Jeff Markgraf
Forum Replies Created
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Oliver –
I agree on all points. Yes, EditBox was 20 years ago. That’s partly my point. I think it was slightly ahead of its time, which partly accounted for its relatively poor market penetration. Don’t misunderstand – I have nothing but respect for what Quantel has done. Henry and Hal set a very high bar, and the newer Pablo and other such systems are equally great products.
Bringing this back to the UI issue, EditBox came around at a time when I think UI options were being more creatively explored. I’ll point again to Henry and Hal, which were kinda in their own world. EditBox went its own way. Video Cube was pretty different from Avid. Even in the linear world, Sony’s edit controller was very different from the CMX/Grass Valley style. So was the Ampex Ace Micro, for that matter.
In the years since then, I think the NLE UI has pretty much calcified into the form seen in Avid, Fcp legacy, PPro and a host of others that have come and gone. For all the much-argued-over differences, these are far more alike than different. Absent the custom controller, even Lightworks hews pretty closely to the standard model. Only FCP X seems to be exploring anything truly different, and only in fairly superficial ways. I mean, consider all the ink spilled over having only 1 source/record window: it seems silly, at least to old online guys, who almost always only had 1 picture monitor that switched between source and record as needed. Hardly revolutionary or unprecedented, but such angst…
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Hi Oliver.
I’m definitely making an assumption here. Quantel never got much penetration with the Edit Box. The reason I suggest cost and marketing as the issue is that I don’t think they ever properly identified their market. At that time, Avid was really making headway toward being broadcast capable (and broadcast -accepted-, which was perhaps the tougher nut to crack). Linear online still ruled, even if only for a few more years. Quantel always seemed to live in that no-man’s land between online and offline. Not many Avid editors could figure out the Edit Box, and they didn’t need to know it to get work, so freelancers were hard to come by. At the same time, it seemed only high-end facilities or show-specific dedicated edit bays could afford the Box. (All the Edit Box guys I knew were converted linear online editors.) So it really seemed the “neither fish nor fowl” concept applied. More of an early “finishing” platform, like Smoke or DS or Flame, with better editing capability but with fewer effects and compositing capabilities. (Hmm, sounds like Resolve maybe?)
Anyway, I always found that vertical filmstrip UI interesting.
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Peter, I have to say I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry in response to your post. Maybe both.
I do feel your pain, having once been forced to fight with the truly awful d/Vision NLE back in the day. The difference is that d/Vision never stopped being the nightmare editor it was born to be. Whereas I’ve had more fun editing on X than I’ve had in decades of the other guys. But it wasn’t a quick and easy transition.
Yes, the renaming of certain functions and concepts might seem a bit forced. Calling a project an event (sort of) and a timeline or sequence a project – really? Kinda silly, but they’re just labels. And most of the other nomenclature makes sense once you’ve made sense of the way X wants to do things. (Yes, I know it’s just software and it’s not really a living thing with motivations and personality – just go with me here.) Compound clips, storylines, libraries, etc., all follow a certain logic. Not Avid’s logic, or my friend Dean’s logic, necessarily, but X’s logic.
The hardest thing to do with X is to stop trying to make it be FCP 7 or Avid or whatever other NLE you currently know. It isn’t any of those things. When I first encountered FCP Legacy (version 1.2!), I spent a few hours trying to make it be an Avid. Then I tried to make it be a Video Cube. When I finally got tired of that nonsense, it turned out to work very well at being FCP.
Well, X is more of a change from FCP (“Legacy”) than FCP ever was different from Avid or Premiere or even the dreaded d/Vision (may it burn in the eternal flames of dead-NLE hell). Come to think of it, X has more in common with the Video Cube than any of the others (maybe Edit Box, too?). And the Avid boys (aka, many of my colleagues) hated the Cube more than they hated FCP!
Regarding the UI (and I mean this in the nicest possible way): Get over it. It is what it is. And it actually works pretty well. I use one monitor and a picture monitor. Everything fits fine. When I go back to Avid or Legacy, the virtual requirement for 2 monitors annoys me. But they are what they are, and it would be foolish to try to make them behave like X.
Regarding finder tags and color coding: so what? Why is that such a deal breaker? Real question, not snark. I do my tagging and organizing in the NLE. And I can tag and color code all I want in finder, then drag directly into X to import if seeing the files in finder is important for some reason.
Timeline editing – which is to say, “track-based timeline editing” in the style of PPro, Legacy, Avid, Edius, EMC and other NLEs (as well as Pro Tools and the late, lamented Avid Audiovision) dating back to the 90s: you’re right. It wasn’t broken. But neither was/is it holy writ. It’s one way of working. But it’s not the only way of working, and X makes a valid argument that it’s not necessarily the best way of working. Quantel certainly didn’t think so, since they made the Edit Box (killed more by high price and poor marketing that by any lack of capability or suitability to its task). Yes, it’s a Pro Tools world in audio these days, much to the chagrin of anyone who loved the Fairlight system (cf. Michael Gissing and others on the Cow). Tracks don’t scare me, and I work with them all the time. But decades of “track Tetris” surely does make me appreciate not having to worry about it in X. And X2Pro gets the audio into the world of tracks (Pro Tools, et al) pretty simply.
As someone who has to “review, scope, slice, dice, process, demo” (and so forth) 4k and raw footage, I should think you’d be happy as the proverbial clam at high tide with X. It’s made for all that right out of the box. The proxy workflow for R3D and the like is built right in. Scopes, broadcast out, basic color correction, high-end effects (either built in or from plugins, the vast majority of which are less than 50 bucks) – what’s the problem? PPro seems to handle it all just fine, too. Avid still makes you wish you were dead with anything above HD video transcoded to their DnX codec, but they’re getting there.
Regarding hardware: any current NLE needs current hardware. Period. Especially for 4k and raw footage. Not sure why this is a perceived problem with X. Or am I misunderstanding? And $300 is pretty cheap for an NLE. Cheaper than the other guys by quite a margin. And, as you point out, no subscription. Again, what’s not to like?
In the end, being pissed off about what something is called or not being able to move/resize a window “just so” to one’s liking seems counter-productive. Trying to make one piece of software act like another is a recipe for frustration and wasted time. Been there, done that. And, frankly, anyone who is smart enough to learn one NLE (e.g., you and me and anyone else on this forum) is smart enough to learn another NLE. All the rest is just chit chat, some fun gossip and theorizing about corporate motivations, and often a bit of silly posturing and politics.
I’m happy to cut professional broadcast product on Avid or FCP Legacy. Less happy to do so on PPro, but whatever. But downright tickled to death to cut it on X. Seriously. It really is that much more enjoyable. For me. And for many others. Possibly for you, too, at some point in the future.
End of counter rant. We now return to our regularly scheduled Bill Davis bash session. (Yup…Loves me some Bill Davis…I really do.)
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Full size Apple keyboard (preferably with custom keycaps for whichever NLE I’m using) and a Wacom tablet (set up in “mouse” mode). My old-man wrist joints can’t take using the mouse for long periods anymore.
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Uh oh. Must not mention experience or awards, lest the “get off my lawn!” set start yelling in righteous (ALL CAPS) indignation.
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So…all is now well. Thanks for the suggestions, Jeremy.
Regarding the ATTO driver, ATTO knows this driver is broken in Yosemite. But it’s for a discontinued card, so no replacement. Plus a new card would be something like $1200. Totally not worth it.
At your suggestion I did reinstall the R3D FCP plugin. No immediate change. And the reimport from camera archive never worked, as the option remained greyed out.
As it turned out, I tried relinking smaller groups of files and pointing to the RDM enclosing folder of at least one file. FCP then relinked the group with no problem except sometimes needing to point to a new folder for some stragglers. Often, FCP would find over a hundred files in different folders with no problem…go figure.
So everything is now relinked, including proxies. Some proxies had to be regenerated for some reason. I’m sure there is some better way to do all this, but at least it’s done. And the whole episode kind of forced me to get a new TBolt 2 raid, which is totally sweet.
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Hi Darren.
My tech guy at the facility where I did the transfer says Chronosynch just checks each file and tries again to copy it, then prints a log of any failures. But I can try checking with the company that makes it, as they are apparently very responsive.
As far as r3d files, I wonder if the fact that each clip in in its own enclosing folder is making FCP hiccup. The reason for the folders is that one file may actually be 2 or 3 spanned files within the folder. When I import the files, FCP seems to know how to go into each folder and make one file out of the pieces. The folder has the same name as the file. I wonder of relinking doesn’t know to drill into the folder, and is getting confused by the folder having the identical name as the file? Because I can relink one file at a time by locating the file name with a “_001” appended to it and selecting it.
Hmm.
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Sorry. 10.1.whatever. The most recent update. Running on a MacBook Pro Retina 15. Yosemite (update, not a clean install).
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Dave, you jogged my memory with your post. I remember having to do a driver reinstall once before with an update. So I uninstalled and then reinstalled the latest Kona 3 driver. Lo and behold, everything works just fine now. Video output is back. Yay.
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My scenario assumes coloring in Resolve. Now, I’ve never used Resolve, so maybe I misunderstand the workflow. If I send my finished FCP edit to Resolve via XML, does it not deal with the original R3D files on my raid? If so, then why do the intermediate RedCine step?