[Phil Lowe]

Just to be clear, Keywords and assigning favorites are entirely optional steps. You can proceed in FCPX pretty much in the same manner as any other NLE. That is, cutting right from your clips to the timeline and then working from there.

Well then I must be really confused about FCPX then, Oliver (and thank you for your reply) because everything I’ve read on these fora (mostly from Bill) indicates that you’re not really fast with it unless you use FCPX as it was meant to be used, that is by keywording every clip and range.

On the other hand, for the example I cited above, I created several bins:

Royalty-Free Music
B-Roll (further identified by date and subject)
SOTs (further identified by date and subject)
Stills & Graphics (including titles)
FX (keys, color correction, etc.)
Sequences (and finally)
Finsihed Program

My organizational workflow was to put all of the daily B-Roll into its own bin, then sequence it, and place that sequence into the “Sequences” bin, identified by shooting date and subject. Likewise, Music and SOTs were placed onto their own sequences and placed in the sequence bin. This allowed me to close the bins containing the raw material I didn’t need, leaving only the FX, Sequences, and Graphics bins open, as I would be using and adding to these as work on the finished program proceeded.

The piece I cut for this particular church was a compilation of individual “stories” shot over about a 5-week period. The keyed SOTs in the piece were all shot the same day, and were the very first element I had to work with (that was the rough cut seen in my second image). As the events the pastor described came up over the course of those 5 weeks, I edited each story, fully completed, on its own timeline, after which I loaded that sequence as a “clip” and dropped it onto the “Finished Program” timeline.

Simple descriptive name and date attributes on the raw sequences were enough to let me access all of the b-roll for a given event in a single bin quickly and easily, and I was able to scrub very quickly through each of these sequences to find the shot I wanted.

So yes, there is some organizational work that must be done – when dealing with massive amounts of data – in order to make the final edit go smoothly. That’s absolutely true of any NLE. What I find off-putting is this insistence – by some – that it must be done for every type of edit.

I also work in news and, for daily news packages and vo-sots, such organization is completely unnecessary and a waste of time, regardless of the software. In this regard, I think Simon’s point (if I read it correctly) is spot-on: how you organize an edit depends on the type of edit you’re doing.

For news in Detroit (using an Avid Interplay system), all of our stories were sequenced automatically upon ingest, and it was, by far, the fastest way we worked. I’ve been told “keywording” is the fastest way to work in FCPX but this was a completely unnecessary step in our Avid news workflow!

I’ll only add, in the church example I posted above, dropping all the pastor’s interview bites on that rough cut timeline, then trimming them there, gave me a sense for what I needed to shoot as events came up. I’ll also add that when I was approached for this project, the original idea was presented to me as 5 bullet points on a piece of paper. Everything else was what I brought to the piece.

[Phil Lowe]

I personally can’t recommend any (aside from some youtube tutorials I’ve seen), but storytelling is what you bring to the dance. Learning the language, UI, and workflow of any editing app is a necessary first step in allowing you to do your job as a storyteller.

Don’t conflate storytelling with any one particular piece of software (or any one particular medium, for that fact). Learn the basics of editing on a non-linear editor, then apply what you learn to telling your stories.

[Phil Lowe]

An X editor then has what many of us see as an additional bonus capability which is how it lets us create vertical magnetic relationships between assets and shuffle those “asset stacks” as units – not with cut and paste risking over-write, but with simple drag and drop – with clip collision avoidance insuring that we can’t inadvertently kill the work we’ve already done.

I’ve never had an issue inadvertently killing work I’ve already done in Avid, especially since you can’t arbitrarily drag things around – snapped or otherwise – until you enter one of two “segment modes”, which, at that point, means there’s nothing “inadvertent” about what you’re doing.

Once you’re building a storyline, it gives you almost exactly the same ability to “see” your edit as any other NLE.

Until that point, though, an X user is “tagging”, “keywording” or whatever it is X users do to simply get to the point of making a timeline. That was the point of your video, yes? Sorry. I like to get my material to the timeline as fast as I can and start “playing” with it to see how it’s all going to fit and flow together. I get no idea of “flow” by keywording something.

Obviously, your mileage varies.

in traditional editing, the video and audio MUST adhere to an arbitrary rule that they have to be separated, all the video must go above the line and all the audio must go below it irrespective of any relationship they have to each other.

You see that as a limitation. I don’t. But had I learned FCPX 21 years ago, and had used it almost exclusively for those same 21 years, I might feel the same way about it you do. Substitute Avid for FCPX in the preceding sentence, and you will understand my POV.

[Phil Lowe]

Regarding the first video:

I’m not really sure how marking ranges to drop them on a timeline later is any faster than marking an in/out and dropping it on the timeline right away in any other NLE. Different workflow(s). Same result.

[Phil Lowe]

Agree with you 100%, Simon. Even as a single editor working on short-form projects for non-profits, I find I am at my fastest and most creative when I can see the road map laid out in front of me. That means being able to lay things out on a timeline and drag them around – like puzzle pieces – to see how things will flow and fit together. One of my recent pieces for a non-profit that ended up looking like this:

Started like this:

I can’t imagine having been able to arrive at this level of complexity (as quickly as I did) by depending upon keywords to get me there. But maybe that’s just me. 😉

The finished video is here if anyone is interested:

https://vimeo.com/132500282

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[Phil Lowe]

Here is the largest broadcaster in Detroit using FCP X in their news operations. When doing hands-on evaluation of other options, their editors preferred FCP X due to speed and ease of use. It has been so successful that E.W. Scripps Co. is now rolling out the same workflow to all their stations in the U.S.

First of all, depending on whom you ask, WXYZ-TV, Channel 7 in Detroit (studio actually located a mile-and-a-half down the road from the station where I worked in Southfield) isn’t the “largest broadcaster in Detroit.” Secondly, I saw that article. It’s a “puff piece” on Apple’s FCPX marketing page. You can literally find the same kind of breathless hype on EVERY NLE website! For instance:

“We need speed and stability for editing daily news from the work site, and recognized a clear need to transition our editing systems to file-based workflows to meet the growing challenges of our day-to-day operations, like up to the minute editing. We chose Grass Valley’s EDIUS because it supports real-time editing for growing clips, supports the latest file formats, provides excellent real-time editing performance, supports XDCAM and edits tapeless media efficiently, is engineered in Japan and offers support services and products which meet our needs.”

Tsutomu Okazaki, Technical Manager, Engineering Operations Division, Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation

You get these same kind of testimonials from every company, with their customers all saying how great and fast the company’s products are. Avid has 18 pages of customer stories all praising its products!

But I digress. Before WXYZ (I used to know some of the guys working there) used FCPX they used FCP7 and said the same things about it! Meanwhile, WDIV (Channel 4) and WJBK (Channel 2, where I worked) were using Avid systems and we were hitting our deadlines, just as quickly, too! Reading some of the remarks here, you’d think fast, non-linear editing hadn’t even been invented until FCPX came along!

So no, I don’t put any stock in a company’s marketing materials. They’re like any movie trailer of a bad movie: they’re only going to show you the parts that make the movie look awesome!

To paraphrase what I wrote before, I may have to “do” FCPX, but I don’t have to “dig” it. I have too much time and money invested in Avid to throw it all away for “iMovie Pro.”

By the way, I once cut an entire news package on the history of the death penalty in Michigan in After Effects, because the piece consisted of anchor track and historical stills. So I’m not impressed to hear that someone cuts news in FCPX: I did it in After Effects! It doesn’t change the fact that neither is designed for cutting news!

[Phil Lowe]

I can’t see how moving vertically is any harder than moving horizontally. It’s a flick of the finger whichever way you go.

It’s not just a “flick of the finger.” It’s finding the right clip, which – in his case – may have been at the bottom of the browser, then scrubbing for the shot, then scrolling back up to the next shot, which may be at the top of the browser, and repeat ad nauseum. That process is to editing what hunt and peck typing would be to a secretary. Meanwhile, having all the clips in a compound clip means I only have to scrub for the shot I need: no scrolling up or down through the browser to find the clip and then find the shot. I can see why people here might think the first process is no big deal, but every second wasted trying to find a clip just to find a shot is a second closer to missing a deadline, and in news, every second often matters.

One of the things that’s often a stumbling block for new users is trying to hang on to the way they’ve always done things in other NLEs. It’s an approach that almost never works, makes the whole FCPX experience awkward, and often leads to the verdict that “FCPX sucks”.

And, as I stated at the outset, while I have to learn FCPX for my job as a per diem news videographer, it will never replace Media Composer for my paid and pro bono freelance work, therefore I need FCPX to work – as closely as possible – to the way I use Media Composer. So I will find workarounds – including remapping the FCPX keyboard – to make that happen. Will I ever be as fast on it as I am on Avid? Probably not, but I’m being forced into this situation and I don’t particularly like it. Yes, I think FCPX sucks comparatively speaking. I hate the magnetic, trackless timeline and “skimming” in the “bin” is annoying as hell. But, I will be able to make it work, though probably not as well as people who have “bought into it” will.

[Phil Lowe]

Thanks. I actually hate the magnetic timeline, but then, I’m used to arranging the elements of my pieces at various places on the timeline and dragging and dropping them where I want them, not where some Apple engineer thinks they should go. It would at least be nice to have he option to turn it off. The magnetic timeline is something someone completely new to any kind of editing might find comforting. I find it very limiting and extremely frustrating.

[Phil Lowe]

[Phil Lowe] “I work in text (list) mode. Always have. Always will.”

Ah, I begin to see the problem. If your goal is the fastest possible survey of the material and making selects, I suggest you use the browser’s filmstrip view. It is optimal in that case.

How much faster can it be than CMD-A>New Compound Clip at which point I don’t have to scroll down through anything?

If browsing is all you need to do, yeah: that editor had the “right idea.” But everything else he was doing was painfully slow. In the time it took him to lay a couple of shots and a single track, I could’ve had ALL his tracks cleaned up on an Avid timeline!

Another thing news editors have to deal with: we generally can’t edit packages without a script, which means nothing gets “selected” (or edited) until a script is finally approved, at which point the reporter tracks the script and we cut all the sound together, so that the producer knows how long the finished package will be. B-Roll at that point MUST match the script, so it’s almost useless – in many cases – to try to anticipate what will or won’t be used before you get the script, at which point the focus turns immediately to editing, not “browsing”, “making selects” or all of the other exercises people NOT under news deadlines get to do on their shiny new Apple NLE!

I routinely turned 1:30 news packages around – from script to delivery – in 20 minutes or less on an Avid Newscutter, using the workflow I’ve described above (sequencing everything using an intermediate sequence). Maybe that workflow isn’t necessary for documentary filmmaking, but news isn’t the same animal.

Apple never designed FCPX as a news editor. The fact that news stations are using it says more about its price than its features as a news NLE. That said, news editors are incredibly resourceful and can find workarounds as needed. Creating a compound clip from all my b-roll looks like it will be mine.

[Phil Lowe]

Voice One: See – Final Cut Pro X is just too different for me to learn and use.
Voice Two: See – Every OTHER software also does everything that X can do!

Those aren’t mutually exclusive statements. Some NLEs – while every bit as capable as others – implement the features in their UIs in a far more user-friendly way.

FCPX went so far as to change the entire paradigm including industry-standard naming conventions. Apparently, FCPX seems to be aimed at getting iMovie users to upgrade rather than getting Avid or Adobe users to convert.

So while virtually every NLE can do the same things, Apple decided to make crossing over to FCPX more difficult for those already entrenched in a traditional editing paradigm.

IMHO, it was stupid and unnecessary.

That doesn’t make FCPX less “professional”, only that fewer pros already heavily vested in other software are as likely to abandon what they already know and use professionally.