[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “Your vision of editing is clear, Herb.”

To me it is, however you seem to see me as through a glass, darkly.

[Bill Davis] “Editing is a thing that happens in a “shop.”
The “shop” determines how and what you edit, the tools you use, and sees video editors as worker cogs – it’s a perfectly valid 18th century mechanical/industrial era workforce model – and yes, it still works just fine today.”

I have worked in “shops” as you described, but the majority of my time I’ve been editing at home, working with virtual editing teams before the internet existed, connected by Fax and FedEx and all this back when you were still a VO guy.

[Bill Davis] “Teams which may (or may not) be fixed in time, place, or area of focus. Instead they remain as fluid and flexible as the internet. They require a new structure. New thinking. And perhaps yes, even new tools.”

See above, tell me something new. For the past 10 years I have been working with a variable team of producers, editors, gfx designers and vo talent that don’t live within 300 miles of each other, some of whom I’ve never met in person.

And new tools would be nice – actually bringing back some old tools would be nicer still. Using Apple’s Chat feature I used to be able to screen a project with an editor 3000 miles away, both of us able to see both the sequence and the timeline as we talked through the edit, stopping to try out new variations as we carried on our virtual editing session. Apple gave up on this many years ago, unfortunately, and I don’t find Skyping nearly as efficient – so please, let’s go forward by bringing back the past, and then maybe Avid editors will get ScriptSync back.

[Bill Davis] “Perhaps over the next 5 years you’ll get even more features lifted directly from X and added to Premiere than you did in this “upgrade”! If they work as well as they do in X, you’ll really, really enjoy them, trust me!”

I would hope so. Many innovative features eventually show up in competing software. Maybe, some day, X will have built in Spectral Analysis. You’ll really enjoy it, believe me.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Scott Witthaus] “[Herb Sevush] “and every time you bought a copy of X you got a copy of 7. ”

Sorry, but this makes no sense. Why in the hell would you do that?”

It was to encourage users to get on board early with X while still having a fallback with Legacy to fulfill those immediate requirements that X version v1.0 couldn’t handle.

[Scott Witthaus] ” It’s more popular, it’s bringing more people into editing than ever were before. People who have never used an editor before find Final Cut X much easier to learn than Final Cut 7″

I understand why a software maker might care, but why would you or I care how easy or hard it was for newbie editors to learn. We’re not newbies and when I hire young editors it’s their problem, not mine, how long it takes them to figure things out.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “Hard to assess whether you might need it, if you don’t really understand what it actually does.”

Maybe, but in many situations you’re forced to make a decision on incomplete information. It would be lovely to have 3 months to asses every decision, both personal and professional, but that’s not often the case.

In my specific case the whole “keywording” thing is pretty much besides the point. All the data I need is contained in the names of my clips (C13R_205 is a Recipe clip from episode 13 from camera C and is the 205th clip shot during production) and the continuity notes I have, (it’a actually a large loose leaf binder)- I need nothing else to find any clip from any angle from any show. All of this work is done in production before I ever transfer a shot to my hard drives, let alone open them in an NLE. So what’s for me to Keyword? Everything about that take is noted and cross referenced in my binder – it would take more time to enter the information than it does to just look it up.

What I do use extensively is a track mixer, with bussing, that will let me add eq and compression settings, as well as level and pan settings, on a track basis. This allows me to change the nature of any part of a clip from Dialogue to EFX and back again simply by changing what track it’s playing on.

I have never had an issue with moving clips, or groups of clips, around a tracked timeline but I do have a strong preference for working with my video unattached to my audio linked only by a sync indicator.

While I prefer to do most of my compositing within my NLE my producer likes to use third party graphic designers to create graphic elements and these are always sent to me as AE project files – (when I was working in Legacy I would request Motion templates but this never happened.)

So looking at my needs, which NLE should I try first?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “That an individual editor would prioritize conditioned comfort, familiarity and a shallower learning curve higher than transitional stress and a potential boost in efficiency is both rational and defensible.”

We are almost there Bill – now just imagine an editor who doesn’t care about conditioned comfort, who’s fine with transitional stress, but who looks at his project and notices that X doesn’t prioritize what he needs and would be a lower efficiency choice than another NLE – if you can acknowledge that such a person and such a workflow exists, then we’ve arrived.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “but the reality is that I still hear voices from the two fringe poles. That either A) Apple ruined it with the total re-write and all the new ideas – or; B) it’s really largely just the same as all its competitors, no better or worse. These are mutually exclusive concepts, and both wrong IMO.”

Let’s discuss B for a moment.

You always react strongly when someone says that such-and-such a function can be done in other NLE’s as well. If you stop and think about it, this will always be true – editing is editing, the work requires certain functions, and any NLE that is used for professional purposes will have to be able to perform those functions. The difference between NLE’s is in how they prioritize those functions, not in whether they can accomplish them – they can all accomplish them.

What makes X unique are the priorities they established – speed of moving clips around a timeline with the ability to attach groups of media together as they move, enhancing search speed by use of keywords, ease of maintaining sync, etc. These benefits come from prioritizing those features at the expense of lowering the priorities of things like visual coherence, ease of track mixing, etc. Therefore it should not come as a shock when someone claims another NLE can do certain X functions, the question is whether they can do it as well.

My guess is you would find that X will do what it prioritizes better and faster than other systems do, while Avid, Ppro, etc will concurrently do the things they prioritize faster than X does, even though, as you demonstrated, that X “can” be used in a more traditional way as well.

All NLE’s can be made to do the same sort of things, it is in the way they prioritize their features that the differences lie, and it is in learning which one’s priorities most closely match your own that happiness in editing lies.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “Pardon me but you are still re-casting my point exclusively and narrowly from a point of view I don’t share.
You are stuck thinking about how X supposedly demands you to adapt to it. Let make this crystal clear. It does not.”

We seem to be talking at cross purposes here Bill. I agree with everything you say in this post. I do not think X forces you to do anything, I think it, like all other NLEs, allows you to work in a variety of styles. I’ve said this in all my posts, I can’t make this any clearer.

I was not discussing X, I was discussing YOU, and not in any sort of disparaging way, I hope. I was merely pointing out that you have an oft stated preference for “pre-editing” or “editing-in-the-browser” which X apparently is very efficient at. I was stating that this is something that holds little interest for me as a workflow, especially as it pertains to making very “tight” decisions early in the editing process. As in most aspects of what we talk about here, one persons strength is another persons weakness.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Scott Witthaus] ” I am not sure what delaying these ideas in todays NLE world brings to the table.”

In Bill’s example he talked about the speed efficiency of making his initial selects so tight that he would loose the eye blink before the next line. I don’t want my initial selects to be that tight, I prefer to keep things as loose as possible till I have to make my final decisions – this way I’m always looking at and reviewing as much as possible. I like to keep it loose and whittle it down slowly, I realize other’s do not have the same approach.

None of this has anything specifically to do with X or Avid or any other NLE – these are basic workflow techniques and I could work my way as well with one editor as another.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “Again, Herb the way you imagine editing in X is not the way it actually works.”

I wasn’t talking about the way X works, but rather about your description of your own workflow. You put a premium on storing edit “decisions” before you begin to edit. Now obviously any NLE will allow you to change your mind and access material you might have discarded at some point, and so my observation about editing are tool agnostic, I’m simply suggesting that delaying decision making might be more important for your projects health than you might think.

The more intelligent the species, generally speaking, the longer the maturation age of the individual — perhaps there is something lost by going too fast.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “We all know that X is annoying because is so different from anything that’s come before it – causing years of “hair on fire” consternation and woe – and yet, miraculously, still everything IT can do- is fully and utterly possible in every other NLE.”

We all know that X is simple and instinctive to use and yet it takes months to “get your head around”, fortunately for Mr. Davis, who is expecting a windfall of profits for being ahead in the learning curve of the easiest of all NLE’s to learn.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

Removing the eye blink when you first review your material may foster some kind of efficiency but only at the cost of making an important decision out of context – maybe the blink is a key to character, not merely something to be avoided as an ironclad rule of editing.

The most important task of an editor is to become as familiar with their material as possible – and that means all their material, the good, the bad, the seemingly pointless; so when the time comes to make a decision “in context” you have all your options open, having committed to nothing. “No wine before it’s time”, no decision made before you have to; it is only during the process of editing that any moment’s importance will be revealed – “deciding the spine is the process of editing.”

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf