Jason Porthouse
Forum Replies Created
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “nothing big – some settings changed, remapped the keyboard slightly.”
OK you owe me a new keyboard now. It wasn’t fair letting me read that just as I’d taken a mouthful of coffee.
😉
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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Another vote for leave as is. This is one of the most vibrant debating forums on the Cow, and where else am I going to find posts from Aindreas that make me laugh so hard coffee comes out of my nose?
BTW Craig, great job on the Skyfall programme. Thouroughly enjoyed it – and good to hear that FCPX is making inroads in to broadcast in the UK. I’d love to cut some broadcast stuff on it, but the Beeb down here are a bit wedded to Avid for that…
Jason
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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[David Lawrence] “1) If a traditional timeline had intelligent groups and a clip layering/overlaping mode such that the editorial results of a clip collision scenario were similar to FCPX, would that give you the benefits of the magnetic timeline?
2) If “FCPX is “aware” of clip relationships in a way that traditional NLEs are not.”, how does that benefit the editor?”
Fascinating discussion David. As to your points:
1) Yes and no. I use lassoing clips to move stuff about in groups pretty regularly, and make room to move sections (say I’m reordering the elements of a programme) by using space in the timeline – I can do this quickly and efficiently using the current mode in Legacy and most other traditional NLEs. Layering may make this quicker in that I wouldn’t have to make space, and I could be confident that my moving stuff would be non-destructive. Grouping essentially would be like a nested section or compound clip in this case, and I can see it’s benefit, but would depend on very clever UI representation to make this efficient – so I guess it would depend entirely on the imlementation and working paradigm that the designer intended.
2)For me it’s a mixed bag. I can see many benefits to the parent/child model that X uses, and that’s very apparent when moving individual shots around, or small clips of shots. Where it becomes less efficient is when X’s idea of what I want to achieve diverges from mine – for instance, moving a shot with attached audio and not wanting to move the audio. It requires a number of steps that ‘traditional’ models don’t, and is therefore less efficient for me and my thinking.
I guess that the main issue with the X/traditional debate for me boils down to my own thought processes. I’ve spent 20 years editing in a linear, fixed time paradigm and have developed a lot of techniques of ordering my thoughts to encompass that – a kind of thinking ‘muscle memory’. X breaks that process and in some instances makes life easier, and others far more difficult for the way I think. Those editors bought up on X and nothing else (and there will be many) will wonder what all the fuss is about, but would also have just as many instances whereby the old paradigm would be more efficient for a given scenario. For me the ideal would be a merger of the two – and maybe grouping/layering would be the most elegant compromise in that case.
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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Well, I’ll offer a counter view. I agree that going to HD would be a smart move – you’ll have a library of footage that is much more saleable if you should ever choose to go down this route. But I’m of a firm view that if something ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You could go to PPro or Avid, but what in your shoes would it achieve? On a professional level you would become familiar with them, but they’re not a million miles different from 7 and you could pick them up pretty quickly. It sounds like there’s no budge for serious hardware upgrades, so I wouldn’t bother. I’ve a very old system at home (the first gen Mac Pro with a Blackmagic Multibridge) and it’s fine still – it’ll cope with 99% of what my clients require (and I’m almost solely HD now) and the most I’ll gain from upgrading is a better render/export time. If this ever became an issue for you a beefy iMac could be used as a render station pretty painlessly…
Meanwhile get hold of X for your home system, learn to love it (and hate it too – I have a kind of schizophrenic relationship with it at the moment) or not and keep a system that works in place at work. Sometimes the best tools are ones that have evolved to fit the job they need to and yours seems to work quite well – don’t add to the stress by changing stuff unnecessarily!
J
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “that is a premium ad campaign right there. premium mental maybe. but premium.
“Aindreas, your talents are wasted for mere broadcast. Dennis, hire this man now!!
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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I’m somewhere in-between both extremes having worked on X on a few projects now. I can see where Carsten is coming from – as a documentary editor I really enjoyed some of X’s features and it definitely made my editing experience more fluid – more time to think story if you will. But there are downside too, and whilst I feel Scott’s post, eloquent though it was, was unnecessarily personal I do agree with some points he made.
FOr me the key with X is that some things it does very well, others are good ideas poorly implemented and some are poor. For me the mag timeline works well – I’ve always been an editor who likes to hold footage in the timeline and X allows me to do it in a very organic way. I loved legacy for this, coming from an Avid background, so once I got my head around the different paradigm I was happy with the new arrangement oveall. I stress overall, because the absence of tracks and some odd (read counter intuitive) behaviours makes some things slower and more cumbersome.
It’s the same for the rest of the app overall. For one job X was far quicker to cut on than 7, and the metadata capabilities were a real boon. For another, it was on a par – some faster and easier, some slower and harder. Would I use X to cut broadcast on? With provisos, yes – and they have mainly to do with timescales and stability issues, and that is my ‘cautious’ head speaking. And, thinking about it, that cuts to the nub of the issue with X for me. Editors are a cautious bunch – it only takes the thought of a machine crash two hours before TX to bring us out in a cold sweat, so we shy away from anything that takes us out of the comfort zone in terms of that which makes our lives easier. And rightly so – there’s good reason and precedent for the way NLEs have matured and evolved over the years. The ‘old’ paradigms for NLE’s are there because they’re tried and tested – we know how 7 responds, we know it’s failings and foibles – same with Media Composer. Dealing with X took me back a bit to the bad old days of cutting on early Avids – shiny, new, prone to failure and way different to 3/4 inch tape and a 9100, but rewarding too. So I’ve added X to my toolbox, and I think increasingly we need to think like this – as one in a set of tools that may, or may not, be the best tool for any given job. We’re all becoming software agnostic in a way, and Apple’s flawed attempt at ‘thinking different’ has, if nothing else, got us thinking and talking about the real meat and bones of our craft.
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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I totally agree Jim, it does feel like a very backward step. My old Fast 601/Silver had a ‘save all the time’ feature – I remember seeing a demo where, in the middle of editing, the guy pulled the plug out of the workstation. Five minutes later, booted up he was back to exactly the point when the plug got pulled. I never lost a thing editing on the Fast. We’ve not come a long way since. Apple should have given the option for added flexibility in where and when Autosave does it’s thing, it’s too much to assume everyone has a Time Machine drive attached.
Hence my reasoning for going old school in terms of backups – its a reflex action born of paranoia from years of experiencing crashes from all sorts of NLEs on all platforms. I’d say that FCP7 was the most stable of all NLEs I’ve used in terms of corruption and crashing, and prior to 10.0.4, X took me right back to the bad old days of regular crashing and potential data loss. Kind of like a bad flashback, only this time it was Media Composer circa 1996 ish rather than the jungles of ‘Nam. I have to say it’s better now though, and I hope Apple are making rock solid stability a priority.
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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[tony west] “This looks like a good habit Jason.”
You need to be organised, as all files have the same name. For Events, I create a backups folder with sub-folders for each project, and a date stamped folder within for each backup. For Projects, I simply drag the Project folder in to my backup, then delete the render folder from the backup to save disk space. Once I’ve done that initially, I’ll just replace the CurrentVersion file and backup folder (providing they’r known good) and that pretty much guarantees a working version is backed up. I do all that at Finder level, without X running. Once you’ve gotten your head around X’s file management structure it’s fairly straightforward, and certainly no more onerous than backing up in legacy. If you do then have to replace the project file, I just drag the corrupt (assuming it is) original to the desktop and replace with the CurrentVersion backup – or, if using X’s own backup file (which is datestamped) I dupe it and rename as ‘CurrentVersion’, then replace. Worked fine for me.
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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When I had issues with a project and event I was cutting in X (caused by a 3rd party messing with something) the backup files saved the day. I couldn’t even open X, the file was that corrupted. BUT, every day at end of play I’d simply copy the backup file into a backups folder – mirroring the structure of the FCP Projects folder. I’d do this with the event too, if substantial changes had been made. I was able easily to pull out the last good backup of both files, rename as ‘CurrentVersion…’ and replace the corrupted files. X opened up fine, no issues, and we were good to go.
I would prefer an incremental autosave, keeping say the last day’s worth of files – and maybe some control over where they saved, or at least the option to nominate 2 save locations. That way a pen drive or external location could be nominated for backup – heck, even iCloud. But having said all that, for a little time spent at the end of each day (I’d always back up FCP7 projects manually at the end of the day to 2 separate locations) the backups I had worked, and got me out of the mire.
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*
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[Bill Davis] “This space is largely for arm wrestling, rambling screeds and low grade, seldom serious character asssasination.”
Can we have this as a subtitle for this forum please mods? It sums us up soooo well 😉
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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.*the artist formally known as Jaymags*