[Jeff Kay]

I’d like to thank all of the posters. Some very good things have been brought up and this is what I have been looking for.

I suppose a little background for the projects on which I work, seeing as the projects and workflow dictate so much of what is extremely useful and what has less value. My primary show is a hunting show. The footage is almost exclusively raw on “set” footage with a huge range of clip length; I’ll end up with 50-200 clips depending upon the show. The other shows I work on are fairly standard 3 angle interviews with 3-7 interviews (counting host open/closes).

The audition function sounds neat. Like the magnetic timeline, it would be great when I use it, but its also something that would just not see much use in my workflow (though I most definitely see how it would be great for other productions).

Being able to adjust audio via sample rather than frame is something I sorely wish I was able to do. It doesn’t come up often, but its something that I have felt is softcoming of current NLE as audio suites are able to do this.

Being able to work natively with more formats is always better. Though I will say that Avid’s AMA is sorely underperforming compared to FC/Premiere, but I do think it performs better than people give it credit for and I am also not nearly as resistant to transcoding as I was before I picked up Avid (I no longer view it as an annoyance but as another tool I can use). Of course I most certainly do wish Avid beefed up its AMA to the level that FC/Premiere have been at and feel like, with most newer NLE features, Avid will be much slower to implement. But I also find some of the multicam comments odd; I think all of the NLEs will do multicam with different formats (or is this in regards to resolution/framerate?).

I am certainly interested in hearing more about the skimmer. I get the idea behind it, but I’m not clear enough on the details of how it works to have an idea of how it would integrate into a workflow (currently I handle long clips with metadata logging and clip markers).

I am also very interested in more specifics of the organization side (keywords, collections, etc). This is one aspect that I think has been glossed over or stated as if it is already understood. I am not personally clear on any differences between it and searching/sifting through current metadata (which is what I use extensively for hunting footage). I side with being overzealous on my organization. Though I find it very odd that they chose to do away with bins rather than having this as a function that can work alongside a bin structure and to say that I am exceedingly wary of giving up bins is an understatement.

I haven’t heard good things about this, but how is FCX in a multi-user environment? I really love Avid’s ability to send and receive bins between users and even different projects.

A different aside: How is FCX in terms of being keyboard driven. Most of the stuff I’ve seen from the software have only been demonstrated as mouse driven. I touch the mouse as little as possible when I edit and much prefer to drive with the keyboard.

[Charlie Austin] “the main reason I think X speeds up my workflow is that all I have to think about is the cut. Like any other NLE, You do your best work when the software melts into the background letting you concentrate on the craft.”

This really is the heart of it. If FCX (or really any NLE) allows an editor to not have to think about the NLE, then its a strong boon. Though, personally, regardless of whether I’m working in MC/Premiere/FC7, I don’t feel that pressure.

[Jeff Kay]

I was hoping for some sort of function or report that would give me a “all media online” or “the following clips are offline”, but both of those feature are very good to know.

[Jeff Kay]

To elaborate. VPE maps a still image onto planes. This creates 3D planes in AE with the still image mapped onto it. Its easiest to see the effect (also by far the easiest to create) for something simple like the corner of a room, or a hallway, something with very obvious perspective. However it doesn’t distinguish between objects or anything in the still image. For instance for a room corner, if there is a chair in the room, then the VPE will map the chair as if it were flat to the wall.

For the effect seen, you would create the VPE, clonestamp/remove any objects that are not meant to be part of the plane, cut out those objects in the original still, and import/place them into the AE composition. The setup of these are by far the biggest part. Once the 3D environment is set up, then its really just camera movement.

[Jeff Kay]

Most of my titles in Marquee take about 15 seconds to go from editing on MC timeline, back to editing on MC timeline. If it takes longer then its because I’m spending time paying attention that the text itself is correct factually and grammatically. There is just no way that AE->MC can approach this level of efficiency.

Well, except for animated titles apparently… At this point I’d rather just not do animated titles than try to bring AE into the workflow.

I certainly don’t think that Marquee is the ‘bees knees’ or whatever the kids say now a days, but I also don’t fully understand a lot of the disdain that it gets. I originally worked on the title tools from Premiere/FCP, and I have found that Marquee is an amazing step beyond those in terms of power, versatility, and speed for still graphics. It has decent provisions in place to create animated graphics, that just apparently falls apart completely at the render.

[Jeff Kay]

Motion track the tip of the pen/pencil. Create a path from that. Apply that path to the brush effect.

Though without knowing a little more about the details its really hard to say as off the top of my head I could think of a few other ways that may work better, or may not work depending upon the shot composition, shot length, picture complexity, etc.

[Jeff Kay]

Its unfortunate to hear that. So far I had been very impressed with Marquee.

I do have AvidFX and have been bringing that into the work process a little bit, but have had little success beyond using effects from the library. There is something at a base level in that software that just isn’t clicking with me; I am pretty darn good with After Effects, but often can’t make heads or tails of AvidFX.

I’m certain AvidFX would make animated titles and of course have far wider range of options than Marquee, but I’m not at all enthusiastic about incorporating it as a title tool.

I’m still on 6.0 and most likely won’t upgrade for another 4 months, so NewBlue isn’t an immediate solution, though I am definitely interested in hearing others feedback from it.

[Jeff Kay]

EDIT: Happens to us more than we like to admit.

[Jeff Kay]

The most important thing is to be aware of how best you, as an individual, learn. Do you learn better from traditional environments? Books or tutorials? Person to person interaction? Trial and error?

For moden motion design specifically, I’d seek out others in the same line of work in your area. Talk with them, have a business lunch, or see if you can take a look at the work they are actually doing.

For AE in general there are several large skillsets that I have (more or less) developed which have served me well.
Existing techniques: What people are currently using. This gives you a good foundation and ability to do the most common things. More importantly existing techniques have been fleshed out and can vastly improve your efficiency

Overall project workflow: Knowing exactly how your part fits in with the overall project is lifesaving. Including learning the other softwares that surround AE and how AE interacts with those.

Reverse engineering: Seeing how others have performed something and then working backwards can lead to learning amazing new things as well as developing variations on that work. Its also very good to be able to reverse engineer your own works for efficiency as well as pushing the limits of what you can do.

Creativity: Its hard to teach creativity and the creativity we use is often very different than what most people think. Our final product is certainly intended to be seen, but the individual steps and methods we use in AE (or other softwares) are designed to not be seen. Our creativity lies in how we get from concept to final product (the layers/keyframes/expressions/effects/etc that we use). The audience is not aware of what we do, but that doesn’t reduce the importance of our creativity.

[Jeff Kay]

AE’s built in encoder is terribly inefficient compared to other options. It takes longer for me to export from AE in H.264 than it does to export RAW from AE and then encode the raw intermediary as H.264 in another encoder.

As far as the RAM goes check this link https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/202/898109#898111 . The listed “used” value of RAM is not necessarily how much RAM is being used by background processes.

[Jeff Kay]

Export raw from AE. Use compression/media encoder/other to encode the large intermediary to the same standards as the rest of the FCP project.