Michael Hancock
Forum Replies Created
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[Herb Sevush] “Does this preserve the in-out points and can this be done for multiple timeline clips being sent to one motion project, preserving their spatial relationship to each other? “
No. Cmd+Shift+R is just the keyboard shortcut for Reveal in Finder.
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Michael Hancock
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[Charlie Austin] “Or, if we’re really being all modern and digital, we could maybe use something like keyword collection or tag. :-)”
You jest, but that’s not accurate either. A Keyword Collection is something new – it’s a collection of assets that have specific keywords attached to them. An event can have assets that have keywords and assets that do not have keywords. But a keyword collection cannot have assets that do not have the keywords. Keyword collections are subsets of data.
I suppose Apple could have called events Keyword Collections, but how do they further sub-categorize things the way keyword collections currently do? Perhaps keywords would become tags?
It doesn’t get much simpler and easy to understand than folder. Or bucket. Or bin. Or container. They all do the same thing – they hold assets, and nothing more. It’s the new stuff (keywords) that deserve the new names because they add a functionality that isn’t really present in other NLEs. But Event? It’s just a bin and does nothing more than what a bin currently does in any other NLE, so the name change is unnecessary.
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Michael Hancock
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[Noah Kadner] “That versus capturing media from an event of some sort: commercial, concept, feature film, etc with a camera. “
This is why I disagree that Event is a good naming convention. It implies an actual event, captured with a camera or other recording device. I find that overly restrictive. What about everything else that goes into an edit? Music selects, SFX, graphic renders, VFX shots, your sequences and versioning. Are those all events, as the name implies?
You could argue that graphic renders are an Event that happened, but it’s awkward and isn’t really accurate. The graphic is just an asset that needs to be stored somewhere in the NLE. Like a folder. Or a bin, which you can think of as a large container that stores your assets. Although folder would probably make more sense if we’re changing the nomenclature to reflect the new digital, computer age and not something that heralds back to the film days.
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Michael Hancock
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Sorry for the long post. I love your post and hope it sparks some interesting discussion.
I think the question/discussion you bring up is a great one, particularly now that more and more people are well versed in multiple skill sets, and not just multiple skill sets but multiple applications within each skill set (NLEs – FCPX, Premiere Pro, Media Composer; Mograph – Motion, AE, C4D; Compositing – Fusion, Nuke; Color – Resolve, Speedgrade, Lumetri, Apple Color). This familiarity with so much competing and overlapping software highlights that every application is a great choice and a terrible choice, depending on the project. And the harder people drive the software and compare it to the competition, and really spend timing learning it, the more evident each system’s strengths and weaknesses become.
[Simon Ubsdell] “What things make you smile with pleasure and growl with anger … in one and the same application?
So, not a question about which applications you prefer, but rather a question about whether you agree that every application has its sweet spot, and every application has its horrors.”
Does every application have its sweet spot and horror? Absolutely. And picking the wrong, or less suited, software at the start of a project is maddening when you get far long to realize it, but too far along to change it.
But a big part of knowing you may the wrong choice, and thus being frustrated by it, is knowing that you made the wrong choice. And you can’t know that if you don’t know what the other software is capable of.
Since I spend the majority of my time editing, I’ll just address my love/hate relationship with my three main NLEs:
FCPX – skimming is fast. Crazy fast. Rough cutting is incredibly fast. But I despise the interface when I’m ready to refine my edit or dealing with a complicated composite where tracks would really, really help keep things organized. There’s not early enough keyboard control without having to keep a hand on the mouse all the time, and the interface often feels sluggish and slow to respond. And the lack of customization in the program keeps me in a state of slight irritation, particularly when it comes to metadata entry and display. If it’s really a database with an NLE attached it’s wasting its potential as a database. But to organize my footage and get that first cut done it’s lightning quick and fun to use.
Premiere – incredible at accepting anything I throw at it, with great keyboard control (most of the time). But it’s temperamental, the interface often behaviors unexpectedly and interrupts my flow, and the lack of a proper offline/online workflow is a huge oversight. If you get too far into a project and realize you really need to switch everything to an offline codec it’s a major pain in the ass and you will rue the day you chose Premiere for that project.
Avid – I still feel it’s the best for straight cutting, particularly when it comes to refining an edit (love trim mode and keyboard control). Love the offline/online workflow and incredibly robust metadata support and customization. Hate that AMA is still unreliable and performance suffers for it. So if you have to get cutting right away, Avid may not be a good choice. Hate the lack of format support (transcode or suffer is still very much a thing in Avid). Hate that little feature requests have been ignored for 10 features (Symphony color, anyone? Title tool? Improved effect handling/interface?). And I miss Scriptsync.
I love and hate them all, but I find the love and hate rise and fall depending on what I’m doing in each app. Like you said – pick the wrong one and it’s a lot of grief. Pick the right one and you’re in love all day.
Curiously enough, I often find myself in an NLE wishing that it had more UI/UX elements like After Effects, or like Resolve. And when I’m in Resolve or AE I find myself wishing they could behave more like one of the NLEs. And I don’t mean “I wish Avid had layer masks and precomps and could do motion graphics like AE”. More like, “Resolve’s ability to quickly sort a timeline by source then create groups would be amazing in Premiere right now so I can quickly apply this effect every shot from CamA_Clip004”. Or “I wish I could hide a handful of these tracks in FCPX like I can in AE. You should be able to make a role “shy” like you can a layer in AE. This timeline is too cluttered and I don’t need to see it all right now.” And I wish every app would work with hardware controllers like color panels or knobs and pots and transport controls. With customizable keyboard shortcuts (I’m looking at you After Effects).
[Simon Ubsdell] “What’s really bizarre for me is that pleasure and grief seem to be more or less equally meted out between all applications, however amazing they are.”
I think you see this because, and I’m making an assumption here, you really know the apps at a very deep level. Based on your posts you seem to learn not just the superficial handling of an app so you can slap some cuts together – you try to find its breaking points so you know where you will run into problems and how to solve them, or when not use the app so you can avoid them. I don’t use Motion but I watched your tutorials and they’re mind blowing. I never would have guessed the app could do so much. So while I may open AE and spend 2 days working on something you may open Motion and have it done in an hour, with similar or better results (talent not included). To go back to my earlier thought – I wouldn’t know I made the wrong choice in software because I don’t know what I don’t know. If you had instead started in AE and hit a point of no return you would have been a lot more frustrated than I would have been because you would recognize that Motion would be a better choice.
If you know multiple apps at a deep level you recognize when something in app A is deficient compared to app B, and vice versa. I imagine that insight amplifies both the pleasure and the grief when you realize you definitely made a good, or bad, choice.
Because the price of entry for all the software is now so low I think more and more people will start to recognize an apps strengths and weakness and will start making decisions on which app to use on a per project basis, rather than always choosing X, Y, or Z because it’s what they’re most familiar with. And with that, will the religious wars over software slow down, or end? Probably not. But I like to think the conversation may swing from “My app is better than your app” to “What is the best app for this project, and why?” And it’s the why I’m most interested in.
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Michael Hancock
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[Bill Davis] “An environment with different rules.”
Yes, but if you’re editing the middle section of your video first and need to cut something in at the beginning of your timeline it’s just an insert edit on every NLE.
In FCPX you insert into the primary and by default everything is sync locked to it, so it all moves down.
In Avid/FCP/Premiere you insert onto any track with all sync locks on. You get the exact same result.
The only time this would differ would be if, in FCPX, you had a connected clip that was starting before the first clip in your primary. Then you could insert directly in front of that first primary clip, under the connected clip, and it wouldn’t split it like it would in a tracked NLE. But then again, that’s only if the connect clip was connected to the primary clip and not to a gap clip. So either get your connection set right then insert (FCPX), or insert then fix a split clip (tracked timeline).
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Michael Hancock
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[Bret Williams] “That’s how X, Premiere, and Resolve show audio now.”
Premiere actually gives you the option for full or rectified. The default in the newest release seems to be full waveforms but you can check a box in the sequence to show rectified waveforms, and they even have an option for Logarithmic Waveform Scaling, whatever that is (I haven’t played with it yet).
I wish FCPX (and all the NLEs, actually) had the option for full or rectified, on a global or track by track (or role by role in FCPX maybe?) basis. I find full waveforms much easier to read when looking for clappers for syncing, or when looking for beats in music. And I find FCPX waveforms to be horribly inaccurate in list view (you have to adjust the list viewer width to find the sweet spot to accurately display them, and it seems to change for every shot).
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Michael Hancock
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Couldn’t you open the Media Tool, have it show all clips from the project, then drag them all to a new bin?
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Michael Hancock
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[Michael Buday] “Is there a way (as with Premiere, Avid, Resolve and others) to add custom LUTS to this drop-down selector? I know I can get a third party EFX Plugin to drop a LUT onto a clip, but I’ prefer to “pre-adjust” all the clips requiring LUT’s in the Library.”
Nope. You only get the ones Apple gives you. Go 3rd party if you want more control and make a feature request.
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Michael Hancock
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This is fantastic! Downloaded it and have recommended it to a couple friends. Your insight is invaluable.
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Michael Hancock
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It’s definitely doing something. I’m sending them a bug report. I’ve mapped Zoom In/Out to multiple keys at this point and all of them work just fine, except for Up and Down.
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Michael Hancock
Editor