Jok Daniel
Forum Replies Created
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Horses for courses. Personally I think that Avid has an undeservedly bad reputation when it comes to effects. AniMatte, Paint, 3d Warp, SpectraMatte and the tracking tools are all very useful, and way more sophisticated than any of the stock FCP7 effects (8-point garbage matte anyone?)
For the kind of work which is the subject of this thread – creative offline editorial – Avid is still a perfect fit IMHO. For all the hype about Premiere and FCP, they still suck at basic editing tasks such as trimming. I suspect that is the real reason Hollywood editors prefer Avid (and, to a lesser extent, Lightworks).
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FYI, Avid released MC 7.0.3 today, with support for Mavericks (10.9 and 10.9.1).
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[Shawn Miller] “I have had days (in the past) where the company I worked for charged a client $100.00 an hour for me to prep graphics for an Avid edit (3 minute interview)… and then later that day, charged a different client $35.00 an hour for me to edit, create graphics for and encode a three minute talking head video. Guess which was for an agency, and which was a corporate piece. :-)”
Sure, different types of productions have different needs, and that will be reflected in the going rates of their respective markets. Big budget agency work (e.g. a commercial starring a celebrity, as in the OP) is a long hours, tight deadlines, high stakes kind of market. That is reflected in the rates.
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[Herb Sevush] “I haven’t worked on spots in over 20 years but unless things have changed radically this was an open joke known to everyone but the clients.”
You really don’t think that clients would have sussed it over the course of those 20 years? In fact, wouldn’t this “open joke” represent a fantastic business opportunity for anyone willing to clue them in? So where are all the upstart companies producing top commercial work at corporate rates?
Just like in any other market, you get what you pay for. Simple as that.
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I edit a lot of this kind of stuff, so hopefully I can provide some insight.
First of all, digital cameras mean a lot of material. If you want every shot to be perfect, you need to shoot a lot. Especially if you’re shooting cars, animals or working with less experienced actors (e.g. amateurs or models). All common scenarios in advertising.
On an average job, I get about three times as much material today compared to say five years ago, when commercials used to be shot on film. For a 30-60 second spot, that means several hours worth of rushes. Usually around five but anything up to maybe 25 hours.
Viewing rushes is real time. No software in the world can change that. Making a selects roll takes me anything from 150%-200% of real time. So the first day or two on a job is typically spent just watching and selecting material. If you want to do a good job, you need to know your material, and that means watching it properly i.e. no “skimming”, “hover scrub” or other cheats.
Assembling the edit is the quickest part of the process. Usually no more than an hour or so.
The next couple of days are typically spent working with the director, refining and/or exploring different editorial options. And constantly going back to the rushes, looking for new angles on the material, really getting to know it inside out.
We would probably be listening to a lot of different music, trying it against picture. And we would be building a temp sound edit as we go along. A lot of ads are shot without sound, so that means building the track from scratch. If the spot is effects heavy, we would probably already be working with the post house, sending edits back and forth, incorporating temp effects etc. Usually, we also have to edit several different lengths, e.g. a 60″, 30″ and 20″ version.
Once the director is happy, the agency will want to spend anything from a day to a week (or more) in the editing room, exploring different options and sometimes making tens or even hundreds of versions in the process. The edits will then move through the agency approval hierarchy until finally locked and presented to the client.
Add anything from a day up to a week for the spots to make it through client approval and revisions.
That’s how you spend several weeks cutting a seemingly simple commercial. And incidentally, that is also why I am extremely skeptical of the huge time saving claims made by some FCPX fans. In my world at least, the “speed” of the software is simply not a major factor. I can already edit almost as fast as I can think, it’s all the other stuff that takes time – watching and re-watching the footage, and working with people (who are generally way slower than any half decent NLE).
At the end of the day, I really do think that all this time is well spent. I could easily edit a 30″ spot in an afternoon (and no doubt FCPX would be a good and fast tool for such a job). But how could I possibly be sure that I got the best out of the material, especially if there’s 25 hours of it?
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[Walter Soyka] “For me, the significant difference with FCPX is the Gmail-style “search, don’t sort” mentality, with smart collections acting as saved searches.
From the user’s perspective, this is a very significant difference with how they interact with their footage.”
It is different, but not necessarily all that new. In some ways, it reminds me of how Lightworks operates. In Lightworks, all clips live in a database, and whatever you see in your bins are just representations of the underlying clips. In fact, in original Lightworks lingo (since abandoned), bins were called “galleries”, which is actually more descriptive of their functionality and somewhat analogous to collections.
Lightworks makes it very easy to have multiple instances of the same clip living in different bins. Bins are used for everything, but they are not necessarily permanent, and you can use them as a kind of temporary workspace if you wish. Search results, imports etc are all presented to the user in transient bins that can be made permanent by renaming them. Closing a transient bin deletes it, but it does not delete the underlying clips – they are still in the database, and can be searched for and put into new bins. (Searches are not dynamic however, i.e. search result bins don’t auto-update with newly added clips like they do with FCPX smart collections.)
The cool thing about Lightworks is that clips and sequences are pretty much interchangeable, and so are sequences and bins. A clip can easily be turned into a sequence, which can then be turned into a bin, populated with all the clips in the sequence. And going the other way is just as easy. Everything opens up in its own viewer (if you wish), and everything has its own timeline. You can play clips straight from the bin, or open up multiple timelines or viewers side by side. Cut sequences into other sequences, or even into other clips, which turns them into sequences themselves. The original clips are still in the database from where they can be retrieved at any time.
The result is a very fluid and malleable workspace, where you can approach each task as you see fit. You can easily edit scenes “storyboard style” in a bin, and then turn them into sequences with a few clicks. Or make a timeline of selects, which can then be turned into separate clips in a transient or permanent bin. It’s a really beautiful and in some ways surpisingly modern feeling system that should appeal to a lot of creative editors. And it’s all about metadata, just like FCPX.
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[Oliver Peters] “My solution to Smart Tool is to enable all of the tool functions. Have it normally off and map ST to a hot key, so you can turn it on when you need it. Also set your settings so that it disables when you click the TC ruler. This way, one click enables any of the functions and when you go to scrub the timeline, it automatically is disengaged. Then the operation feels more or less like clicking a tool key in FCP7.”
This is pretty much how I work too. I never understood why people make such a fuss about modes. What is the operational difference between modes and tools anyway? In FCP7 there’s a gazillion single-purpose tools that you constantly need to switch between. Very annoying. With Avid’s Smart Tool, switching between modes is pretty much transparent, and you get the benefit of a proper trim mode.
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[Bret Williams] “Why wouldn’t you just delete the clip? Or video portion of the clip? Still seems bizarre.”
A trim tool that requires me to manually delete clips to clear space before using it doesn’t sound very useful to me.
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[Chris Harlan] “I’m guessing you don’t use Media Composer, then.”
It’s a very useful feature. It means I can keep trimming back a long clip on V1 even when the associated audio tracks have several shorter clips in the same space.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “yes – but to be precise about this – if you rent that Alexa, the product of your work is unbundled. The camera shot it clean out.”
Good point. The problem is not the subscription model, the problem is the lack of open and well documented file formats in the NLE space.
I am a “cloudie”. The subscription model works for me, but CS6 is not my primary toolset. I mainly use Photoshop, Audition, Media Encoder and Bridge to support the work i do in Avid Media Composer. As long as I stick to standard file formats, I am fine with not owning the tools outright. But I would think twice before adopting a cloud licensed Premiere as my main NLE.