Mark Morache
Forum Replies Created
-
[Craig Seeman] “Stacking with tracks to organize sometimes made editing and screen real-estate difficult to manage. Now it’s easy to highlight key areas of interest and operation without a lot of up/down scrolling.”
I hate vertical scrolling with a passion, and I’m still doing that in FCX. Maybe just not as much. In FCP7 I could make all of my tracks small except for the one I’m working on, and that one I could make HUUGE if I wanted to. Perhaps there’s a way for them to add that ability back to FCX.
Meanwhile, has everyone discovered the minimize/maximize button in the roles index? You can minimize every role except the ones you’re working on.
Perhaps that’s where I’ll do my single clip maximizing.
TRACK EXPAND WORKAROUND: create a role called “max”. Minimize all of your audio roles, and when you want to maximize a single or a group of clips, select them and add them to the “max” role. When you’re done working on them, put them back where they belong.
Roles will help me get the job done, however I feel like after driving faster than I’ve ever driven, it’s taking me 30 minutes to park the car and get out.
———
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] “If your Snacks and Cereal are all in the cupboard, would they need their own shelves?”
No, but if you eat Rice Krispies you might need Soundtrack Pro to remove the snaps, crackles and pops because the noise removal in FCX is sketchy at best.
That’s a joke.
———
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 -
Duplicating the project vs creating a copy in finder.
Duplicating the project is a big FAIL because either you lose the render files in the copy, or you are forced to duplicate them all (could be many gigs).
Duplicating a timeline in FCP7 was quick and easy, all the copies were linked to the same render files, and the increase in the size of the project was managable.
How difficult would it be for someone to create an automation that would look for project files, and every ten minutes create a timestamped copy of the project file in a different folder?
There are two issues for me: Actual versions and timestamp copies.
I don’t make many actual versions, that I lock in and share with people. I’d bet that you could do alot with auditioning to create different versions within the same timeline.
The timestamped copies could totally save my ass. There have been times when I’ve totally wiped out some of all of my tracks to the right of my edit point without noticing, because I’ve been focused in quite tightly, and I don’t discover this until I’ve executed past my number of undos.
We could all come up with our own horror stories about how our asses were saved by the vault.
Give us back our vault!
———
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 -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I think it’s because I have trained myself to think of the Position tool as the work of the devil, representing as it does an addiction to the old way of doing things that Apple don’t want us to cling on to 😉 So much so that I forget to use it when it’s the easiest way of doing things!”
I found myself thinking the same way.
The programmers didn’t just put it there to appease us. It’s necessary.
I figure that any keyboard shortcut with a single unmodified letter is an important primary function, so I move them up in my tool bag. I’ve also been using D a lot more. (three point editing isn’t the work of the devil either)
I’m pushing myself to use F and U more, and even [].
———
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 -
Yeah, seriously, did you backup before you installed the new software?
Always a good idea.
———
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] “[Simon Ubsdell] “Design-wise they are very impressive, but operationally they still feel like a stop-gap to me.”
So how would you do it different?”
I agree with the stop-gap classification, and they still need to do more to get us back to the functionality we had with tracks.
Sort as I go. For years, as I edit I drop my audio into tracks based on their “roles.” It keeps my clips organized and my tracks organized. I can visually inspect my timeline and see where my music is, as well as my dialogue, my sfx, etc. I’m a visual person, and I like getting that kind of feedback.
Can I survive without it? Absolutely. Will I thrive? Perhaps not.
It’s sort of like saying to the cashier, “go ahead and just dump all the coins anywhere in your till, so you can serve customers faster, and sort it all out at the end of your shift.”
That’s what I’m doing now. Dumping all of my tracks into the timeline then I need to sift through everything to sort and tag.
I challenge anyone to find a cash-register till without separate spaces for each denomination of coin and bill. Cashiers sort quickly without thinking, and because the money is sorted, it actually makes it faster to serve people.
Editing is like that for me. It’s simple to keep things sorted as I edit, and easy to find them and modify them when I need to. Since my clips are sorted and close, I can easily lasso groups to modify them. The sorting for me happens automatically, almost without thinking.
However like Craig, I abhor adding additional tracks just because I may need the extra 2 or 3 layers for a five second clip, and I will be stumbling over those extra tracks for the rest of my edit. It’s the best excuse I have for nesting, and may be one benefit of the magnetic timeline.
Here’s my great idea. First, bring back our tracks. Next, let’s improve on this magnetic timeline thing with an in-timeline form of nesting that works like double-clicking a stacked effect in Avid. How about if the collision avoiding could happen within nested tracks. For example, if my source audio is patched to audio track 3, and there is already a clip there, it automatically creates a compound clip to avoid the collision, and gives the clip a special visual representation to indicate the internal clips, and avoids the collision by adding the extra nested tracks necessary.
What I hate about nesting is that when I edit inside a nest I lose the relationships to the clips outside the nest. I’m losing a great deal of my context. By keeping the nesting in-timeline, I believe we would have the best of both worlds. Double-clicking the nested clip would expand it, similar to Avid, letting me patch to the nested tracks and perform edits at will, all the while seeing the visual relationship of the clips inside the nest to the clips outside the nest. I make my changes, and collapse the nest, keeping vertical scrolling to a minimum.
A note about the roles in FCPX: The roles window in the timeline index will not allow you to select multiple timeline clips. It highlights the clips, but you can’t select the highlighted clips with one click. However you can use the clips window in the TLindex, and type the role name in the search field to highlight the clips in the timeline. NOW the list of timeline clips with that role are listed, and you can select all the clips in the list, then you can click any of the highlighted clips and ALL the highlighted clips will be selected.
You can also go into the “clip appearance” window and select to see the timeline clips labelled with the role names. (Now just give us the ability to change the clip color in the timeline.)
I don’t love Roles. They are a necessary evil to make it possible to export split tracks, but for me it feels like one more thing I need to stop and do, for every freakin’ clip in the timeline. And if the clips are inside a compound clip, you need to go inside and make sure each clip is tagged with the right role.
———
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 -
It’s even easier than that.
Once you lift from the primary storyline, just use the position tool to drag the music to the primary storyline, and everything should now be connected to it.The trick is keeping the clip in the same position horizontally.
And the magic of adding transitions to connected clips isn’t really magic at all. Adding a transition to the connected clip promotes the clips to a secondary storyline. All it does is save you a keystroke.
Have fun.
———
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 -
It’s strange and non-intuitive to me that I can’t print the book from the help viewer, even though I still need to be connected to the internet to use it.
Thank you for your help.
I now have my pdf.
———
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 -
Ok, someone help me please…
I was able to save the previous FCX manual as a pdf. I don’t see that option here.
Also, I was trying to use the search function to find information in the manual, “roles” for example. No hits for me.
In fact, using the menu Edit/Find, the find (opt-cmd-F) is greyed out.
Am I doing something wrong?
———
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 don’t produce music videos, but I try to do the same thing with narration so I think it applies.
One logic says “obey the paradigm! The primary track is the spine. It’s the content that drives the edit. Put your music there.”
Another logic says “the primary storyline is where the easiest editing happens, why put something in it that doesn’t need editing, like a finished music production?”
Personally, I like to edit my video in the primary storyline. I feel like most of the tools and functionality are geared for this.
I would attach my music to the first clip, or a bit of gap or black before the first clip, and do my primary editing in the primary storyline, being very very very careful not to lose my sync. I use a lot of replace edits, and the D, Q and P keys. I’ve also been using the lift from and overwrite to primary storyline too. Stay away from the W key, and you should be fine. You may want to place matching markers on your music and video clips occasionally to indicate that things are still in sync, and help you get back to sync if something goes wrong.
But ultimately, you need to do what works best for you.
Good luck.
———
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