Jeff Kirkland
Forum Replies Created
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[Sascha Engel] ” The media management is the only thing, that stroke me very inflexible and unforgiving so it’s important to me, that I launch the project the absolute right way first”
Pleased to hear you’re not just rushing in 🙂 I’m a trained educator so I always get concerned if it seems people may have jumped in without paying attention to the basics first.
Regarding media management… if we’re talking about dealing with files and folders on the hard drive then yes, FCPX is quite inflexible. If we are talking organising the media inside FCPX before you start to edit, then it’s one of the best.
Everybody has their own methods. I personally just get FCPX to copy media into the event folder and let it handle everything. I have far less issues that way. Some prefer to do all their organising as folders at the Finder level and just link to them in FCPX.
Either way is fine but it’s important to remember that FCPX isn’t good a re-linking and is very unforgiving of anything that changes a file – so no matter what you do, once imported you should try to never mess with those files outside of FCPX again.
Organising media and metadata may not be especially exciting but it’s generally the key to FCPX success. However you choose to organise your imported files, once they’re in forget about the files on the hard drive, everything revolves around ranges, favourites, keywords and tags inside the event library.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
Hi Sascha,
No offense intended, and I’m all for jumping in off the deep end, but it strikes me that most of these questions are really foundation ‘how do I actually use this app’ questions – and makes me think you would do well to invest in some training before you get to much further down the major project path. Ripple Training, Lynda.com and others have great courses and it will be time well spent.
While all the good folks here can offer lots of useful advice on workflows, plugins, and FCPX basics, we can only really tell you what works for our own projects and needs – it’s could easily be a short road to disaster if you start any large project without understanding enough about how the application works to be able to pick and choose the right bits of workflow for your specific needs.
Happy to keep on helping and answering questions but maybe just some food for thought… I’d much rather see you have a great FCPX experience than get half way through a project and hit a brick wall because you missed some important foundation step at the start.
Cheers
Jeff KJeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
Once the plugin is installed, you should be able to just bring the footage in using the FCPX media import window.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
Having just done a clean install of my FCPX system, I can say that the effects that made the cut are Magic Bullet Looks and Neat Video Noise Reduction. I have plenty of others both paid and free but those two are my must have plugins.
I also pretty much always Event Manager X and Xto7 installed, along with Clip Exporter to get things out to After Effects.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
As always, it’s whatever works for you. All methods mentioned here are perfectly valid. I prefer the compound clip snapshots because I find that hitting a couple of keystrokes, giving the snapshot a name,then using another keyboard command to break it apart, is less disruptive to my editing than exiting the timeline, duplicating and then coming back in. Plus I can snapshot just part of the timeline if that’s all I need to do.
Which is not to say I never duplicate projects but I personally prefer not to have a cluttered project browser.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
Initial reports are that the import to Logic isn’t all that great. It doesn’t understand roles and has a tendency to put each audio clip on its own track because of that. Looks like it might be better to hang back until they get another update out.
Having said that, I’ll probably still get it just because I’m still using Logic 7 and its about time I had an excuse to update.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
Another thought along the alpha channel lines could be to play with compositing modes.
If all else fails you might try creating a custom dissolve transition in Motion that does what you need. You should be able to open the existing one in Motion and hopefully “fix” whatever is causing the issue.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
I’m not sure I see how creating a compound clip as a snapshot of the current state of a project can slow down the system. It’s just sitting in an event minding its own business, not actually being used anywhere unless you decide to access it’s contents to revert some or all of your project, and then you’re adding the contents of the clip, not the compound clip itself.
Which is not to say there’s anything wrong with duplicating the project or using a backup app or whatever works but I have a 90 minute multicam concert project in front of me that has eleven compound clips in an event as snapshots of my progress and I don’t see any signs of the system slowing down.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
I agree with you – but things like the title templates are great if the budget is low and I get to add a little extra production value that wouldn’t otherwise be there. I’d argue that it’s not prosumer to provide them, just maybe a little prosumer to use them. But guilty as charged. Any port in a storm or low budget edit 🙂
For me FCPX is the cornerstone. All edits start here, and I don’t think there’s anything much I wouldn’t edit in X. Then it’s off to Smoke, or Resolve, or After Effects, or whatever else. As you say, there’s no one application these days.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland -
Maybe think of compound clips as virtual clips rather than nested clips. You can open them to edit the contents and make changes globally to every instance, or you can add them to a timeline, break them apart and use them as pseudo templates.. They have lots of uses.
I take a snapshot by turning my timeline into a compound clip. I then immediately break that clip apart again, which breaks the relationship with the new compound clip. I can now edit, play with ideas or whatever. If I need to restore to my snapshot timeline, I can delete the current timeline, edit in the snapshot compound clip, break it apart and be back to where I was before I began playing.
Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland