[Gary Huff]

[Jeremy Garchow]I talk about it in the article, with screengrabs! :0) It is preliminary “bucket” organize. ie throw related clips in a “bin”.

I saw the article and I don’t understand how it’s any different from another NLE with an actual bin and sorting clips the traditional way.

Exactly how were things sorted differently than you would have before in a way that was better?

[Gary Huff]

[Walter Soyka]Gary, what’s with the aggressive tone? We disagree, and you’re describing me and my arguments as “full of it,” “leaving outs,” “dumb,” and “magic?” If we’re going to disagree, let’s do so with civility.

First of all, “full of it” and “dumb” wasn’t even in reference to you, so thanks for pulling in two of those to attempt to bolster your “poor me” defense. And please don’t resort to being so incredibly sensitive that “leaving outs” and the “magic” crack are as offensive to you as “glee club” was to others. And, BTW, yes I’m aggressive, but I try to be fair and if you make a good point, I’ll concede it. But so far, most of your points seem to demonstrate an ignorance of software development.

I think it’s roughly analogous to raster drawing versus vector drawing.

It’s not even roughly, more like not at all. Vector-based drawing takes place at the moment of media creation. FCPX is not there in the camera when I’m shooting video, it comes in later when the process of dealing with video is the arrangement of it, and it works its timeline by automatically linking what it thinks (by IF…THEN…ELSE rules on a fundamental level) are proper linkages.

And it sometimes doesn’t even get them right when editing within it.

I’m essentially offering an apologist argument to rationalize why Apple hasn’t included — and have stated that they won’t include — a much-needed legacy import feature: a translated timeline wouldn’t feel like a “proper” FCPX timeline without a lot of manual intervention.

That’s fine and all. I would say that, from my point of view, Apple didn’t include one because FCPX is not the successor to FCP7. Instead, it is the “pro” version of iMovie. A newly formed Apple product, not an upgraded version of someone else’s code. I think to argue otherwise is really to bury your head in the sand (IMHO).

I don’t know. I haven’t used iMovie. Since FCPX can import iMovie projects and not FCP projects, I’d assume that iMovie’s architecture is far closer to FCPX than FCP7.

And this wasn’t so much referencing anything that you have particular said, but others who had tried to make the argument that iMovie and FCPX have nothing in common except a superficial resemblance in UI.

There is nothing like a clip connection with an arbitrary linkage point in FCP7, Avid, or Premiere Pro, and because of this, you cannot replicate the full behavior of the magnetic timeline in anything but FCPX. You can come close in many cases, but not all; FCPX’s features and structures make the new timeline’s logic fully internally consistent.

I never said “arbitrary”, I said you could duplicate it by linking manually, which I can. I still don’t understand why you cannot see that FCPX’s timeline is just like the others, except with more automation of linking clips. That’s all it does. And sometimes it messes up as well.

[Gary Huff]

Agreed. I would rather have more options than less. But what I’m saying is that there are those touting that new production paradigm AND the new metadata as being the wave of the future, when it seems counter-productive TO that new production paradigm.

[Gary Huff]

[Walter Soyka]FCPX works because it encourages you to establish these relationships in context at the time you make the edit. I don’t think an imported timeline missing these contextual cues would feel like an FCPX timeline which relies on them.

FCPX does not, at least to my knowledge, use any sort of artificial intelligence engine to establish this context. The “context” of which you speak is a simple run of IF…THEN…ELSE statements in the code (more or less) that governs the behavior. Whether it does it at the moment that you place clips on the timeline, or whether it does it later with clips that are arranged in time by another NLE, the end result is the same. Undesired linkage could easily be fixed after import.

It’s curious to me because you can’t seemingly claim that all of this will be messed up when FCPX will import iMovie projects, so that must be an admission that iMovie has a lot in common with FCPX under the hood if that sort of importer was provided on Day 1. Yet there are those who claim that it only bares a superficial resemblance with the UI, so which is it?

I’d love for someone to figure out how to make a meaningful translation.

Ah, I’ve seen the out you’ve left for yourself there.

My argument is that making a traditional timeline into a fully-functional FCPX timeline is an incredibly complicated problem, and that’s why I think Apple has not included that feature. Do you disagree?

Yet another out. No one is saying that an importer will do a 100% perfect job time in and time out. That would be dumb. However, I will say that an importer will be able to import a lot of projects that will play correction from time 0:00:00 to the end. There will probably need to be some connections made, but that’s it.

Are you really unable to grasp that most of what FCPX magnetic timeline does it automatic linkage? You can still do the exact same thing in any current NLE, you just have to do it manually.

[Gary Huff]

[Walter Soyka]
Going OUT to a traditional edit is relatively easy, but some FCPX-specific information (clip connections, storylines, compound clips, etc.) will be lost as there’s no way to store that data in other formats.

Going IN to FCPX in a meaningful way is a whole other matter, because the same FCPX-specific information I mentioned above doesn’t exist in other apps or formats and must be guessed or deduced by the translation application.

I guess you’ll keep tossing up this argument until someone goes and does it, and then I suppose in response you’ll just throw up your hands and, say, “I don’t know. Must be magic.”?

[Gary Huff]

Of course, to use this you still have to edit in FCPX, which is where the big problem lies. 😉

[Gary Huff]

[Craig Seeman]Do you really think there’s a large market that has held off buying iPads because there’s nothing like FCPX for it? I don’t think there’s a big financial incentive in that.

There is if the plan is to eventually drop OSX and have only iOS.

[Gary Huff]

How about all those people that said that FCPX’s timeline was so “revolutionary” that it couldn’t translate older projects or out to other formats and so on.

Guess they were simply full of it, eh?

[Gary Huff]

Actually, a Mac IS a PC, because all a PC stands for is “personal computer.” The distinction should be made between a Mac PC, a Windows PC, and a Linux PC.

And this thread is rather pointless, really.

[Gary Huff]

[Sam Cole]Just a thought . . . it’s taking sooooo long to get to the 1st FCP X update, maybe they are working on porting it to the PC under Windows 7?

Actually, it already exists. It’s called Vegas and it’s much better too!