Douglas K. dempsey
Forum Replies Created
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Second Bill’s comment on the “kids” — my high school students, some of whom are actors from theater class and think of themselves as ‘tech averse’ are thrilled to instantly and intuitively succeed in X.
One of my better students is the daughter of a commercial editor in NYC, who cuts TV commercials on Avid (ever see the Barcardi “Revolution” period-piece spot?). No denigration from Dad.
Some students who are more advanced, usually boys who are already software-centric, will ask to see PPRo and I show them. I have never seen those kids have ANY trouble going from X to PPro.
Doug D
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Thanks John.
As I said, I quickly fell into the habit of keeping everything in the Library on external RAID, and just designating the FCPX auto backup to my internal drive, so you theoretically have another copy of the metadata/project if everything goes south before proper RAID backup and you must recreate a media drive and relink everything.
I’ll be interested to see what people say about maximizing effectiveness of your Raid card.
D
Doug D
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John, I don’t have advice but I’m anxious to hear responses to your query because I have many of the same questions about what I SHOULD purchase.
I am also wondering about the best config for FCPX, given the library structure. In FCP7 we always kept the project file separate from the media drive. In X, it is very easy to fall into allowing everything to be stored in the Library, because of the ease of copying/transferring the whole shebang intact.
On your system, would you have the Library on the SSD or other single drive, with the “sync” alias pointers to media on your RAID? Or keep the entire Library on the RAID, where it could easily be archived to your other Cine RAID as a single transfer? Does it matter?
BTW in my own home office setup, I tend to prefer RAID 0 because I end up backing up media anyway, so RAID 5 becomes redundant. As I understand it, RAID 5 keeps you working after failure in a time-critical environment … versus stopping to do a major restoration. Is that accurate?
Doug D
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Ha ha, yes I’ll take both!
I’ll used distrusted processing to have the MacPro do transcoding, while I edit on the iMac!
Doug D
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Andy, your link sent me to a page of Timesavers YouTube’s I had collected awhile back.
Can you tell me which one(s), or if you are on a MacBreak by episode number?
Thanks
Doug D
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Bill, awesome!
I am going through this exact issue with some of my more impatient 9th & 10th grade students. The older students usually accept my advice going in.
Otherwise, they are learning that, to instantly start messing with the clips before selecting, often comes back to bite them when they cannot find anything they “liked.”
They DO enjoy the “fun” of using the J-K-L, so that’s my selling point to wade through all the stuff and make “selects.”
With your permission, I’ll show your video in class to underscore the process!
(Maybe my school will finally decide to spend some $$ on training programs; if so, I’ll come to you first!)
Doug D
Doug D
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Per Bill’s comments, I have posted often on this forum the fact that I use X for a high school video class, the 15-18 year old range Bill mentions.
And I have noted that we have FCP7 and the full CS6 on all of our iMacs.
But X is the sweet spot. Kids from theatre, photography and art … universally respond well to X.
These kids don’t have a “where are the tracks?” mentality. They just instantly “get” the app and start using it creatively.
The more serious students who come back year after year tend to buy X and work at home; they dive into the deep end in class, trying to master techniques and features.
I show them FCP7, PPro and Avid MC Student edition. They appreciate the vague idea that workflow and group collaboration may require them to master more apps if they ever “go pro.”
But meantime, I don’t see anyone being “held back” in their experimentation and creativity by using X.
Doug D
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Hey Charlie. Interesting challenge to our perception. I will try this in Legacy, using the transition settings to adjust in/out points of the effect, versus rolling the cut point, and ponder your concept.
Meantime, when I have something asymmetrical to make, it is usually as you describe: a layered effect, with careful key framing and bezier control so that as certain picture elements change, their opacity is addressed with custom keyframes. Sometimes you need a color that lingers to go away sooner, or you want two picture elements to arrive at a split-opacity and then linger as they move in space, and THEN both dissolve.
Yes, that kind of asymmetrical effect is trial & error key framing, not a simple “apply effect.”
Doug D
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This is good news, perhaps big news.
Think of the way cameras are no longer all-in-ones: you buy a box with a big sensor, various viewfinders and LCDs, rods, rigs, external recorders and glass.
Now, an editor might use FCPX for its metadata capabilities (as David Lawrence has so astutely noted), Premiere for its track editing, and maybe Resolve as a finishing, trimming NLE — as well as grading tool.
Sure, Adobe offers its “suite” and Legacy FCP was part of a “studio.”
But a la carte NLE combinations may well be the future for many!
Doug D
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Haha, I am looking forward to using Resolve 11, and I know RippleTraining is at work on a tutorial, anticipating its popularity. Thanks for the warning! This is typical, right? Even though there is no virtual camera that could conceivably, in 3D mode, perform a pan and tilt, someone has the half-baked idea, “Hey, in movies they call it Pan and Tilt, let’s do that!”
In writing the first lesson you learn is “parallel structure:” Like goes with like, to make things easy to follow. But in UI there are apparently no “grammatical” syntax, structural rules. So you get a mix of graphics app conventions, NLE features and movie language.
My observation of the traditional NLE as a wildly mixed-metaphor is: The Timeline is based on physical film editing, where you ran tracks of film and mag stock (audio) through a synchronizer while screening, selecting, editing. (Moviolas worked this way, and even flatbeds like the Steenbeck — although there, your tracks are turned on their sides). You could unlock the sync block and “slide” tracks out of sync … which is what you do when you shuffle clips around on NLE tracks. But the Source & Record windows (as Avid originally called them) are straight out of another era altogether, tape editing, in which you played a Source deck and watched on a Source Monitor, then dubbed your desired shots — via timecode — onto a Record deck, the result playing back on a Record Monitor. And finally, the “Browser/Bins” area leaps forward to yet another era, and is basically a Mac Finder or Windows desktop metaphor, with files hierarchal-organized into folders. The NLE mixed metaphor spans about 80 years of user interfaces!
With FCPX, Resolve, advances in metadata … we have a chance to become a bit more integrated and consistent in our interface rules and language. Maybe it will become important someday.
Doug D