[Keith Koby]

I was referring to copying or moving media from one event to another. It used to dupe. Now it just copies the alias.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

Yes. This is important. Before it would duplicate media.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

Events Metadata vs MAM Metadata

Take a look at what is possible with the Cantemo Portal I referred to earlier… You can have a full length feed clip that you’ve ingested and catalogued into the MAM. That clip can have multiple (overlapping) ranges that have been and annotated in the MAM. You can then export an xml from the MAM that opens FCPX and imports into your event. The clip will have a drop down with all the annotations as keyword collections.

Now lets say you have a whole bunch of clips – different angles or just different clips all referencing the same person or the same action like a gatorade dunk. Collect them in the mam, export the xml and import all of those into an event. Inside the event you not only have your individual clip and it’s ranges, but a way to automatically group all of those labeled ranges into keyword collections. Want to see all of a particular type of highlight from the clips you imported? Simple, click on the keyword collection or search.

So you have the centralized repository in the MAM and the fine tuned area in the NLE for what you are using. The beauty of those keyword ranges is that they are basically little subclips all ready to drop in to the timeline and fine tune. It makes for a very, very fast workflow inside the app. FCPX is nice in that it can really use all of the data you throw at it from the MAM.

What is needed is the ability to add role and sub role information to clips in the mam and then have that carried across via xml.

Roles and Sub Roles…

Roles are another set of metadata tagging that you do in the event and they carry in to the timeline. They give you very powerful handles for finding, selecting, soloing, effecting, correcting etc, all the clips in the timeline. But better, they give you handles for exporting what you want to export.

So if you have your lower thirds and graphics roled as such, you can quickly turn those on or off in the timeline or in the export. You can save your export by role setups as presets! You can group those in the share menu so you can for example easily export a texted and textless master from the same timeline… No duping of sequence and cleanup and re-render necessary. And export is super fast on cheaper hardware (iMacs with thunderbolt dongles etc).

So, first you have your Sr. Editor establish the graphics package as clips and compound clips that are “rolled out” or “rolled up” if you like, in a master event. You export an xml of that Graphics Master Event and put it in a central place on the san and even catalogue it in the mam for quick access.

From here, we are creating another san location for each station or each editor where they put all of their graphics builds. They each can import a complete ready for edit graphics set into their personal san location…

From the point of view of sharing it is better than 7 in that metadata tagging that is made and “shared” via xml is more useful. You just go about the sharing in a different way. I don’t see it currently as a huge advantage or disadvantage on the workflow process. Just an advantage inside the app when you are working with the materials. The framework is there for it to be a huge advantage in the future.

[Keith Koby]

John,

Sorry, I got to this party really, really late. All the wine is gone and there’s been like 4 or 5 fights… I missed a good one!

We are using fcpx in an xsan environment somewhat similar to yours and it works and we are actually finding it very powerful and useful.

Here are the keys:

1.) Keep your media centrally located on the san. Govern finder access with ACLs just as you would today. Not sure how you do it, but we do not use Final Cut Pro Documents structures any more for media org on the san.

2.) Turn off “copy media to the event on import” (paraphrasing) in the fcpx preference’s pane. It’s a preference that you’ll want to manage and teach your editors about in the event that they trash their preferences (just like we had to with certain preferences in 7 in a san environment like scratch etc)…

3.) The directory where you would keep your fcp 7 project files will need a parallel directory on the san for fcpx “san locations”.

Important concept: fcp7 project file = fcpx san location
or a san location is just a folder on the san, so, folder = 7 project

The storage pool on your xsan where this project directory is kept (if you are using affinities and the like in your san setup) needs to be big enough to hold your render files.

4.) In the fcpx project directory that we created above, create a folder for each “project” that you are working on. Add that new directory as a “san location” to one station’s fcpx instance.

5.) Inside of x, select the san location in the event browser and create a new fcpx event in that san location. Do the same in the project area and create a project. Import your media (no copy) into your new event and begin tagging/prepping and then editing in the newly created project (timeline).

6.) San locations are one user at a time, kind of like 7 projects were supposed to be one user at a time. Although in 7 you could open the same project at the same time and clobber someone else’s work if you weren’t careful.

7.) To hand a san location over to someone else, “remove” it from one instance of x, add it to another.

8.) a) To copy a project to another user, like you would copy a 7 project file, create another folder on the san in the fcpx projects directory. Export an xml of your events and projects from the first station, import it on the second into the newly created san location.

8.) b) Jeremy Garchow and I have been discussing other workflows. You can take a project (sequence) and make a compound clip out of it (like a 7 nest but better), and then share the compound clip inside of an event as an xml. The second user can then import it.

Yes a mam can help. Check out Cantemo Portal. We are installing it now.

https://moosystems.com

I suggest them because, being in a similar san environment to your’s with lots of media and “collaboration” (using the same media at the same time at the least), things can get changed and moved. Check out the feature they are adding called CP Media Detection that reads Filesystem Events.

https://moosystems.com/products/moofs-media-detection/

Yes – we too want real project and event sharing inside of X. We also want a good way to get information back out of fcpx back into the mam. It opens many doors when that feature set is available.

I think, though, that a mam would be recommended over putting tens of thousands of clips or hundreds of thousands of clips into a single project (7, X, PP6, whatever – you’ll have problems). Catalogue and centralize that annotation in a mam. Search the mam. Pull what you need into a project and customize from there. You’ll get better performance from the NLE. Cantemo Portal has a way to export an fcpxml directly into fcpx…

So to answer the question of the original post: Events, good or bad?

Events are incredibly powerful if you use them the right way and they work in a collaborative environment. If used in the wrong way in a shared environment (copying files into the event), they can be cumbersome.

Happy Holidays John! If you want to discuss further, I’m sure we have a mutual friend who can put us in touch.

Keith

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

[Chris Lambert] “Not the end of the world if it can’t be done but def submitting this as a suggestion to apple.”

Oh, it will be the end of the world! 7:30 AM tomorrow morning if I’m not mistaken…

If you give all the clips that you want to apply the effect to a particular role or keyword, then you can select all of them in the project timeline with the role selector and then apply the same effect to all.

This would be in the timeline though, not before…

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

Yes. It makes sense. We’ll try the finder route. I’m hoping that intelligent assistant could be updated to recognize san locations to help in the following scenarios:

1.) San Location with lots of projects…

It would be nice to hide some of the projects with a GUI (because I don’t want editors digging in the finder in an fcpx folder structure.)

2.) San Locations without projects…

So if we have San Locations with Events that contain our graphic builds and elements as compound clips and whatnot, but don’t have any projects associated with that San Location, I could hide the San Location icon in the project browser area as to not pollute it with what equates to an icon of an empty drive…

One of my editors is in favor of compounding but I wasn’t quite ready for the scenario when he brought it up. I’ll have to revisit it with him. Being able to export directly from the compounds is helpful though.

Thanks,
Keith

[Keith Koby]

Xsan. We are trying to have one san location for one particular type of monthly promos.

So we might have a couple dozen clips that are in the event. Those are cleaned up and compounded with mix and split audio, slates removed and some edits made in the compound. They are heavily “rolled” out up there in the event. In the same san location we want to keep the timelines “projects” for the variants of each promo. Some variants of graphic overlays are controlled by rolls, so those can go in the same project. Others get timed out differently, so they nee their own. A total of maybe 80 timelines for 20 some sources. Lots of sub folders keeps it nice and tidy.

There is a separate san location that contains the standard graphics event.

I have to get the exact number today from the editor. We hit a wall where everything slowed down. Particularly the process of jumping back and forth between projects.

Moving a couple of projects to a new san location helped. It would be nice if fcpx would let you move folders of projects at the same time instead of just individuals.

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Rabble rousers!”

Insurgents!

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND NETWORKS
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D

[Keith Koby]

There’s a base for a killer sharing app there in fcpx. The adobe sharing thing isn’t real yet and will be expensive because it’s going to require expensive servers to crunch footage into proprietary streaming formats to get it done. I highly doubt apple will role over and play dead.

We actually are finding it just as easy to share with X as it was with 7, if not more easy to share. We can prep graphic layouts with compound clips in an event and export that as an xml. We can do the same for base versions of spots cleaned up and ready for multiple editors to use for different purposes. Just as easy as fcp7 but better because of roles and metadata. We think organization is better than 7 because we have the media shared in a central location outside of the trappings of the legacy FCP Documents folder.

[Keith Koby]

Hey Chris!

I wouldn’t expect you to know me or the brand of the company I work for because we are not consumer facing for the most part, but we are a good sized facility (post-wise) producing a lot of content.

We have 30 odd edit seats and we are moving many of them to X. I can’t give exact numbers until after the new year, but yes we are adopting x.

Keith