[Simon Ubsdell]

[Tim Wilson] ”
BTW, the title for this thread immediately made me think of the fantastic 1971 single by The Persuaders, “There’s A Thin Line Between Love And Hate.” “

I was thinking more Night of the Hunter 😉

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[David Lawrence] “AE is not an NLE. I wouldn’t dream of doing editorial cutting in it. And I can’t imagine changing it to make editorial cutting viable.”

I agree with the first part, I more or less entirely agree with the second part, but while I agree with the third part … are we really saying that we can’t think it can’t be done? I’d be fascinated to hear your reasons.

I think I’d say it probably could be done but that retro-fitting NLE functions (especially to an application as mature as this one) would always be a compromise …

But what was your thinking behind saying this?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Tim Wilson] “1) How/why do you feel After Effects is different from NLEs? Extensibility in general gets at some of it, but it feels bigger than that to me.

2) Is the idea of “doing everything” in one application that “does everything” appealing to you?

That is, Simon, I understand that you were originally speaking about the frustrations of using multiple tools for the SAME task…but since you mention After Effects and Premiere and FCPX/Motion, and Resolve/Fusion comes up too — are there limits to how far you’d like to see an NLE extend?”

To be honest, I wasn’t thinking of being prescriptive here or even necessarily thinking about NLEs specifically and I’m certainly ambivalent as to whether I think extensibility is always desirable.

In the first place, I was in fact wondering whether there aren’t advantages to rigidity.

Back in the day, I used to use Audiovision and like the few who were lucky enough to do so before AVID killed it, I always felt that it had a kind of perfection to it that ProTools still to this day hasn’t achieved, and probably never will. ProTools is undeniably far more flexible, but Audiovision felt like it was designed very specifically to do a very specific job and as such it “just worked”. It was in many ways extremely “rigid” (e.g. fixed track count!!) but therein lay a lot of its strength.

I purposefully didn’t specify a particular NLE in talking about rigidity, though at the front of my mind was Media Composer rather than (say) FCP X. MC is optimised for the traditional source/record editing method and if that is how you are cutting, then its rigidity (the locked interface) feels just right – having your source and record image always the exact same size is in many ways ideal both from a technical and a creative point of view. However that same rigidity can be frustrating if you want to adopt a more flexible “modern” editing strategy, drag and drop, copy and paste, etc. – and obviously while a lot of editors (me included) are perfectly happy with the Smart Tools, for a lot of users they are a clunky and unwanted feature. I’m not sure anyone would say they love the Smart Tools when compared to what other NLEs offer to achieve the same result.

I think I made a bit of a leap in going from talking about rigidity/flexibility to bringing to up the notion of extensibility – which is not the same thing as flexibility necessarily. I certainly don’t think I’d want or need an NLE to be extensible in the way that After Effects or Nuke or (the paid for version of) Fusion is extensible. I’m not even sure how it would work!

I was simply suggesting that these kinds of applications tend to have far happier users generally and I was positing extensibility as the reason. You’re much less likely to be shouting “to hell with this dumb piece of software”, when you have in your hands the means to make it almost infinitely clever …

As to whether NLEs “should” grow extra pieces in order to achieve a slightly different form of extensibility, I’m just not sure. I do have a certain prejudice that says I want my NLE to be the best it can be at cutting and leave the rest out of it – always assuming that it gives me plenty of interchange options to get out to other dedicated applications. That prejudice does of course collide with the reality that it is nowadays very rarely enough to have just one-way traffic out of your NLE.

So do I want the best possible round-tripping, do I want an internal mechanism that lets me access other applications without round-tripping, or do I want an application that does everything under the one roof?

I’m really not sure. I’m pretty certain that any “one roof” über-application has to be built on the concept of rooms – if I’m grading or doing audio post or visual effects or mograph, I want a dedicated interface and I really, really don’t want to have to be poking around in some fiddly sidebar. I hasten to add that this is my prejudice showing again – if, say, I’m doing audio post, I don’t want to compromise on the toolset or the interface in any way whatsoever, but I can appreciate that many won’t feel the same way. This being the case though, I haven’t seen anything yet even remotely approaching the status of the kind of über-application that I would be happy using.

(I really like Nuke Studio, though, so maybe I’m talking nonsense – although I think the strength of Nuke Studio is that it’s built out logically from the core Nuke concept with the single clear aim of bringing realtime editing to Nuke users. This seems to me a bit different to what Resolve is doing – as long as the editing features of Resolve were simply a way of giving colorists some control over editorial finishing, it made sense to me. I’m not convinced that aiming beyond that is a good idea and I doubt there is really anyone (yet?) who is thinking Resolve is the NLE they have always been waiting for. Which leaves me very ambivalent indeed about what may or may not happen with Resolve and Fusion – I’d certainly like to see a Fusion that looked like Nuke Studio but I’m not at all sure I want to see Fusion simply grafted into the existing Resolve set-up. Although that may work brilliantly …)

Sorry – rambling a lot here. Not sure if any of that is germane to the conversation.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

A really great post, Michael, and you managed to say pretty much everything I would have said on the subject.

A lot of your pluses and minuses are very similar to mine, incidentally. (Don’t get me started on AMA – it’s the Devil’s work! It’s very frustrating that the NLE that has historically been the strongest at media management is still distinctly unreliable in a feature that is really vital for today’s workflows.)

Slamming up against the walls of an overly rigid interface is a classic instance of where pleasure turns to annoyance. There are interfaces that are designed with a very specific way of working in mind and it’s great when you stick to the designer’s notion of how you should work, and everything will feel fluid and easy. But the rigidity will quickly lead to frustration as soon as you want work in a way that the designer didn’t envisage. But then again, the same application can be rigid in some respects and flexible in others …

I do wonder whether “extensibility” has a lot to do with the degree to which an application can frustrate or not. Seeing how someone like Walter works with After Effects (simply amazing!) makes me think that there are applications that in a real sense have no actual limits because of the means they offer the user to build out beyond the core in any direction. (NLEs are fundamentally not like this, although I can see that it might happen with Premiere at some point.) If you can to some extent “rewrite” the application to suit your needs, are you going to hit fewer of those sticking points?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Herb Sevush] “To quote from my favorite Christmas family movie, “The Lion in Winter””

I love that movie – I still have the LP of the soundtrack somewhere, worn out with playing.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Charlie Austin] “The civil discourse still gets derailed by the same people who’ve always derailed it.”

Since it is rather obviously my civility that you are, no doubt rightly, calling into question, I thought I should try to excuse myself to some degree.

I posted a specific example of a specific real world project with a specific set of source material and a specific very tight deadline to illustrate a point of about editing speed, the topic of this thread. Using this example, I argued for the specific benefits of the subtractive string-out method, as against a subclipping/keywording method, as it pertained to this particular project, the argument being NLE-agnostic. (I wanted to make the broader case for having a pluralistic editing outlook rather than adhering to a rigid, single-system methodology at the expense of others.)

A certain other contributor countered that FCP X was exactly the right tool for this job (although I hadn’t said it wasn’t), and detailed another specific method for achieving the same result.

I then demonstrated, by exactly counting our respective keystrokes, that this other person’s method was up to TWO TIMES SLOWER – when both methods were compared inside FCP X.

In pointing out a basic error of FCPX technique in this other person’s method, I jokingly and unwisely suggested that some elementary training could be helpful – the context for the joke being that this person is in the habit of recommending the same to others at every opportunity.

Rather than take the joke in the spirit in which it was intended, this person then decided to claim, entirely without justification, but repeatedly and vociferously, that I know nothing about how FCP X works.

It is invidious to have to defend my expert knowledge of an application that I use professionally all the time. I will point out that in the very first week of FCP X’s release, I was the leading voice asking Tim to set up the Techniques forum so that those of us who wanted to learn and share tips on working with FCP X could do so in relative peace (as no doubt he can confirm). I have used FCP X continuously ever since. I posted many tips and tricks for FCP X both there and on the (far less prestigious!) fcp.co forum, and of course I published more free Motion templates for FCP X than any other user apart from Alex Gollner. More than that, as a plug-in developer for FCP X (as well as Motion, After Effects and Premiere Pro), I have seen far more than most users here of its dark underbelly where weaknesses still lurk. In providing support to our plug-in users, I have to rely on an in-depth knowledge of FCP X to help them with issues relating to aspects of the application with which they are not conversant. And so on – I won’t labour the point.

It is my view that this person’s unwarranted claim seriously overstepped the bounds of professional courtesy. Certainly it is acceptable to point to specific details that one has got wrong or misunderstood (who knows any application well enough never to make mistakes?), but a blanket claim without adequate/any justification that one of your peers is fundamentally ignorant goes way beyond the rough and tumble of this forum and I hope that most contributors here would agree that it is unacceptable. (Tim right or wrongly agreed to moderate the posts in which this claim was repeated and I am grateful to him for having done so. Many here will be unfamiliar with my contributions to the FCP X community and will have been left with a wildly inaccurate picture.)

I fully accept that I can be overbearing in some of my posts but in this instance I do believe I offered a sufficiently fulsome apology to the person concerned, so perhaps I can be a little more civil than you give me credit for … occasionally. I’ll go away now and leave you all in peace.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Walter Soyka] ”
What about you? What slows you down, both in bad ways and good?”

Bad slowdowns: Making bad calls as to which application to use at the start of a job and having to rework it in another application or devise a new strategy to mitigate the bad decision and carry using what we started with. Internet upload/download speeds. Clients who insist on using slow or unreliable transfer portals.

Good slowdowns: anything that prevents us slogging away without a break and losing focus (see Herb elsewhere).

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

I think I won’t take Steve up on his suggestion to take this outside and settle it with duelling pistols, not least since I suspect you are a much better shot than I would be.

Instead I will apologise for being arrogant, overbearing and considerably more forthright (always a serviceable euphemism for rude) than was perhaps appropriate.

There is one more thing I did want to add to the discussion though. You kindly mention my recently started Fusion tutorials, but in addition to these I have also for the last few years been running an extended series of free tutorials for Apple Motion, some of which Tim has been kind enough to host right here on the COW.

My small band of loyal subscribers has been generous enough to call them the best tutorials for Motion available anywhere, and although they are probably being much too generous, I think what they are responding to is the fact that although I provide the means for really getting to know the toolset in depth, I stress that that’s just the starting point on the journey. By all means learn what Apple meant for you to do with the application, and then … you can begin to start actually using it, as against merely operating it.

It’s in thinking beyond the limitations of the toolset, and indeed in many cases fighting against those limitations and devising improved methods of working, that you will start to get the really great results. So my advice, in this, one of my limited spheres of competence, is to learn everything you can – and then question everything about what you’ve learnt, every step of the way, on every single job. There is always a better way, a different way, a way that’s more appropriate to what you are trying to achieve. Apple don’t know what you are trying to do, only you know that. Be bold, be creative, think outside the limitations of the application. Don’t be a slave to it.

All the best,

S.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

Hi David

Thanks very much. I’m really enjoying getting back into Fusion and really excited to see where Blackmagic are going to take it. Very exciting times.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Jeremy Garchow] “they just aren’t tabbed, they are arrowed”

But they are quite flaky still, in my experience. Sadly. You don’t always get what you ordered.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Did you pancake timelines in FCP7? I bet you didn’t.”

I did and do. It’s great.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com