Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Pedro de la Fuente] “Basically my OMF exports makes a mess of my audio clips positions. All audio goes to 1st frame of the video although the soundtrack (music) remains intact. No way I can get it mixed. Anyone having issues?”
I haven’t yet had much of a chance to work out all the issues with PEFCP 5.0 but it does seem that it’s not altogether reliable.
I haven’t had your problem of clips being misplaced but I have noticed that detaching audio results in translation errors, and also that multi-track audio doesn’t seem to get handled accurately either.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “You can’t assign an effect to a secondary, although that would be kinda cool.”
For me if you could do more with secondaries, especially assigning effects to them as you can with CCs, it would be a huge improvement..
Most of all I would like to be able to move things in and out of a secondary with ease (as in a Lift from/Overwrite to kind of thing). I think working with secondaries as temporary locations for stuff that – for now – belongs together would solve a lot of problems.
I’d like for example to be able to set up a secondary in such a way that I know that I could drop my dialogues in there and my basic/standard EQ and compression would apply as if I were bussing them.
I agree that CCs have undesirable limitations – not being able to see inside them, and hence edit everything in context, is a big negative for me. I don’t want anything hidden away from the main business of the edit. (This is something that used to really bug me when I worked a lot with AVID DS.)
Secondaries on the other hand are much more like “open containers” that you can see inside at a glance, and that you can move stuff in and out of at will whenever you need to adjust the edit and suspend the secondary relationship – then it’s as easy as anything to restore the relationship or make a new one.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Do you think he works that way because he wants to, or because the FCP7 interface dictates he has to? If you need to export separate tracks, there’s no other way to do it but to put everything on its own track. X solves that with Roles.”
The main reason he has for grouping his tracks the way he does is that (as he explained) he likes to “live mix” the different stems (dialogue, effects, music) through a basic desk. You can’t yet do this sort of output routing with FCPX – even with Roles. Maybe that will arrive in later incarnations of the Roles idea …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
You can find rotation if you Show the details of the Transform tab in the Inspector – however it is Z rotation only which I don’t imagine is what you have in mind.
If you could post a screen grab of what you are trying to emulate it might be easier to point you in the right direction. I, and others most notably Brendan Gibbons, have made a number of Templates that might do the trick.
Or you could simply use the Distort tool to fake the effect.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Chris Harlan] “The DPS Perception PVR!”
Another cracker! I was so excited when I started using this 🙂
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Thanks, Lawrence.
You might prefer to try this newer, improved version (with more accurate measurements than the previous one):
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/5229
It also includes the option to show a couple of different adjustable grids as well as the Safe Title/Action option – which I always find useful for lining up graphics.
Plus everything can be coloured as gaudily as you see fit! Which is after all the main consideration!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] ”
Just curious as why the “replace” functions won’t work as overwrite for you?”It would be nice to be able to restore or add a group of connected clips to a secondary in the same way that you can Lift them from the secondary.
Actually it would be nice to be able to use Overwrite to Primary Storyline with audio clips and not just video – why can’t you “Lift from” but not “Overwrite to”?. Not sure why this isn’t already implemented …
As for Replace, I’m not a big fan of the options – I’d far sooner have a traditional Replace edit option (sync to playhead) than what we’ve got. Replace from Start/End seem to me to have limited value compared to this (there just basic 3-point edit options really), and the notion that the default Replace behaviour is to ripple the clip to the duration of the new one strikes me as very eccentric, though I can see how it might have the occasional use.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I completely agree, but isn’t that what a “track” is?”
Exactly! I don’t think we ever quite realized what brilliant organizational tools tracks actually are until Apple opened our eyes to it by taking them away 😉
I suppose I’m just looking at secondaries as a way of getting back some of their benefits in some form …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Yes, I will give it a whirl. I will probably send something more generic like, “…it would be great if we could have a bit more visual organization control of our audio clips below the primary storyline.””
I’d have to agree that your zones idea is a cracker – hopefully they’ll think the same in Cupertino!
Thinking about this whole issue of organizing your audio visually, I have been coming round to the conclusion that for now one of the better ways of doing this would be the judicious use of secondary storylines.
There could be a numnber of benefits to working more in this way.
First of all, while editing audio in the primary storyline is pretty straightforward, it is definitely compromised when trying to edit audio within the realm of connected clips. Obviously, in the most basic scenarios the primary storyline will take care of most of your audio editing needs but outside the simplest cases there is a clear need to edit audio efficiently outside that single realm. Music editing is obviously going to be the prime example here, where speed and finesse are critical.
Trying to edit audio down among the connected clips has slightly the feel of trying to juggle with eels – in time you could become a skilled eel juggler but it doesn’t feel like a skill worth devoting too much time to if there’s another way. In particular as far as I am concerned, the inability to simply overwrite one clip with another in this realm is a tiresome drawback. Editing music for example usually requires the ability to slide one clip against another, overwriting or extending around the edit point as required with a single action. If you try moving connected clips against each other for the same effect, you’ll get one clip slipping out of the way precisely to avoid its getting eaten up by the clip you are moving – or conversely, moving it apart will open up a gap. Either way you will have to “repair” the edit by trimming or extending. OK, so it’s only a few extra actions but who wants more actions? We are always hunting for ways of using fewer.
Another way for me is to group the audio that I’m currently working on into a secondary storyline (not a compound clip where its inner workings are going to be hidden away from the main timeline, which is too much of a disadvantage for me). In the secondary storyline, most of the advantages of the primary storyline are restored and you can indeed go back to sliding your clips against each other in the traditional way. And you get the advantage of being able to ripple edit without affecting anything anywhere else – again great for music editing.
What would be great for me is if secondary storylines had all the functionality of the primary storyline and none of the restrictions that currently with them. It would be great for instance to be able to connect clips within the secondary – and not have to Open in Timeline to do so (nesting behaviours, though useful, are really not good for editing generally because they require you to edit “out-of-context”).
What secondaries also give you is a measure of visual control that is otherwise lacking among connected clips (as you’ve been discussing), so that for example I can keep all the clips that belong in one music edit (there could be several within the one cue) together in one place.
There is a sense in which secondaries are already virtual tracks, more so in fact in relation to audio than video. They can also be broken apart as necessary so you never need to be locked into one organizational system if you don’t want. (It would be really helpful if you could have an Overwrite to Secondary Storyline command, as well as the Lift from Secondary Storyline – but I can see how this might be complicated in practice.)
I think expanding the capabilities of secondaries, or rather implementing a system where the secondaries share all the characteristics of the primary would really open a lot of possibilities and reduce some of the limitations.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Craig Seeman] “I do think one option would be to have the option of Clip Connections connecting to something other than the Primary Storyline. This would mean clips could travel with Secondary Storylines for example. Granted at that point one might have to have a means of color coding the connections for example.
This would move FCPX into a more nodal form of editing.”
I very much agree.
On a related note, it would be nice to see them remove the tyranny of the one “primary” storyline and make it more of a democracy where all storylines were equal, rather than that secondaries were second-class citizens with reduced options. (The ability to make 3-point edits into all storylines equally – entailing some kind of edit destination selection option – and of course make In/Out selections as opposed to having to rely on the range tool, seem like really important requirements.)
I very much like your notion of a more nodal system within the timeline – that I think would be a genuine advance with powerful possibilities.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com