[Matthew Schickler]

David – Not sure if that was a complement or an insult.

I dont understand your comment about aspect ratios. You’re saying a non-pro should not be allowed to crop their video, to say, a 2.39 : 1 aspect ratio? I know of a lot of people interested in doing this for stylistic reasons.

[Matthew Schickler]

My workflow for something like this would be:

1. Lay down the music
2. Lay down the clips in a preliminary order
3. Start at the beginning and ripple/roll edit the clips to get a rough cut where the video and transitions are in sync with the music
4. Possibly move some of the clips around. This is where being able to leave gaps is key (as you say, you don’t want your previous work to get out of sync)
5. Slip edit to fine tune the clips, slide edit to fine tune the timing of the transitions

As for titles and overlays, once the clips are synced to the music, I think of the overlays as being locked/synced to the clip, although that’s not to say there aren’t cases where you want them to sync to the music, e.g. maybe you want the title to get punched in on a particular musical note or beat. The main example of locking to the secondary would be if I had added an overlay that belonged with a particular clip (e.g. it describes something in the clip) and then in the end I decide I want to move that clip somewhere else. The overlay should move with the clip. If it was in the primary storyline, it would. If it was in a secondary storyline, I’d have to move the overlay manually. It’s no big deal, but since part of the power of the magnetic timeline is being able to lock down relationships between elements in the timeline, it’s a shame you can’t lock an overlay down on a secondary storyline.

I haven’t really shot anything lately, so I’m really just dealing with toy examples in FCPX right now. I’m going to pull some video off my archive drive and try to cut a short music montage together and see how this all works out in practice.

Thanks for the civilized and constructive discourse.

[Matthew Schickler]

[Matthew Schickler] “The problem with putting the soundtrack on the primary storyline is that you can’t do normal editing between connected clips, i.e. you cannot ripple/roll edit or add transitions.”

OK, I partially take this back. I forgot that you can make a connected clip a “storyline”. That allows you to add clips to the secondary storyline as well as do ripple/roll edits and add transitions. Unfortunately, you cannot connect anything else to a secondary storyline. So, if you add a title, for example, the title gets connected to the primary storyline, even though your intent would almost always be for it to be locked to the secondary storyline. Again, the ability to connect clips to things other than the primary storyline and the ability to edit compound clips “inline” would go a long way to fixing some of the more obvious problems with the magnetic timeline.

[Matthew Schickler]

I have : – )

[Matthew Schickler]

Hey Simon,

The problem with putting the soundtrack on the primary storyline is that you can’t do normal editing between connected clips, i.e. you cannot ripple/roll edit or add transitions. You’d have to group the clips as a compound clip and then open the compound clip in the timeline. But once you open the compound clip in the timeline you don’t have your soundtrack for reference as you’re editing. I guess that sort of gets to one of my other points about a mode where you could edit the contents of compound clips at the project level instead of having to open the compound clip as its own timeline.

If you’ve got some suggestions for how to overcome this, I’m all ears. I just don’t think there’s a clean workflow for this at the moment.

As for cinematic frame sizes, what I was talking about was not the lack of standard digital cinema formats (clearly 2K and 4K are the right formats) but things that, at least for a non-pro like me, are more aesthetic in nature, like cropping video to a super wide 2.39:1 aspect ratio.

-Matt

[Matthew Schickler]

[Andrew Richards] ” I still don’t see how they are exclusive of any of the good ol’ fashioned bin behavior. You can still create one with a keystroke like you could with a bin, still drag clips into it like a bin, still look at the contents in a list like the bins in legacy FCP.”

Andy, I’m with you. I see no difference between keyword collections and bins, except that keyword collections are more flexible. Long live metadata!

[Matthew Schickler]

@Nick — thanks for this tip. I had been looking for a way of browsing the clips “by notes”. Didn’t even occur to me that all of the metadata information would be displayable in the list view. Very nice!

One small gripe — while you can add your own custom metadata fields to the database, it doesn’t look like those fields are text searchable. For now, it looks like Notes (or some other built-in text field) is the way to go. Would be nice to add a custom metadata field, e.g., called “Transcript”, and put a transcript of the clip dialogue in there.

[Matthew Schickler]

But does it know how to decode native AVCHD files!?!? Lack of native support for an extremely popular video format is so perplexing to me… I don’t buy the argument that you need the metadata in the camera archive directory structure. Tools like handbrake can open, play, and transcode the raw (MTS) files with no trouble and the results are perfect.

[Matthew Schickler]

I agree. Templates and rigging are probably the best feature of FCPX / Motion 5. Now if they would just add FCP/Motion roundtrip, it would be awesome as there are still things better (or only) done in Motion (“motion tracking” being a big example). I have a feeling that at the moment, there are some limitations in FCPX that they are working on with respect to full rendering of Motion projects. It would explain the lack of roundtrip as well as some of the strange limitations on property export to templates.

[Matthew Schickler]

Yeah, I bet I mucked up the length of a layer somewhere. I’ll take a look at it when I get home tonight. Kind of glad someone is actually using it!