?”

Great post, Mark and crystal clear. I’ll answer you and everyone else after a short break. Stay tuned…

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[David Lawrence]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Again, this is clearly true in Media Composer as well, as is made much clearer in MC 5.5 where you can select them and manipulate them in ways that are fundamentally the same as what is happening in FCPX.”

Agreed. but in MC, they’re basically invisible unless you decide you need to use them for something. And you can turn timeline ripple mode off.

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[David Lawrence]

[Steve Connor] “David, gap behaviour is perfectly logical and not a bug at all.”

Watch the video again. Just lifting and dropping the gap with the Position Tool causes the the clip to the immediate right to be swallowed. Why? Because the timeline is rippling under the lifted gap. If the Position Tool automatically creates gaps when you move a clip object, why wouldn’t it also create gaps when you move a gap object? To my mind, this is inconsistent behavior.

[Steve Connor] “It would be illogical for FCPX to have behaviour where when you move or edit a gap, another gap is created! “

Why?

[Steve Connor] “Not true, Shift delete deletes the clip and leaves a gap automatically…”

Sure, but technically shift-delete is replace with gap. It’s the opposite of FCP7 but I can adapt — not that big a deal.

[Steve Connor] “…you do not have to manage the gaps at all, you don’t have to touch them, you don’t have to create them.”

I find this to be untrue. Gaps are objects. You have to deal with them. If you want to extend open space to the right of a gap, you have to trim forward from the gap tail. Something you could easily accomplish in FCP7 with T or TTT and a quick drag. Or Try applying a cross dissolve at the head of a clip. In FCP7 the dissolve begins at the head of the clip. In FCPX the dissolve centers between the gap and the clip. There’s currently no easy way to start the cross dissolve at transition end.

I realize that FCPX provides other tools to accomplish the same goals. But as long as gaps are objects, you have to deal with them. My $.02

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[David Lawrence]

[Neil Goodman] “If you break it down. Media Composer works similiar. Although the timeline isnt locked in ripple mode. You cant have gaps on the timeline either. Instead you have “filler” which can be manipulated, trimmed etc, even add filters to it . It is essentially a gap clip as well. The difference is MC has two segment modes, one for rippling, one for overwites .If FCPX had these two different modes, problem solved right ?”

You’re absolutely right. MC’s gap implementation is nice. I think the key is that in MC, you don’t really have to think of the negative space as an object unless you make a cut or need to use it as a slug. Then it transparently changes function. It’s smart and useful. And of course, ripple is a mode, not default. If FCPX changes to behave this way, it would solve a lot!

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[David Lawrence]

[Steve Connor] “and well done for starting the most interesting and productive thread on this forum so far IMHO”

Thank you Steve. I appreciate your questions and comments along with everyone else’s. A couple people have questioned the value of the FCPX debate forum in general, but I find I learn a lot here. Let’s keep it going!

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[David Lawrence]

Thanks again, Jeremy for the thoughtful and well-documented response and for keeping this conversation going.

Apologies for the delay, last week was hard and flew right by. Let’s dig back in.

[Jeremy Garchow] “OK. In FCPX There’s a couple of ways to do this…

…An alternative way is to log all the clips in the browser, marking favorites as you go. You can then name those favorites, select them all and hit ‘e’ to put all the different favorite ranges in the timeline. Screen grabs of event and subsequent timeline here:”

I’m with you all the way here. I really like working with favorites in the browser. As soon as that XML transfer utility is available, I’m ready!

[Jeremy Garchow] “Moving on to the edit.”

Here’s where we run into trouble. There are two main bottlenecks — one slows me down, the other is a deal-killer.

The first bottleneck is inflexible layout options. Aindreas’ subthread did an excellent job covering the issue. My bins are usually much fewer and simpler than his example but I share the same need of getting a quick overview of all my source at a glance. It’s crazy how much UI space is wasted on chrome and empty space in FCPX. Even setting font size in the browser to small doesn’t help that much, gaining only a few extra lines. Still, I can manage. It takes more fussing and scrolling than I like but I can get to what I want. And as you’ve demonstrated so well, the flexibility of favorites and keywords are really great.

The second bottleneck is the timeline itself. Your example above is similar to my own attempts to match my FCP7 cutting style in FCPX. As you’ve demonstrated and I’ve found for myself, it’s certainly doable. All the techniques work.

But it’s not very efficient and feels like it’s fighting against the design of the program. The reason for this has to do with the nature of the position tool and gaps. This is probably one of my biggest issues with FCPX and one of the most misunderstood aspects of the magnetic timeline. It’s big enough issue that it deserves its own topic so I will address that here:

The Position Tool Does Not Disable Ripple Mode – Here’s Why

Please join me in that thread to get into the nitty-gritty of ripple-mode, gaps and the Position Tool.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Where it does differ is that you can’t mark in and out and export from the timeline. In that case, you’d either dupe the timeline and delete everything you don’t want, or you’d send to compressor and mark the ins and outs in Compressor to compress, definitely not as convenient for sure. It is functionality like this where FCPX needs some help, but these refinements seem like programming add-ons, not undoable impossibilities. “

Yes, hopefully we get In/Out points for export soon. Case in point – here’s a timeline that has nothing to do with story:

Those are sixteen 15-second interstitials. I export them one at a time by setting In/Out and choosing export. You can imagine the headache of dealing with this right now in FCPX. The current project architecture doesn’t seem to consider the many possible uses for a timeline besides linear story. There’s so much more you might want to do. I do things like this example a lot. To be fair, I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to set persistent In/Outs for export soon. I can’t imagine any debate over this 😉

[Jeremy Garchow] “As far as the STPro workflow, perhaps STPro isn’t needed in FCPX anymore? The filters are there, the real time is there, and provides a bit more flexibility for changes. If changes come, you don’t have to deal with a change list, you can simply work right in the timeline. Tracks on clips can be easily tuned off en masse if needed in the inspector > Audio > Channel Config, even before the clips hit the timeline, or after. Secondary story lines/Compound clips can make adding filters to similar clips easier. Hopefully an update to Roles will help to being an audio bus functionality to FCPX. An Effects tab in the Timeline Index would help here too.”

I’ve experimented with this and I see potential, but it’s not there yet. First off, it’s great to be able to use VST plugins directly in the program. Excellent to be working with the plugin’s native UI instead of sliders. Real-time performance without rendering is awesome. That said, it’s just not good enough yet. It really feels like my computer is maxing out after I add a couple audio filters. In my test, adding VST noise reduction and compression slowed everything to a crawl. I also was getting audio pops that would not go away no matter what I tried. It felt slow and flaky until I turned audio filters off. Maybe my 3-year old unibody macbook pro is a bit too old, but I have no problems when I round trip to STP. Everything works smooth as silk.

I think it’s asking a lot for one program to do everything. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that these features are there and I’m sure they’ll be useful. But specialized tools will always carry the day in terms of power, flexibility and quality. Fortunately, the tools for data exchange are moving forward. That actually brings up an interesting point that David Roth Weiss raised in another thread:

[David Roth Weiss] “Should proper “tracked” exports in FCP X ultimately be implemented by Apple or a third party, the question is, will long-form editors will really want to work for months with one view of their project, only to look at and implicitly trust an entirely different view of the same complex project just before taking it to their favorite mix facility?

Personally, my intimate knowledge of the layout of every event on the timeline in one of my edits is always quite helpful when I go into a mix, as the mixer is almost always seeing the project for very first time. Do I want to be seeing it for the first time too when I’m on the clock at a mix facility? I don’t think so…”

I haven’t gotten into tracks vs trackless in this topic, but I think this is an interesting and salient point to consider.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Trimming in X is a lot easier, J&L cuts are very simple, and once you start laying in broll, the connected clips make moving things around very easy. I guess my question is, how can you see this not being accomplished with the magnetic timeline?”

Let’s get into this in the new topic linked above.

[Jeremy Garchow] “I think that using the browser to help organize your selects is a pretty efficient way to start telling the story. I understand that maybe that’s not the way you work, but it wasn’t the way I worked either as FCP Legacy’s browser kinda sucks, so putting everything in a timeline was logical. FCPX allows for objects and visual thinking, but it also allows for text based searching as well. This is the best of both worlds if you ask me.”

I totally agree this is a powerful way to work in the organizing stage. Once we have the ability create our own layouts, I’ll like it even more. But there’s one key advantage of my timeline method that your example doesn’t address — when I’m marking my favorites, my favorite ranges are soft. I may know that a particular sound bite is good, but there’s always surrounding contextual speech that I may not know I need until much later in my editorial process.

With everything exposed on the timeline I have instant visual access to my marked sections, and I can easily skim to find related material that I didn’t realize was important at the time. When you Control-f to create objects as in your example, you only see the ranges that were marked ahead of time. In order to see the favorites in the context of the clip, you need to go back into clip-view. I can select ranges and add to the timeline from the browser, but there appears to be no way to see favorites on a whole clip once it’s added to the timeline. I would expect to see favorites in the clip’s timeline index at the very least. Maybe I’m missing something here?

How would you do something like this or is it a feature request?

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] ”
Yeah. I hear that.

https://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/399182/october-06-20...
“

Nice. Love Colbert — he had me laughing all the way up to the end bit with the email. Sigh.

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[David Lawrence]

[Craig Seeman] “Apple surveyed the MP3 field, smartphone field, netbook field, observed how they were used, synthesized that into new products. Personally I feel that’s what they’ve done with FCPX. For them, when the “consult” it does not mean simply “what to you want” but to examine what people are doing, how they do it and that results in their direction on how to do it a new/better way.”

[Craig Seeman] “I’m honestly not sure people understand this which is why they don’t get how and why Apple develops products whether it’s iPods or FCPX.”

I agree with your analysis, Craig. The problem is that iPods and FCP serve very different markets. It remains to be seen if the development strategies that enabled Apple to dominate the consumer technology market will also work in enterprise-class business markets.

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[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “So, how’s everyone doing?”

It’s been hard to think about this stuff the past couple days. Finally getting my wind back.

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David Lawrence
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