[David Lawrence]

@Aindreas – you sir, are a poet. 🙂

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Ultimately: Is a forensically absolute, intellectually disinterested timeline, shorn of pre-baked methodology, an anachronism?”

I certainly hope not!

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[David Lawrence]

[Herb Sevush] “”FCPx takes care of this by simply sliding the clips out of the way, but keeping them in place and the things connected to them in time, not necessarily at the same exact tc mark, but they are still together.”

But once you’ve slid these things out of the way, don’t you then still have to decide what to so with them. If I get it right, in the magnetic timeline if I extend or move a piece of audio, the already existing audio simply slides to a new track, but keep it’s temporal place in the timeline, and I now have 2 pieces of audio fighting each other. “

This is a very important point. FCPX’s default behaviors amount to editorial decisions. When the software automatically resolves a conflict, it’s making default assumptions about my editorial intent. Short of reading my mind, I don’t see how it can ever get this right more often than not.

Clip collisions, etc. are just not a problem for me. No doubt because I’ve internalized TTT and moving things around. But even when I do encounter a collision, conflict or media limit, I consider that an editorial problem. The software can only guess at my intention and it’s as likely to guess wrong as it is to get it right. There comes a point where it’s more efficient to just let me handle it. I stand by my previous analogy.

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[David Lawrence]

Great post, Andrew. Thanks for your clarification.

[Andrew Richards] “Both offer the option to match the frame rate of the first clip added to their respective timelines. Before any media is added, before any Primary Storyline is created, the FCPX timeline has a “Master Clock”, to borrow your terminology.”

Yes, true.

[Andrew Richards] “The big change is, as you put it, is with “spatial representation and object/space behavior”. This absolutely forces the user to adopt new habits for constructing an edit, but the way time is framed hasn’t changed, just the way it is filled with content.”

Bingo.

[Andrew Richards] “Breaking decades old habits and muscle memory is a shock to any user, and I think that’s a huge reason why so many veteran editors recoil from the way default behavior of FCPX’s timeline.”

I think there’s more going on than just muscle memory habits. A good UI makes the expression of user intent natural and intuitive. My current experience with X is that it often confounds my natural rather than learned expectations in terms of both spatial and object behavior. If a UI is intuitive, changing to it should be easy because it makes intuitive sense. IMHO, the fact that so many experienced editors are having difficulty is a clue that something is off. I’ll get into this more in my next post.

This is not to say that FCPX is wholly unintuitive. We’re seeing many reports of how it makes certain jobs very easy, especially for novice or non-editors. I think it’s highly intuitive and optimized for simple assembly. The question is how does it scale once you want to go beyond that? How does it handle the requirements of a complex production? Is it really more efficient or just different?

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[David Lawrence]

Very incisive post, Glen. It will be interesting to see how Apple addressees the issues you raise.

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[David Lawrence]

[Paul Dickin] “In the late 90s a new program called mTropolis was born – OS 9 only 🙁 (It was later bought out and killed by Quark!!!)”

Interesting you should mention mTrop. Somewhere in my studio I have a copy of 2.0 given to me by the CEO of the company. In the pre-dot com mid-90’s I was partner in a Paul Allen funded start-up. Our company designed and produced two CD-ROM titles and were spun off as a new venture that became a national brand.

That story is for another time but the core technology my company bet on was mTropolis. I loved how it was designed as an object-oriented system for building event driven interactive experiences. Light years better than the Director UI model. So smart and efficient! I was devastated when Quark killed it.

But here’s the thing. We authored in mTrop, but we had a Media 100 to create all our time-based assets. Media 100 and Premiere for any and all time-based work. mTrop for integration and interactivity and interactive time-based play.

[Paul Dickin] “At that stage of the editing process a Node-Based interface paradigm could be totally appropriate (and productive), in my view.

A question to David L.:
How much time have you spent using Shake or the node-based part of Color?”

I’ve played with Shake, Nuke and a bit with Color. My brother Dan is way more expert than I am but we’ve discussed it a lot. My take (and bro concurs) is that node-based processes are fantastic on a shot/scene level. But they don’t give you much leverage in editing because editing is a fundamentally different kind of process with very different concerns driving the task.

To put it more simply, the timeline is optimized for time-driven manipulation, but thu layer stacking and filter ordering you can roughly simulate a nodal pipeline. A nodal pipeline is highly optimized for shots but may have a timeline attached because it’s comping in a time-base effect. You can work in both, it’s all about picking the best tool for the job.

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[David Lawrence]

[Andrew Richards] “both the traditional and magnetic timelines express a linear time scale against which media is laid out in sequence, so I don’t think there is a seismic a shift as David’s premise suggests.”

Linear time scale is not the issue, it’s about frame-of-reference in regards to spatial representation and object/space behavior. I think it’s a pretty big deal in terms of UI design change. In fact, I can’t think of any application that uses it’s main window quite like this. But I’ll keep looking 🙂

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[David Lawrence]

[David Cherniack] “What’s not clear is how it deals with complex insert situations”

I think this is a huge question and it’s the how I tend to do the bulk of my work. My hunch is we’ll see the first scaling issues here and with sound mixing.

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[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “I think AV Foundation here is a red herring. “

It may be that we’re seeing it modeled in the UI but I absolutely agree that if that’s the case, it’s a choice on the part of the designers.

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[David Lawrence]

[Craig Seeman] “FCPX timeline, while a timeline, is certainly using a new tuning.”

I think a better analogy is that the magnetic timeline is to the open time timeline as a GarageBand smart keyboard is to regular keyboard. They’re both keyboards, you play them both in similar ways, but GarageBand’s smart keyboard has all kinds of automated features to help make good sounding music easily and with less skill. The regular keyboard is completely open. You’re on your own. It only sounds as good as you’re able to make it sound with your abilities and style.

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[David Lawrence]

[Craig Shields] “Are you using FCPX now? If so, how much time are you spending with it? Do you have or can you create examples of the potential problems of which you speak?”

Like many, I’m currently unable to use it for client work, but I have a softer project that I’m using as a test case. Mostly I’m testing its various assumptions and behaviors and trying to understand how it wants me to work. Then I’m comparing that against things I typically do in 7 and noting which is more efficient. My next post will touch on some of this.

For a real-world stress test, I think we should all be paying close attention to what these guys find out:

https://fcpxmegatest.blogspot.com/

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