Herb Sevush
22
COW Coins
20
Premiere Pro Coins
Forum Replies Created
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“YOU may need ‘tracks’ to work, but your AAF/OMF output software and 8-track audio SDI connectivity doesn’t. What’s needed is metadata to identify which timeline asset belongs to which output channel. An interface which allows that to be allocated doesn’t inherently need ‘tracks’.
It needs an editor who understands how to drive the interface.”Bu what’s in it for me?
Audio tracks are an extremely useful visual organizer as well as an efficient way to create a workflow that will naturally work with others. Why should I have to re-learn a universally excepted interface? I’m asking that seriously – make the case. Show me the productivity gains in tagging audio with metadata and how that will make my life MUCH easier – easier is not enough, it needs to be an order of magnitude easier to be worth the trouble.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
Chris –
You are who FCPX was targeted at. I am not. I used to own a Harley, I took it into the shop and my mechanic turned it into a moped. It works for you, your commuting to work, you can save some money. It doesn’t work for me, I’m going cross country.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
Nolan –
If the P2 footage is off you need to go to the Log and transfer window and go to preferences (it’s the little button at the top right of the media duration column) under preferences make sure that the checkbox for “Remove advanced pulldown …” is UNchecked and then re-import. If it already was unchecked, I would try checking it and then re-importing.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
OK, so instead of FCP7 where the timeline is a pointer to quicktime clips residing on a hard drive, a FCPX project is a pointer to a composition which is a collection of assets held in memory, a metadata database. Fine. It sounds like it should be very flexible, much more so than FCP7, so I still don’t see why that makes creating timeline based editing impossible. Which is what my previous post was about. Why does AV Foundation rule out assignable audio tracks or a Viewer Window – which is Chris Kenny’s argument.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
“Even if attempts were made to make it slavishly similar, any ground-up rewrite would have had too many subtle inconsistencies … for it to drop into established workflows without a bunch of testing and transition time.”
OK, so now we’ve moved from it couldn’t be done, to it would have been hard to do. As though FCPX isn’t going to need 12-18 months of testing and transition time – only in this case after 18 months it still won’t recognize legacy projects.
I don’t know why you insist on trying to distort the obvious. You have a perfectly good argument to make – “FCPX is the wave of the future and in the next year or so will have a lot of the functionality of FCP7 – and if you don’t like it, piss off.” That’s Apples (unspoken) argument and it might even be true. But to repeat ad nauseum that FCPX had to be written this way, and that anyone who is thinking of migrating away from Apple is basically an idiot are statements totally without merit.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
It was inevitably going to lead to an app that wasn’t going to be an immediate drop-in replacement
Again, and again, just because you say it, it doesn’t make it so. Explain to me just where AV Foundation made a “drop in replacement” impossible? Just saying, well it’s AV Foundation, doesn’t explain anything. I don’t see what the nature of the video file has to do with the design of the timeline. Does it contain video and audio. Can the tracks be separated and moved separately. So where’s the special magic?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
“Maybe it’s time for you to move to another NLE.”
Maybe it is. Most of my work is multi-cam episodic broadcast. I don’t do a lot of layering and compositing in FCP. I always thought that was what Motion (or AE) was for.
Where once you had a product that could handle multiple styles of work, and therefore was fairly complex and even cludgy, you now have what might be a very elegant solution to a much more limited number of workflows. And that was what the Pro is FCP was all about, a very customizable program that enabled you to find the best way to create whatever workflow you needed.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
“But we basically knew that was going to be true since we knew Apple was going to do a rewrite… and a rewrite has been inevitable to people who understood the technical limitations of the old architecture”
Your basic argument is that Apple was re-writing the underlying architecture and everyone should have known that this would cause the program to drastically change.You keep repeating this over and over as if it were true. It isn’t. It wasn’t inevitable that an underlying structural change was going to lead to a total functional change.
The simple analogy is a car. You can make a wankel rotary engine, a steam engine, an all electric car – as long as the driver knows where the steering wheel is and where the brakes are he doesn’t care. A total change in structure does not necessitate a change in the way a product functions.
About 8 years ago Discreet Edit*, the best NLE I ever used, underwent a total re-write. It took 2 years, and that delay helped contribute to it’s demise. however the actual product was a seamless upgrade to the previous versions – 100% new code, huge improvements in functionality, totally backwards compatible.
Apple needed to do a re-write. It chose to change the functionality. One is not the necessary cause of the other. No matter how many times you link them together, it just ain’t so. Not even when you repeat it.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
“The only big ‘optional’ change, really, was the decision to try to improve on traditional muli-track editing and bin-based clip organization. If they hand’t done that … backwards compatibility would have been easier to implement.”
And every one would have been happy.
“But forgoing the implementation of an improved approach because some people will initially be uncomfortable with it is not a recipe for long-term growth”
The key word there is “improved.” And it would have to be radically improved to be worth it, not just a little improved and only in some cases. If FCPX is radically better than traditional timeline editing then it will succeed.
Most editors, including myself, will knee jerk hate anything new, so I pretty much discount most of the editing complaints I’ve been reading. And you have been doing a good job correcting them and showing them new ways to do old things. But I also haven’t heard anything that sounds like a radical improvement either – the items that sound good to me have nothing to do with the new editing scheme and have everything to do with being a 64 bit ap.
My work is 95% multi-cam and so far I haven’t heard anything having to do with actual editing that makes me wish FCPX would hurry up their multi-cam implementation. On the other hand I am curious to learn how you can have a multi-cam function without having a viewer window. Time will tell.
And that time is probably more than you have been guessing. According to the latest accounts the version released is basically identical to the advanced versions seen by Phil Hodgetts and Larry Jordan last February. Despite private assurance from FCPX designers, they weren’t able to add any functionality in the last 4 months. The idea that this is going to be ready to go Pro in less than a year seems very dubious to me. I’m glad your so confident.
“and even if Apple had tried really hard, importing sequences from FCP 7 was never going to be more than approximate, with an entirely different rendering engine, a different library of effects/transitions, different clip parameters, etc.”
If Premiere Pro can open a FCP project perfectly using XML, then FCPX could have done the same as long as they hadn’t arbitrarily decided to change the traditional multi-track system. And even so, a translation that wasn’t perfect in terms of transitions and effects would have been better than nothing.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
Exact video and audio placement in the timeline (or project) would be sufficient, even if the transitions, EFX, and titles aren’t perfect. Let the editor worry about the relationships and what they mean.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions