Mark Morache
Forum Replies Created
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[Carsten Orlt] “Having tracks is something editors have to struggle with everyday because all tracks have to do everything at once.”
I honestly don’t know what you mean by having to do everything at once. And I would not say that I struggle with tracks. I sometimes get annoyed with the need to patch the source tracks with the destination tracks because the buttons are so small but I don’t struggle at all. Tracks are easy to understand. They give me the three things I need to do my job. They give me information about what I’ve got in the timeline, they give me control to make the edits and changes I need, and they provide the power to turn all of these boxes and lines into the final magic that people will watch.
[Carsten Orlt] “but you can’t change the basic idea behind it because that would mean you’re back to tracks.”
That was my point to this thread. Is there a way to make this work? I’m not convinced that the things I could do so easily in FCP7, like drop audio cross fades on my b-roll shots can work in FCX. I’m not convinced that forcing us to select one thing as the primary storyline will make things easier in the longrun, when often our edit decisions are based on things that are happening in more than just one track at one moment.
The truth is that this interface isn’t entirely trackless. There are multiple tracks. They just show up when they’re needed, and I’m not sure that makes things easier in the longrun. Yes, I’m not patching my source and destination tracks over and over, but organizing the media on tracks is not a struggle, and has always given me powerful control over my edit.
My bottom line is that I’m not finding this faster. Some things are faster, and some things take much longer. If Apple came up with a way of applying audio fades to multiple clips I’d be one step closer to loving this. Not just the fades, because I can copy and paste that, but the audio would need to be extended a few frames beyond the video edit, before the fade is applied in order to overlap the audio.
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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 -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Depending on what you need, you can switch those around at any time”
Yes, but in FCP7 you didn’t need to. I still find the thing awkward, and that may be because there is ONE WAY to put things in the spine that makes everything else make sense, otherwise it still feels like I’m a slave to the paradigm, rather than having it work for me. And I like using I and O to set my points on the timeline. Tell me how I can use the keyboard to set the edit points on a secondary timeline? I can’t figure it out.
[Jeremy Garchow] “We need to be able to edit all four tracks (or whatever) of embedded audio at once”
I agree. I don’t like all of the audio being hidden. Choosing between detaching the audio and hiding it is a choice between two evils. FCX keeps me from having a track with only one or two clips in it, and that’s a good thing, but all of this double-clicking to see the hidden audio is wasting my time. Although I’ve said this before, I could live easier with it if expanding the audio showed me all four of my audio channels, in the context of the timeline. I hate nested clips in that you must edit them apart from the timeline, so you can’t see how your timing works with the other clips that aren’t part of the nest.
I think it would be very cool to be able to nest the audio, or any layered effect and open it up like an effect in Avid, with the small tracks visible in the context of the entire timeline. I’d use nested, or compound clips a whole lot more then.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I mean how can you do a multicam switch without a sources and program monitor? Impossible.”
Be careful of what you call impossible. You just might encourage them to try it. I believe that this whole magnetic timeline thing was the result of a double-dog-dare between software designers.
I still maintain that Apple will need to build in many more accomodations in order to make this trackless timeline work. Secondary storyline? In what bizarro universe would we even need to think like this?
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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 -
I’m curious, it this while it’s background rendering? I often have playback problems with the background processing, even if it pauses the process while I playback.
I don’t know about the font size changing. Is it possible you are adding a keyframe? If you reset the parameters, does it act as expected?
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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 -
Alex…
I believe there is a bug that gets you stuck in the event browser. There have been times where I’ve used my trackpad to move the cursor to the timeline, and clicked to select it, then hit play only to find that I can’t get anything to play but the clip in the event browser. I’ll try the command 3/command 2 trick.
As for the timeline view, I’ve never had shift-z give me any less than 100% of my timeline. Is it possible that you may have changed your keyboard shortcut to something besides zoom to fit?
Look in the view menu, and go down to “zoom to fit”. It should have the Shift Z shortcut, and selecting it in the menu should make the entire timeline fit in the screen.
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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 -
I’m thinking it might be time to keep your project names to no more than 25-30 characters.
Any reason why you need more than that?
Personally, I like short and simple. When I import my footage from the camera, and it wants to name a clip something like 20111011162355_A002_C003.mov, I rename all the clips to something short with a serial number attached like Grad11_001.mov.
It’s much easier to manage clips and sequences in the bin I think, with shorter names.
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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 -
This really annoys the crap out of me as well. I can’t believe Apple would make this “all the media and projects all the time” the paradigm if our wait time keeps getting longer as the projects start piling up. Hiding things in finder is an easy enough workaround, but why not design it correctly to begin with?
$5 for an app to help with this seems like money well spent. But it’s still a workaround. Yikes.
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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 -
I am not using a tower anymore, and I don’t need any of the more expensive matrix i/o devices that have this. I think my turbo does the same thing for me, perhaps not as fast, but for $99 it’s an alternative I’m happy with.
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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 -
[David Lawrence] “Notice what happens to the clips to the right of the gap. They ripple. And the clip to the immediate right of the gap gets eaten. That’s the bug.”
Interesting, but I don’t think it’s a bug, but rather an interesting anomaly. I think it was pointed out that with the Position tool, you can select a gap and move it left and right, and it will move predictably, except that moving the gap doesn’t leave a gap. It sort of makes sense. If you wanted the gap there, why would you move it?
Lifting the gap with the Position tool would make sense if you want to move the gap above the primary storyline, but that’s not logical. You can have gap in a secondary storyline to leave space between clips, but you can’t have a gap clip connected directly above another clip.
Wanting to move the gap with the position tool, to move a gap and leave gap, might be as useful as wanting to divide by zero. If you want to make new gap somewhere, it’s quite easy to do, without moving a different gap.
Is nothing actually something? If nothing was nothing, why would there be a word to describe it? Nothing must be something, and if it’s actually something, why call it nothing?
Using space for organization. Like you, I use space for organizing. In FCP7 I group things on my timeline separated by space. It’s like a clothing designer laying pieces of fabric out on a large table. They don’t need the pieces to stick together until they’re ready to sew.
I don’t mind the gap in FCX. I’m glad that I can move it around as I need to. I can extend it with a ripple trim. I can change the duration of it with a few keystrokes. I can cut it, and replace it.
What I don’t like is, well, just about everything.
I believe that tracks in FCP7 are very easy to understand. You place a clip on V2, and it will cover up anything on V1. Place a dissolve between two clips on V2, and you will get a dissolve. It doesn’t take a master’s degree in editing to understand this.
FCX however has many more options, and not in a good way. When do I connect a clip? When do I place the connected clips in a secondary storyline? When do I place my b-roll in the primary storyline by overwriting to the primary storyline? Why can’t I use composite modes in a secondary storyline? When do I nest things inside a compound clip?
To make trims in complicated, layered timeline takes some skill. It’s really not easier in FCX when you have L cuts and many layers.
It is a whole lot easier to “unpack” the layers to make the trims in FCP7, because they are all visible. If I want to trim a soundbite to remove “ums” and “ahs” I can easily remove the unwanted bits of audio and remove the space between bits. I think this takes more thinking in FCX, because the audio doesn’t live on a timeline by itself, it’s connected to other things.
I’m not sure I’m being entirely clear, but I don’t think the magnetic timeline is useful. I’ve been using it almost exclusively since June 21, and I can make my way through it alright, but it’s still awkward.
My take is that the magnetic timeline is someone’s intellectual theory about an alternative way of editing, and not really the next big thing. Now comes all the add-ons and workarounds to try to make this albatross work, when there really was nothing wrong with the original editing paradigm.
Give me the keywords, the metadata, the ability to edit native h264 files, the skimmer, the motion effects, the logic effects in the timeline, the color tools, the timeline index, the ability to filter bins by typing in a search field, and all the other cool things about FCX, but for God’s sake, give me back my tracks.
Was that clear?
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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 -
[John Mendelsohn] “Is that hardware or software, animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
It’s actually both.
It’s a small usb device that looks like a usb drive, and software that helps you manage your encoding. It will work without the dongle, but it works so much faster with the device, and that’s what you’re paying for.
Best of all, with the turbo attached, Mpeg Streamclip and Quicktime 7 both have export settings that use the turbo acceleration.
And this I love… if someone gives me a dvd as source, I just rip it to an mp4 file, and drag it into FCX and start editing natively.
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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 -
I tried this the other day, and it looked like it was going to take hours to export a 6 minute movie from FCX on my MBP 2.66 dual.
I have an elgato turbo, and I love it. It’s $99 and not only does it compress the footage into h264 much faster than my MBP, but it does the pixel crunching, leaving my processor available for other things, like editing and posting on the Cow.
Turbo has a direct setting for youtube hd. It will encode your clip, and upload it for you if you’d like. I’ve been very happy with it.
And if you want to put a movie on your iphone, it rips the movie in 4x or better.
Using the Turbo, I export my prores from FCX then drag the exported clip onto the Turbo app.
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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