[Mark Morache]

Grrrrrrr.

Wouldn’t be the first thing I missed.
Makes me wonder what else I’ve overlooked.

Thx.

———
Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.

Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

I don’t miss the extra monitor.

I don’t begrudge people who do, and I wouldn’t mind if they gave me the ability to turn it on and off. I value my real estate with the one window.

I’ve had to do some shot matching. It’s not too difficult to stack shots, apply a small scale or opacity to the top clip so you can see two clips in the window, then use the <> keys to bump the top clip, doing the bump/scrub, bump/scrub until you see the action matching.

And lastly…. my goodness! How did movies ever get made working on a moviola? Don’t you just have one viewer window on that? Or a single-screen flatbed?

’nuff said

———
Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.

Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

Naw.

At first I thought of it as Final Cut Pro Ex

then as Final Cut X

Now I think of it as Final Cut Pro Eventually

It’s getting better and better, and little by little everything is starting to line up.

It’s been enough for me to start using it with 10.0.0, and never stop.
It’s only getting better.

I think they should have labelled it as a beta, just like the external monitor function.
They should have NEVER taken FCS3 off the market, and still shouldn’t, as long as it’s still selling any copies at all.

In fact, I think they should either severly discount FCS3, or give it away for free with the purchase of FCPX.

Meanwhile I’m going to continue to exercise my Q, W, E and D fingers with great delight, and look forward to the next release.

———
Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.

Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

Yes indeed. I miss dragging an effect into the bin for use later.

And I miss the ability to copy and paste individual attributes onto clips.

It’s interesting that there are shortcuts I can assign for copying the color settings from the previous or second or third previous clips.

It’s also interesting that I can grab an effect in the properties window of a clip, and I can drag it around. It becomes a ghost image, but I can’t do anything with it. It won’t land anywhere.

I know that I can create a color preset and apply that to clips. Still not as easy.

I’m sure they’ll add those thing, but not one instant too soon for me.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

How about this Jurriaan…

Apply the default time, then use the timeline index to find your transitions (type diss in the search bar), select the ones you want to change, hover the cursor over the timeline to activate the selected transitions, hit cmd-d to set a new duration.

You can’t do that in FCP7.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

[Simon Ubsdell] “A clip stays floating and connected, almost in a transitional state, until you decide it definitely belongs as part of the spine”

I actually don’t like secondary storylines as much because I can’t use the keyboard to skim and set in/out points on secondary timelines. I hope that Apple can find a way to implement this. Seems like if I have a secondary storyline selected that hitting I/O and D would affect the secondary and not the primary.

Meanwhile I connect a clip over the part of the timeline I want covered, overwrite the primary and create that L cut with the audio, and start editing and arranging the clips in the crook of the L cut. It works for me.

[Simon Ubsdell] “Conversely I can’t seem to get friendly with fine-tuning edit points in the browser.”

And it’s easier to edit with 100 separate clips in a bin? This is where the tagging and keywording comes in handy. A little bit of sorting makes things much easier to work with.

I’d love to see a few small things implemented that would make this even more robust:

>Give me the ability to hide used footage in the browser.
>Give me keyboard shortcuts for different zoom views in the browser. I want to be able to snap to 10 sec and 5 sec views with a mouse click.
>Remember my bin views. I’m happy with a single icon for still files. 5s and 10s for my tape footage. 2s for file tape clips. 30s for music clips. Etc.
>I also want to see a way to skim through a browser clip without zig zagging back and forth over long clips.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

[Alex Hawkins] “screaming and banging the desk during my session”

Yeah, it was frustrating. I’m not sure when I turned the corner, but it makes sense to me now, and I can focus on my decisions and not the interface.

I think just making sure you understand the tools, and muscling through the edits. Practice using the Q-W and E tools. Get used to lifting clips from the timeline and overwriting back to the timeline. (I frequently connect clips, then use opt-cmd-down to overwrite them into the primary storyline.) Practice making secondary storylines, compounding clips and breaking them apart. Get used to opening clips in timeline mode, to mis multiple channels of a single clip. And above all, get used to expanding the audio of clips, and even the entire timeline. Map a keystroke for “expand” and “collapse” all clips so you can see and hide all of your audio split edits. Learn how to avoid breaking apart the audio from the video when you don’t need to. Get used to the speed tool. Learn how to add and adjust gaps to leave holes and adjust the size of those holes, then fill them with video.

Anyone else have that “turn the corner” experience?

If you didn’t get around the corner, start a new thread.

I was editing in 7 the other day. It was a project I needed to be able to share with other editors, and I didn’t want to do that to them. You know what I mean.

I was surprised how much I was missing X. I missed the snap of the skimmer. I missed the audition function when I wanted to audition some different clips of music. I missed the quick searching in the eb (event browser). I also starting to get annoyed at the track patching in 7.

[Alex Hawkins] “audio I found annoying with funny looking waveforms and didgy small green tracks”

You can expand the audio tracks. You can also use roles to expand and minimize audio tracks you aren’t working on. And I absolutely love the waveforms that reflect the output level of the clips. I use that to adjust my audio levels and get them close to where they need to be.

[Alex Hawkins] ” I just found it not very responsive.”

It can be sluggish if there’s background analysis and other tasks going on. Transcoding is a core hog, and should be avoided at all costs. Often it’s worth leaving background rendering off if you don’t need it. There are also some things that can cause serious project bloat that should be avoided, like creating long compound clips, and editing them into many small bits. 2 1/2 hours of footage shouldn’t be a problem.

[Alex Hawkins] “It should not be restrictive in any way at all. “

I don’t consider it restrictive. I think of it like gravity. We’re used to gravity. You put something somewhere and it generally stays there. Move away from Earth’s gravitational field, and things seriously change. Things may not stay where you left them, but to be weightless is fairly awesome, and you need to use the magnetic nature of the timeline and the ability to connect things to each other to get around the lack of gravity.

And frankly, without the gravity, there also isn’t alot of friction, so things move around quite quickly and freely.

I say watch some tutorials, practice with the tools, try some different strategies for navagating the new paradigm, and don’t let it beat you. It’s kind of like riding a bicycle. After falling and falling and falling, you eventually learn to balance and once you learn to ride, who wants to go back to walking?

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

Was there anything that you liked about it? Anything positive?

I found that it took me about three times as long to edit a project my first time out, and it’s progressively gotten faster and faster.

There are things that are faster from the get-go. Dealing with various formats without the need to transcode. The keyword filtering. The skimmer and the event browser.

The other things, like manipulating things in the timeline, take a bit longer to get used to.

I too was screaming (literally screaming, out loud) every time I got bitten by the new paradigm. After doing a few projects, I started understanding the way it was designed, and things started snapping into place, and I got energized.

I’ve cut a few things with people watching over my shoulder, and it’s very cool to see them get excited and energized by what I’m doing.

Don’t sell it short yet. If you have the time to try a few more projects, I expect it will get better.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if there are some very capable editors for whom it will just never click.

As for me, I’m not going back.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

So I tried creating a still with an alpha channel, and a drop shadow.

I brought it into FCPX, and the drop shadow wasn’t black, it was whitish-grey. It’s not filling the shadow with black.

I tried this with the layer style, and without the layer style (merging the layer with a transparent frame to flatten the layer). It made no difference.

Someone verify this…

Still 1: A single layer PSD file with a drop shadow (not as a layer style, but merged with the image) comes into FCPX as an image, not a layered sequence, and it comes with an alpha channel with white mixed in with the semi-transparent black (not pre-multiplied?)

Still 2: If I duplicate the layer, so that there is more than one layer, now the file imports as a layered still sequence. I can turn off all the layers except the one that was in still 1, and the drop shadow acts like it should.

Still 3: I add a transparent layer behind the layer in still 1, and it still imports like still 1. Fail.

Still 4: I use the brush tool to just put a dot on the transparent layer. Now the still imports as a layered sequence.

I didn’t keep any layer styles, but rasterized them all before importing.

This is crazy behavior. Can we go back to the way it handled stills in 10.0.2?

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

Amen. For me, they broke something that worked. If I wanted to animate layers, I can do that in motion. Or I suppose even use a script to export separate layers out of photoshop.

Grrrrr.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com