[Oliver Peters]

[mishka] “Does that mean the clip from the source monitor will go to the track the mouse cursor is hovering over with insert or overrecord command? What about a clip in pasteboard?”

Timeline clip is loaded into the source player. It is parked at the point matching the timeline “playhead” and in a stack of several tracks, the one that the mouse cursor hovers over is the clip selected to be loaded. You can then insert or overwrite as needed.

Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[CharlieX] “For instance, if I turn OFF all the A-S widgets on my timeline and try to do a head trim, I still get “clip colllisiton on A1″. Again this is a final stereo mix that has no explicit relationship to my video”

I think clip collisions are a fact of life. FCP is trying to maintain A/V sync and avoid conditions that force you to go out of sync. You’ll get a clip collision with a positive head trim on all clips except the last. Doesn’t seem to matter about A-S. When you do a minus head trim a slug is left in the audio which is the opposite effect. If you are familiar with Avid, it’s the same as editing with sync locks always turned on.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

>> Nine out of ten FCP editors never got the idea of Replace edit. Does that mean it is poorly implemented in FCP?<< You missed my point. Having a function or feature that isn't used doesn't mean poor design. Requiring more keystrokes to achieve a task is less efficient and therefore a weaker interface design than a more streamlined approach. There are plenty of more intelligent approaches out there. Take for example Match Frame. It honors the A-S hierarchy in FCP. Avid also takes a somewhat similar approach. Compare that to Velocity, where instead you simply hover the mouse cursor over the designated clip on any track and hit Match Frame. That clip pops up, whether it is on track 1 or track 10. No track enables or anything else required. Sincerely, Oliver Oliver Peters Post-Production & Interactive Media Orlando, FL http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[mishka] “Without examples it sounds very hollow.”

The problem is that A-S and the rules for linking, track patching and locking are all interrelated. This is the reason so many people complain that they have to lock tracks in order to get FCP to do what they want. The reason is that they do not have track A-S properly enabled/disabled to do the right thing. Even though there are keyboard shortcuts, it is several lkeystrokes more to do these tasks than in Avid and so people either never do them or never learn them in the first place. The consequence is developing a style based on workarounds rather than proper methods. In short – poor UI design, because it was written by software engineers and NOT editors. For example, to have “go to” and “clears” on modifier keys makes sense to a programmer, but NOT to an editor.

[mishka] “Liquid combines the worst interface decisions from edit* and Avid and it is soon to be dead too. Velocity? Edius?”

Of course everyone has their preferences. I think Avid has the best UI for editing, but there’s also M100 844/X, Smoke, Quantel and more. If you like Premiere Pro, it’s close to FCP but its delete/trim functions are even more lacking.

While we’re on the subject of suggestions for 5.5 how about these things:
– Separate user settings
– One global TL setting, not one that defaults to the preset with each new sequence
– Curves in color-correction tool
– User-defined UI colors
– Clips colors that change the clip on the TL, and not the thumbnail/name
– Sift functions in the bins
– Surround mixing
– True mixed codecs on the TL
– AAF support

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[mishka] “I like AutoSelect. There are keyboard shortcuts. Actually that’s why I like AutoSelect.”

Sorry, but I think they suck. It’s the single biggest impedement I see to working as a power editor because it counteracts natural and intuitive ways of deleting and trimming in the timeline from the keyboard. It’s just an example of too much redundancy in the GUI that is handled far more elegantly in other apps (yes Avid, but others as well). It generally trips up experienced editors coming from other systems and it sets up new editors who learn on FCP to develop poorer and slower working styles, since they never question what these do or how to use them in a more powerful manner.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

There are two choices: EditShare or Facilis Technology (Terrablock). EditShare works with GigE and is probably exactly what you are looking for.

Buy something. DO NOT take the DIY approach unless you really understand how to build a SAN.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

You appear to be asking about “chunking”, which is the ability to play out media while a clip is still being digitized. I don’t believe Avid Xpress Pro will support this, but it’s possible that one of the news products will. A non-Avid NLE like Editware’s FastTrack connected to a server will do this. ESPN has been using this system.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[drmwvrjohn] “honestly, it took me two hours to do a thirty minute task on an avid. ….. i’ve noticed in an avid is the fact that you can completely cut, cue and place the clip into the timeline using only the keyboard. hey, i even tried editing an mtv WITH transitions (dissolves and dips) using only the keyboard.
admittedly, fcp’s color correction is a bit better than the avid. but with proper tweaking, it’ll come out just the same.”

Hi,

Whatever you are doing, you are doing it wrong. I too do both and still feel a bit faster on Avid but there is no 4-to-1 difference. You really need to go back over the manual. I’m not trying to be snide, but all the SAME functions are there. You can be just as keyboard-oriented in FCP as in Avid. Dragging-dropping to the TL is a bad way to work if you want speed. FCP works the same, mark in/out, then insert (F9) or overwrite (F10). The main thing to remember is that timeline ripple function rules are based on the status of: linking, track patching, track auto-selection and locking. A lot like editing with sync locks on in Avid. Learn those things and you’ll be fine.

On the other hand, I can’t possibly see how you think FCP’s color-correction is better. To get the same functionality in FCP as I have in Avid’s CC tools requires that I use 3 or 4 different CC filters in FCP.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[David Battistella] ” I wasn’t trying to start anything, just more curious about Nitris workflows :)”

No problem at all.
– Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Oliver Peters]

[David Battistella] “Is it captured or digitized via firewire or imported. if it imported, where is it captured?
…..I though the Nitris was an 8-bit solution.
Why is the raw picture quality silly?
Is it because FCP is such an awful scaler?
Is the rendered media in FCP somehow inferior to the rendered media in an AVID product?
Just wondering what avid does to the picture to make it so much better.”

David,

DV25 is captured via FireWire and wrapped with an OMF wrapper to make it cross-platform compatible between Avid systems. DV50 and DV100 is captured via FW and wrapped as MXF. I think there are some pretty good multi-generational codec comparisons on Marco Solorio’s One River site.

I believe Nitris is a 10-bit YUV solution. It also handled 2K film files. I’m not saying that Avid’s image is better, rather that at its best, it isn’t worse, which is what you originally implied (or so it seemed to me). I use Kona 2 all the time, so I’m well aware of how good images via FCP can look. At their best, both companies put out excellent images.

My point about the scaling is that Apple does not have good scaling engines in FCP. This was specifically addressed in the FCP5 upgrade. As yet, I really haven’t had a chance to make any new comparisons. I have done that with Motion versus Red versus AE and wasn’t that impressed (with Motion’s quality on hi-res, highly textured stills). My point about raw images, was because this rarely happens. Images are scaled, color-corrected and effected in many ways. In these steps a lot of things happen to alter the image. For instance, many of these processes use OpenGL video cards. These are designed for game playback, so even though they may be pulling in 10-bit images, they frequently are writing only 8-bit images back to RAM.

What about YUV-RGB-YUV conversions? It’s all a pretty pointless argument. Frequently the “better mathematical” processes yield poor images. So for instance, Avid’s notoriously bad DVEs were Pinnacle cards. People objected to the fact that they tended to soften the image. In reality this was needed because the image filtering made the moves look smoother and softened textures, which would tend to scintilate otherwise.

Go look at the arguments on the Smoke forum. Smoke on Linux is an 8-bit box, but that’s 8-bit RGB. Is this better than 10-bit YUV? I don’t know, but Autodesk certainly thinks so and the images tend to bear them out.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com