Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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A lot of crashes for me but I’m running it on a MBP rather than my MacPro while I test it out. When I use Open in Motion everything gets very sluggish. I probably need to try a clean install to sort it all out.
But as Geoff says it does seem (as advertised) to recover from crashes without losing anything – which is an amazing step forward if you think about it.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I’m liking secondary storylines quite a bit. The main advantage for me is that secondary storylines are “open” and you don’t have to step in to see what’s going on inside. The negative is that you can’t apply global effects to them unlike Compound clips.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[john spirou] “There are handles in every keyframe, not just smooth in/out… you can mix linear – curved keyframes etc., search for it ….”
These are controls for adjusting the spatial interpolation of the path of the transform – they are not for shaping the temporal keyframe interpolation.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Sorry, Aindreas, I know you’re going to hate this but yes, I really do like it. And I think you could come to like it too.
I understand that you work in promos which is not that far from what I do quite a bit of, so here would be description of how the workflow pans out.
I’m guessing that you’ll probably start with a music track, maybe a voice-over, maybe some sync dialogue and you’ll cut all these together in a rough shape before you add cutaways and other details. There’ll be loads of gaps and things missing but the basic shape and probably also the running time will get locked down as a first pass. And I think this is where FCPX is very much in tune with the way we work – we do make a “primary storyline” and then add in our “cutaways” as a subsidiary process.
I hate the apparently patronising “primary storyline” name but it turns out it’s a good description of your basic underlying edit structure and the fact that that edit structure exists as a rippling timeline is exactly what you’d want for it. You want to take that chunk that you’ve cut and move it somewhere else – it’s a snap to do because the whole sync thing is happening for you, you don’t have to worry about moving stuff out of the way or track assigments or any of that kind of malarkey that takes up time. You go right ahead and move it.
Likewise it makes perfect sense for your “cutaways” (and we call them that where I come from so I don’t object to that name quite as much) are connected to your underlying edit, which is actually what you want in pretty much all cases, or at least it works that way for me. Equally it’s a great idea that the subsidiary “tracks” don’t ripple because again this is exactly what you want of them – you want to be able to slide everything around and trim it freely without worrying about anything further down the timeline.
You obviously also work the way a lot of us do with a kind of scratch pad down the end of the timeline where you can work on variants and try stuff out – there’s no reason at all why you can’t still do this is FCPX. A nice thing about FCPX is that you can also make groups of clips into their own “storylines” which act like edits within the edit (and you can instantly pull them apart again when you want to), so once you’ve got a nice idea worked out down the end of the timeline you could turn it into a storyline and cut it into your master edit – but it’s just another way of working and you don’t have to do that.
I really like Compound Clips which are almost identical to the nests of old – but this time they actually work and could turn out to be one of the most powerful things in the toolbag, especially since it’s easy to break them apart unlike nests.
I could go on, but I am really getting into this new way of working and will find it strange revisiting FCP7 tomorrow morning and remembering how much less easy a lot of the editing tasks are there!
I think the big problem is that a lot of people are looking at FCPX and they just can’t see how it would fit into their editing style and I absolutely understand that it’s almost impossible to fathom at first glance. You just need to work through all the concepts and start to find the ones that work for you – just as with any NLE you might be used to there are loads of alternative ways of doing things and some you’ll never use and some you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.
Maybe!
Come on over to the dark side – it’s really not that bad once you give in to the evil empire 😉
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
But, John, Smooth is just an Ease In/Ease Out behaviour – the original question was about Bezier curves which of course don’t exist – yet.
And a proper graphical keyframe editor seems to be an essential requirement at this level – I’m hoping that’s coming as well.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[jim bachalo] ” a MUCH better and more tightly integrated workflow than PPro to AE”
I’d say that’s a bit of an exaggeration until we know a bit more about how it’s actually going to handle anything other than FCPX templates as it can’t yet send anything else such as browser clips or timeline events, though this is bound to come very soon. The rigging and publishing features are definitely a neat trick however if all you need Motion for is to adapt templates.
I’m hoping that it’s going to develop more fully as a compositing tool as well, for example handing off rotoscoping jobs which FCPX is clearly not meant to cope with (I’d also like to see Shake-style rotoscoping with proper edge feathering control rather the AE style global feather that we’re still stuck with). It will definitely be the place go to for a better key as the keying tools in Motion 5 are much improved (still not great) and the keyer in FCPX is very, very basic.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[turner hall] “you can only rig options for effects and transitions found in the effects/transition browser. “
Yes, you are absolutely right about this – Final Cut templates can be Opened in Motion 5 but as yet you can’t send any of your timeline or browser choices there.
I very much welcome the signs of closer integration with Motion – I’ve already used it to make a Custom title that fades in and out (see my tip below somewhere). I have to say it wasn’t at all quick going either way – I was expecting something very fast and it definitely chugged a good deal on my MBP. I think it’s great that Apple haven’t tried to build Motion into FCPX which would have been a disaster I think.
For many things I have found Motion to be much quicker and simpler than AE and its integration with earlier iterations of FCP while not perfect were pretty handy, if you remembered not to embed the Motion effect in the timeline which always ended badly (and looked far worse than if you rendered a new clip out of Motion, primarily because Motion could do floating point calculations that FCP at the time wasn’t capable of, but is now!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[turner hall] “Ranting is of no use now, its time to provide constructive feedback”
I totally agree – my fear is that there is so much ranting (an unprecedented amount by any standards) that the signal to noise ratio is utterly out of whack. I can see a situation where Apple hear the noise but fail to pick up on the faint signal! That’s always assuming that they bother to listen at all.
My feeling is that the official feedback site will be swamped with nonsense quite as much as the COW would have been had there not been a separate forum for more reasoned evaluation!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Craig Seeman] “Apple has already told various journalists that it will be very fast. That’s the point of App Store distribution vs disk and ship for major upgrades”
I think for me the issue is that there is a mountain – no, a Himalayas – of stuff that needs addressing which means that however fast the updates come it will still take a good long while till it all settles down comfortably, as I am increasingly thinking it will.
[Craig Seeman] “I’m finding everything works so far”
I shouldn’t have said that – I agree that it all works, although it does have a beta-like bugginess to it which means quite a few random crashes for me a least, but there are loads of things (see the Techniques forum) that don’t work remotely as well as we have reasonable justification to expect they should. Lots of sketches for ideas that will probably come good, too many things that are still cobbled together from iMovie builds (Projects!!!!!!!), I think it is reasonable to say.
But overall, and I’m risking my life saying it here, I’m starting to be a fan and am impressed by the potentiality of so much that we’re seeing as much as by what’s already implemented.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Josh Gross] ” the new Color simply hasn’t been released yet. “
It would be so great if you were right about this but I do seem to have read in the Apple literature and elsewhere that Color and Soundtrack Pro have been folded into FCPX and hence by implication won’t exist as separate apps. I do hope I read that wrong though!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com