[Simon Ubsdell]

[Oliver Peters] “It completely negates what I would call the “proximity” effect.”

Does it, though? Could we not have the benefits of both? Having more efficient search doesn’t mean you couldn’t still pick through a random pile of stuff if you wanted or needed to.

And yes, I completely agree about the value of serendipity to the editing process – Serendipity is a truly genius editor and we do well to trust him/her.

In my experience, editing serendipity comes to your aid more effectively when you haven’t over-compartmentalised your material and/or your workflow. I have watched too many editors organise their material to death and lose all the random benefits of a looser organisational structure.

In a sense, my argument for better search is also an argument for more relaxed, less heavy-handed organisation.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Fascinating post! Many thanks, Walter!

I do wonder whether the Big Data question is fully germane to this discussion though. The problems of Big Data are problems of analysis, whereas the challenges we are talking about here are a lot more humdrum – namely, how to find stuff.

The question “”Where is thing X?” is a lot easier to solve than the question “What do things A-Z mean?”

I would suggest that the problem of how to find stuff has been answered very impressively, but just not so much in our industry.

To take the example of Google – a pretty convincing example of an answer to the question of how you find stuff – the solution in its crudest form is fundamentally simple. When we use Google, “all” we are really doing is a string search; in other words, we are asking for a match to a set of characters that we type into the search field.

What makes it clever is the “AI” component. It can cope with “fuzzy” matching (mistyping on my part, approximate matches, etc.), which is obviously important, but Google also “knows” what I might be wanting to type (autofill), it “knows” what I have typed before, or to put it more grandly it “knows” the things that are important to me and the things that are less important, which means it can display the things that are important to me with a higher ranking than those which are not.

Of course, when we talk about this in the context of Google, it seems like rocket science, but there’s an app that I use every day that also knows useful things about how I use my computer, and that’s Alfred. (If you haven’t used Alfred, you are really missing out on a fantastic productivity resource.)

So how about we just ask our developers to give us “intelligent search”?

Would that work for you?

(Of course, intelligent search still relies on more or less intelligent “labelling”, but that’s another question. Again, I think the answer to that one is relatively simple, but I won’t go into that here although it’s been touched on elsewhere in this thread.)

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Good grief, man! I said I was leaving. It’s a low trick to kick me again as I pass though the door.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

A troll. A bore. An incoherent evangelist. Or very possibly all three.

When Aindreas turns up like the ghost of Banquo to damn you for being de trops, you know you can sink no further.

I recognise that as my cue to leave and skulk off into the shadows to nurse what shreds remain of my dignity.

To have irritated and/or mystified you is bad enough, but to have failed to engage your interest is an unforgivable solecism.

There’s nothing worse than the person who thinks s/he has something interesting to say and is wrong in that opinion.

Carry on being scintillating amongst yourselves; I will bore you no longer.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

It’s definitely not easy and quite a few of the major applications we use are just not that good at this stuff.

I would certainly agree that tagging is a lot more useful in principle because it travels with the file wherever it goes and doesn’t lock you into an organisational structure in the way the folder structures do. This is where MAMs and MAM-like offerings are starting to offer real benefits.

But for now many if not most applications understand external folder-based organisation and for that reason it’s a useful stopgap until we get something better.

If I drag a folder into Ae, I’ve kept that structure and as things stand that’s a reason for making sure my Finder level structures are fine-grained enough and make sufficient sense to be useful.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

I see what you’re saying, but haven’t you just made the case for Finder level organisation instead of application-based organisation?

Nothing is impossible (in theory!), but it’s a lot easier to envisage organisation travelling smoothly from the Finder to whichever apps you are using, than to expect those apps to be able to export their organisation methods is a universally useful way.

In a sense, your FCP X organisation is “wasted” because it can’t travel outside the application. (It’s not really wasted, because it’s super useful to FCP X.)

Conversely, if I make folders at the Finder level, these are items that I can usefully “import” into any number of applications with the organisation intact. Similarly with tagging at the Finder level – not quite so universally useful but with KFP and Kyno I can create keywords and ranges that translate to both FCP X and Premiere. OK, that’s not a lot of choice yet but it’s a reasonable guess that these developers might soon support Resolve, etc. In other words, we can already see the start of a process that lets us create universally useful “tags” that flow from the Finder to other applications.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Your Finder organisation system is a good one and works because you are primarily working in FCP X.

The assets that we receive and generate are so diverse and they are needed in so many different applications that we really need to be super organised about our Finder level organisation otherwise it gets really messy and painful very quickly.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

I hear what you’re saying. I too am one of those editors who prefers to work inside the NLE and I totally agree about the importance of flow.

But I think the workflows we are discussing here are about the preparation of your media before it ever gets to the NLE rather than a process you would be accessing while editing, so I’m not sure it’s fair to say they are disruptive to the editing flow. Given that usually the purpose is to help you find your material faster once you are in the NLE, I’d say the opposite is true – in other words, by managing your media more effectively, they are assisting with the flow once you get down to work.

Your observation does make me think of another major consideration that I don’t think anyone has yet raised here, and that’s the fact that regardless of which editing platform we are using and whether or not we choose to “pre-prepare” our media, most of us are still doing it twice over. Which is to say that we are organising at the Finder level and then again once we get inside the NLE.

Over here at Tokyo Towers we use Digital Rebellion’s indispensable PostHaste utility which allows us to instantly create complex Finder level project organisation whenever we start a new project, using a house style that we have decided upon. But useful as this is, it still means we have to organise our media all over again once we get into the our chosen editing (or other) application.

It would be great to see ways that would eliminate some or all of this redundancy so we could media manage once and only once. But necessarily that would mean organising at the Finder level not the application level since we want our organisation to ripple through to wherever we happen to be working. That’s obviously going to be tricky but that’s where all those clever developers come in 😉

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

I’d say: think about how you browse a stock footage library online and try to take guidance from that.

What is it about the way that the material is organised on those sites that makes it work for you and enables you to find what you want quickly?

Once you’ve answered that question it should be easier to come up with a good workflow.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Yes, I’ve been hammering away on it today and doing some back-to-back comparisons with KFP for a point of reference. As I say, the speed factor is a really noticeable bonus because you’re not waiting for it to build a library as such.

From the FAQ answering the question whether or not it’s a MAM: “Well, sort of. Many of the features like tagging, descriptive metadata support and filtering give it a MAM kind of feel but its scope is currently rather a very light-weight support of production processes rather than long-term archival, although people may still find it useful for that as well. The main point is, that is is much more light-weight than typical MAMs because it does not require an import/ingest step before you can do something useful with your material. That means there is not really a concept of “inside” or “outside” of Kyno, which also means there is no global search of all content Kyno has ever seen.”

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki