[Franz Bieberkopf]

Andreas,

Thanks for this. I am often working with subtitled material and haven’t read much about experiences with X. Seems dreadful.

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Ben,

I don’t know whether you’ve misread this forum deliberately or by casual blindness, but the debate has not been about whether or not FCPX will sell – it is about who will buy and what sort of impact it may or may not have.

But, the App Store is a pretty poor source of information – how many licenses have they sold? Who is buying? How are they using it? (Incidentally, where I am, FCPX is outranked by iMovie at 15.00.)

You probably missed Craig Seeman‘s calculations a while back but by his guestimate sketch the number was around half a million.

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Timothy,

Thank-you for posting this. In almost six months since the release of FCPX I haven’t seen any information like this, and as I tend to work on larger, longer projects this sort of information is fundamental and crucial to my evaluation.

I am frankly astounded that such performance issues weren’t primary for the FCPX design team.

Manually managing memory …

Breaking sequences into “more manageable segments” …

Turning off the much marketed “background rendering” …

Leaving audio work until the mix …

I really have no words beyond the ellipses. Where is Aindreas when you need him?

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Sometimes I see stuff and just shake my head …

I guess speed wasn’t a design priority.

“I don’t know; I’m not a programmer.” (from the video)

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[David Roth Weiss] In news, right up through the end of the 70’s, negative was often cut and screened live on-air via a “film chain,”…

For some reason I always assumed film chain was print – though I suppose they had a pos/neg switch? It certainly makes sense to bypass the lab time and go direct from neg.

Were you hot splicing A/B rolls or tape splicing single rolls of neg?

I would assume, being in a broadcast environment, that “B roll” took on the broadcast meaning that I’ve outlined?

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Andy,

Yes, this is necessary for neg conforming in 16mm as outlined above. (Though I can’t imagine ever putting your negative through a moviola …)

The meaning was fundamentally different in the video edit suite (though perhaps it came from the film terminology? This we may never know …)

In the video suite “A” roll and “B” roll designate functions of footage – it’s an ideological designation, and reflects ideas about the importance of the footage.

Contrast this to the purely technical designation needed for neg conforming.

It is the video paradigm (above) that has been adopted in the “Primary Storyline” model of FCPX and this was the point of my post.

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

A preliminary search yielded only this:

https://www.theindiefilmblog.com/history/the-history-of-the-term-b-roll.html

… hardly authoritative (no dates or references) but it reflects my own impression. Outside of video, I’d only ever heard “B-roll” when conforming 16mm neg.

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Bill,

Without opening the question of how they have added to it, my point was that the A/B roll model is the fundamental model they’ve chosen – it informs the way they approached the timeline.

I think you’re in agreement here.

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Andy Neil] A-Roll/B-Roll editing has its origins in film actually where master shots were collected on one reel (A) and cutaways and other angles were collected on a second reel (B).

Andy,

My experience with film editing is very limited, but this against everything I know about it, where reels are compiled by Scene or Slate (for scripted material) or Scene and Location (for unscripted material).

I’d be interested in more history and detail if anyone can point the way.

So far as I know, where the A/B model has been used in film, it was imported from broadcast.

For instance, while I might imagine Griffith working with A/B collections (though I have no reason to) I can’t imagine the Soviets, Godard, Wiseman, or Murch doing so.

But I’d love to know more about the history …

Franz.

[Franz Bieberkopf]

Bill,

I agree the source / record analogy in FCP and other NLEs comes from broadcast. I am looking at the timeline.

I am talking specifically about the approach to editing – the idea that you cut an A-roll and “cut away” to B-roll. This approach seems built-in to the Primary Storyline model (with attached clips).

Franz.