[Jason Porthouse]

So here’s my twopennorth. I’ve decided to become an agnostic editor. It’s easier for me as I tend toward ob doc work, that is largely cuts only. Every once in a while I’ll treat myself to a dissolve.

X – well I really enjoy cutting on it. And directors I’ve worked with, once they’ve got over their initial fear (you mean it’s not an Avid?) love it too – they seem to have much more of a handle on the UI in terms of understanding what I’m doing, and the organisational power seems to mean they have a better handle on the footage. 7, Avid and Premiere all seem very opaque in comparison – their UI’s work against understanding for non-editors.

Avid – now the tool I do most paid work on. And it does work – even though it can be hideously clunky (AMA I’m looking at you…) it seems to have solidity. I can understand how post houses feel comfortable with that. It’s not too bad for my type of editing – the mode and smart tools work well enough and trimming is fine – but I like a more tactile timeline so X and 7 still win here for me. There are still many many things that MC does well, and I can’t see it being replaced anytime soon. But god help me if I have to do any heavy graphics-based work on it – the whole nesting effects thing still brings me out in a cold sweat and I realise how much of a paradigm shift FCPs effects handling was when it launched.

Premiere I’m going to have to learn, if only because quite a few people over here are turning to it as far as in-house units are going, presumably because of no need to ditch hardware. The limited amount I have played with PP7 it was impressive but not immediately slick – but again I don’t have the experience on it to really comment.

FCP7 still ticks many of the boxes – responsive timeline, easily accessible tools – so I still cut on that if I have the choice between that and Avid. It’ll be fine for some time to come for many of the projects I do.

So working across many NLEs seem to be the way of the world for us freelancers, though I have a sneaking suspicion that if they can fix issues around sluggishness and some of the odd UI stuff in X it’s metadata capabilities will turn a few heads towards it in years to come, and with the advent of proper XML support there may be many more using it as a logging/first rough cut tool before moving on to something like Resolve for a polish.

So I do switch, back and forth as the job entails. Where I can I’ll use X – if it’s the right tool for the job – and if not, one of the others will suffice. Aside from the annoyance of muscle memory errors, I don’t find switching that troublesome any more…

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

Post-It notes are my favoured analogue metadata – lots and lots of them. Gotta get decent ones, mind, as the glue lasts longer and they stay sticky. I use a different colour for each story strand (I’m often cutting docs with multiple strands) or character, and name each scene on notes as a kind of nonlinear shorthand script. It’s really easy to be able to change stuff around, and see the spread of stories across the arc of a film or series – you can see if one story dominates or is too long before returning to the fore. Most directors I’ve worked with think it’s nuts for about 5 minutes and then become instant converts.

I can’t see any software or e-device replacing them.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

I would welcome some kind of story level range marking. I often cut docs with ‘scenes’ in mind, and the ability to quickly re-arrange those scenes to try out new story arrangements would be great, even if some finessing of the joins was needed later. It’s kind of formalising my ‘post-it note’ method of working out the arc of the narrative.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

Bill, the trouble is when they re-paved the parking lot they forgot to paint lines on to tell people where to park, and the arrows directing them round. And they installed a big, big magnet at one end of the lot. Now it’s just chaos, cars ten deep unable to move and nobody knows where any of the keys are…

(said with tongue firmly in cheek)

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

I’ve had similar on a 10.9.2 system – specifically spacebar (or any play controls) not working until you click on a different project or reload the current one. Other little niggly things too that make using it quite frustrating at times.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

That was lovely. It would’ve been perfect if the mother had become a born again biker chick at the end, but you can’t have it all 😉

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

I think it’s great. Humourous, sassy and a good example of something that would have looked pants just a few short years ago given their (probably small) budget.

More power to their peaceful bellies, I say!

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

[alban egger] “Waveforms: do you have enough RAM ? 16 GBmin! And when you import clips FCPX takes a while “rendering” the waveforms, although the import is basically done. When you cancel X while this process is still working, then you might have your issue.

Beachballs: when I use a fast RAID I never see it. When I use FW800 drives they occur often.”

Hi Alban, yes to the RAM – 20 gigs at the moment. It’s not the rendering – its that skimming the clip plays audio that doesn’t match the waveform under the skimmer at that moment. So I use skimming for fine audio edits – it’s great tp be able to rock back and forth over audio slowly to get sub-frame accuracy. But there’s a disconnect between what your seeing on screen (using the waveforms for a visual guide) and what’s heard. It makes for a confusing experience until you learn what to trust (the waveforms NOT the audio)

Beachball wise – it’s a Thunderbolt G-Raid so no issues there. It starts to get worse after 3 or 4 hours – move a clip in the timeline – beach ball. Raise volume – beach ball Basically any action will cause it – then it may be OK for 5 or 6 actions, then back again. Quit and restart seems to cure it for a while. I think it’s doing something to the database and that’s locking up X in the meantime. But that’s just a guess.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

I did wonder about the RAM – I might pull two sticks to see if it helps. Also I noticed a CUDA driver has installed itself (part of Resolve I believe) – could this be conflicting? Can’t seem to find it to uninstall – and it renders (no pun intended) Resolve unusable – not that this matters particularly…

Try this on your systems too and see if the same behaviour happens:

Grade a shot. Then add another colour adjustment with a mask – pull the exposure just on the outside of the mask for a vignette. Then copy that colour attribute and paste it – if I do that I get a completely mangled grade on the next shot, centre almost black as if the grade’s been reversed. So something’s being corrupted in the translation from one to another.

It’s not the biggest issue, and I think that the colour board can give some very nice looks far far quicker than Legacy 3-way, but it looks bad when you do it in front of a client and it’s obviously corrupted. So I grade each individually if they have multiple adjustments and hope they don’t notice I’m not cutting and pasting…

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

[Jason Porthouse]

Thanks for all the pointers. It’s interesting because they’re repeating faults but not consistent, which makes me think sloppy code rather than workflow – but I’m open to being wrong. I’d rather not transcode but will try and see if that makes a difference.

Here’s another – just cutting in a sequence when the spacebar refuses to ‘play’ – and then the Play key, and icon on screen does too. I can skim clips but the sequence is ‘stalled’ and I have to load another then reload the one I’m working on to be able to play it.

Again this is stuff I’ve had with multiple formats across multiple systems, so it’s not just system optimisation. I will report them as I’d love to get these and others fixed, just to have that solidity of editing experience.

Mindy you – cutting on Avid last week and I had maybe 2 crashes a day where the app just disappeared – no warning message, just cut to the desktop. That in a major London post house too, so no excuse in the setup.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.