Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Walter Soyka] “(Veering off-topic a bit, I meant to mention this earlier: a lot of nodal functionality exists within Motion’s layer-based system through clone layers. Pretty clever solution!)”
Could you explain?
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Oliver Peters] “It seems to me that one of the key missing functions is the ability to drag a Project directly into an Event. I realize you can “open in timeline” and you can start a compound clip in the Event, but these all seem like workaraounds. Why not the same behavior as we had with bins? Assemble a timeline of selects and drag that into an Event for organization.”
I very much agree and this is a really major missing piece for me.
On the one hand there is the Bill Davis school of editing for people who are deliriously happy making all their selections in a browser environment and who feel that the job is pretty much done once this has been accomplished … OK, so I simplify for rhetorical effect, but you know what I mean!
On the other hand, there is a popular school of thought that likes to do their editing on the timeline, in the sense of making selects as a sequence rather than a folder/bin/collection of assorted clips.
The huge advantage to the latter way of working is that you can immediately see how the different clips might fit together, but also get a feel for how they flow into one another.
When you make selects in the timeline you can already feel the edit coming together as an edit (rather than just a list of decisions about what to include or exclude).
Ideas start to come together about the organization of the material that might never have occurred to you if you hadn’t been working this way.
More than anything else, you get to know your material in a very real sense, but you keep watching it and rewatching it. (I’ve seen quite a few feature editors who even like to keep alt takes back-to-back in their scene assemblies, just so they can continously be evaluating – and re-evaluating – the different choices.)
Conversely, the former school of thought involves staring at a database of clips that is effectively inert – there is no synergy between one clip and another, not way of knowing how they might fit together from just lookoing at them this way.
And most disadvantageous of all – and I know this because I’ve seen too many editors work this way – a lot of good material simply gets lost because it is not being reviewed enough. There is a feeling that because the browser has been organized and selections made that the onus of reviewing the material has somehow been removed. Time and again I’ve seen editors looking at bins full of detailed clip names and thumbnails and all sorts of organizational aids, but not really knowing what’s actually in those clips becaue they’ve only looked at them once.
One of the key lessons of editing is that the really good stuff – that one little moment that will really make your edit sing (or possibly get you out of that impossible hole that you can’t fix any other way) will very probably be hidden somewhere you least expect it.
And I think the FCPX model with its insidiously seductive data management tools makes the danger of losing track of your material all the more acute. There’s clearly even more of a sense in which the organization takes the place of the actual editing. There is a real potential for false confidence, confidence that you’ve rejected, and selected, the right stuff and you can start the edit from that point – without going continually going back.
Bill Davis tellingly describes this as a “two-stage process” – organize first, edit later. My concern about this is that “stage one” seems to be shutting the door on the selection process as though it’s all done and dusted.
For me, and it’s just a personal judgement, editing is essentially one process from start to finish and it’s a process that involves continuous evaulation – and more importantly re-evaluation – of the material.
That’s why I’m not sure that FCPX is necessarily a force for good in all this!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Chris Harlan] “Personally, I would love an NLE that could group tracks in the way Motion does. It would be totally rocking to have the option hierarchical track Groups so that all sfx could reside in a single group that could be expanded/contracted, have filters or volume changes applied globally, etc.”
Isn’t this just what you can already do when you compound clips in FCPX?
A Compound is not hugely different to a Motion Group in a practical sense if not a design one.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Chris Harlan] “I’d be willing to call a Photoshop layer a single frame track if anyone wanted to get into a donnybrook over it.”
To be really pedantic, a Photoshop layer doesn’t have to be a single frame – all you have to do is go into the Animation mode and you start getting time based media there too! There’s a timeline where you can trim and offset clips and apply a variety of animated parameters that make is quite like a kind of cutdown After Effects.
Animation is Photoshop is surprisingly powerful but not much used.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Use the Shift key while dragging to constrain the movement to vertical only. (Or you could use snapping to keep its position in time.)
Keep dragging till the clip is where you want it to be, and the others will move up or down to accommodate it.
(Use the alt key when dragging to make a copy, if that’s what you want.)
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Bill Davis] “I’ve used the example before of how I import long raw narrations into X. Use the range tool to mark the good takes, and if I do that with some care, I can just drag everything tagged as a FAVORITE to my timeline and essentially my initial “edit” of my voiceover is done. I’m left with nothing I don’t want. I can become more “precise” on the timeline if I need to.”
Actually I’m surprised that you think this is a better way of selecting VO takes than editing in the timeline (although I can see it has some uses).
One of the key things with VO recordings is to know how one take sits against another, how well the intonation, inflection and other factors match, especially if there has been a pick-up in the middle of a paragraph or even a sentence. The only way you’re going to make those judgement calls correctly is to hear the edited takes back to back, in context, on a timeline.
“Editing in the Browser”, which is what you are describing, is not going to allow for this. It’s adequate for rejecting stuff you definitely don’t want to use, but not for actually making choices about which takes work best together. And let’s not forget that quite frequently you’re going to want to steal or a word or two here and there from takes that are otherwise “useless”.
(Having said that, editing VO on the FCPX timeline definitely feels a lot quicker and easier than in other NLE’s, for a variety of reasons.)
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Bill Davis] “Editing as ALWAYS been a “two stage process.””
Maybe so, but my point was that a) if there are two stages then the organization one has traditionally been of far less consequence than the putting the shots together process, and b) I don’t agree with the notion of stages as such, but rather that there should be a constant free interplay between selecting and editing.
But perhaps we are talking about a difference of emphasis, and more to the point a difference of editing styles and/or requirements.
[Bill Davis] “We can all think of lots of typical stuff where that’s all the editing that a person needs.”
I can see where you’re coming from and, yes, there are some advantages to be had from the FCPX methodology. However, I think to talk about this type of work as “editing” is possibly confusing. It’s really just “prepping” or whatever other term you want to use. Almost by definition, editing is what happens on the timeline … or is that an preposterous thing to say!??
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Bill Davis] “Time and time again, I see them want to start their editing “in the timeline” – because that’s all they’ve ever done before.”
I’m intrigued to see that you think that “editing in the timeline” is not recommended for FCPX.
To my mind, and I really, really like editing in the timeline (!), it seems that FCPX is extremely well suited to this – better even than FCP Legacy, which is vastly superior in this respect to Media Composer.
[Bill Davis] ”
It’s hard to get them to think of “two-stage” editing via first the event browser and then the timeline.”I’m also not sure that editing is ever best conceived as a “two stage process” – shouldn’t it always be a fluid interplay between sourcing the material for the edit and actually making the edits?
I wonder if you aren’t being seduced by the (relative) novelty of the Event Browser into elevating “organization” to a more more important role in the hierarchy than it needs to have or deserves.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Richard Herd] “Here’s my actual question: In what order are other folks working? Am I too old school? Is there a more efficient way?”
You are really lucky to still be able to leave the audio to the end of the process once you’ve got “picture lock”. Clients now almost universally expect the audio to be “perfect” from the very first cut, and I believe a lot of editors are now finding this to be the case.
There’s no “rough cut” anymore and that applies almost as much to the pictures.
This means that it’s increasingly important to have a workflow that allows for “polished” temp mixes that can be done relatively quickly. STP used to be pretty good for this (a lot quicker in most cases than going to ProTools) but it had its limitations, especially for longer form.
FCPX with its Logic/STP audio tools and the ability to compound clips to make “virtual” tracks does seem to be quite a good way forward in some ways.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
A very interesting and thought-provoking argument.
But how sustainable is the notion that FCPX is in any real sense a nodal system? Granted, connected clips are kind of nodally connected, but only kind of, and really the idea doesn’t extend much further, does it? There is no meaningful sense in which those connections involve the kind of process tree modality that we associate with nodal compositing workflows. Nothing is actually passed through the connection – and you can’t interpose other types of nodes to change the value of the connection.
Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your point.
Conversely I think Motion is and always has been a long, long way from being a nodal compositor. The layer/group compositing method is clearly in line with the completely non-nodal model of After Effects and the like, although I would say that in the way they have implemented Groups there is far more speed and flexibility (or at least the potential of that) than there is in AE.
Personally, I would be disappointed to see Motion move in the direction of a nodal model, even if such a thing were actually possible without starting again from scratch. The way it works at the moment, it’s a very good and speedy motion graphics app (that also happens to be a great fit for the FCP environment both old and new). If it started trying to be a fully fledged Nuke/Shake type compositor, I reckon it would lose that edge.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com