[Steve Connor]

[Herb Sevush] “As a cutter of PBS broadcast shows my absolute is 26:46:00, and to work in an environment that doesn’t prioritize that would be, for me, absurd.”

[Herb Sevush] “Above all, to paraphrase Bill, it seems the magnetic timeline prizes the maintenance of original editing decisions. But is that a good thing – I spend the majority of my time revising, redefining and often obliterating those decisions in favor of later ones.”

It keeps the relationships until you break or change them Herb, just as easily as you would in a tracked NLE. What it does is KEEP those relationships intact as you work on the rest of the story.

It’s hard to “get” how another system works based on how other people describe (or wax lyrical) about it especially when you haven’t used it.

\”Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines\” W.Soyka

[Steve Connor]

[Walter Soyka] “We’re not just post. Most of what we do is design, and footage is just a suggestion. Our clients have graphic design expectations (present a number of options, perform a number of revisions), but we operate in a video context.
“

Just checked out some of your work – wow! Whatever your process is, it clearly produces spectacular results!

BTW I have stolen your quote for my new sig – thanks

\”Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines\” W.Soyka

[Steve Connor]

[Tim Wilson] “Instead, shine the brightest possible light on what’s making you happiest. Leave room for the possibility that you’re wrong about some of the basics about the rest, just like you’re asking me to be, and maybe we’ll both have room to grow”

Great post Tim, it made go and make a cup of tea and read it through again. Lets’ hope people take the suggestions onboard.

How about, to start with, we stop referring to track based editing as “the old way” 🙂

[Steve Connor]

[Walter Soyka] “With a traditional NLE, you read the timeline, and you can see and use and change the relationships. But it’s on you, the editor, to use and preserve the relationships of obviously-related clips during operation. The traditional NLE only offers you tools to manipulate clips. You have to make multi-selections, both vertically and horizontally. You have to toggle track locks to preserve some pieces you want to keep. You have to play Track Tetris to make clips fit after a move. You, the editor, have to do a lot of timeline work to keep related clips related during operation.

Because FCPX actually encodes clip relationships (this clip comes first, then this clip comes second; this clip connects to that clip at this point), there is no work that you, as the user, must perform to keep related clips related. The relationship is defined by the editorial operation that puts it into the storyline in the first place, and of course you are free to redefine the relationships at any time.

Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines. This is a real semantic difference.”

Ladies and Gentleman, we have a winner!

[Steve Connor]

[Neil Goodman] “[Tony West] “People often describe the program as “getting out of your way so you can focus on the story.”
When actually, it’s participating in the edit with you like some sort of assistant editor.”

Thats a great description of how it actually works instead of all the other mumbo jumbo. I would read your article.
“

I agree, parts of this argument are nonsensical. The tracked editing description in the original article was badly explained and has sadly detracted from what was on the whole one of the best descriptions of editing in FCPX I’ve read.

[Steve Connor]

[Shane Ross] “But is there a similar way to let Apple know this?”

Yes, via Feedback and they definitely listen, they’ve contacted me a couple of times about requests over the years

[Steve Connor]

[Oliver Peters] “The coolest part of the show, though, will never be seen by the public. Before the barges can be sent back to the dock, all remaining propane must be vented out of the flame barge. This is done in one huge fireball after park closing, as they fire off all 34 (?) flumes at the same time!”

I was there in February staying at the Caribbean Beach which is across the way from EPCOT and I think I saw this happening a couple of times late at night !

[Steve Connor]

[Oliver Peters] “Thanks. A year of my life right there! At the time, we had asked to at least double the horizontal and vertical pixel resolution. The engineers told us don’t go there. It’s a square factor for everything – weight on the barge, time to fabricate the displays, labor to hand-wire the LED blocks, cost, etc. We were told the closest anyone would see it would be 500 feet away – therefore “good enough”. So our test “platform” was the Australia continent panel, which is more or less 40×40 pixels. That’s effectively a desktop icon. We figured that if you could make out an image on that from 500 feet, then the image was useable. The other continental masses were bigger palettes. So, a lot of late-night testing with stock footage in the backlot at the Magic Kingdom.”

Yes, great job, seen the show a few times and I’ve always been impressed!

[Steve Connor]

[Oliver Peters] “However, back in those days you had professional DV decks and the AJA Io. If you took a DV tape, played out through a pro deck’s component analog or SDI connections into the AJA Io, you got a better-looking image.”

I agree, we used to do this all the time when I was an online Editor and there was a visible difference

[Steve Connor]

[Herb Sevush] “Try putting yourself in the position of someone with multiple seats of Legacy doing broadcast work – needing Multicam and all sorts of OMF and EDL output to finish and with plans to add 3 more seats to handle a new series, only to find out one morning that he can’t get those new seats, he won’t be seeing any upgrades, and he has no idea how long his old seats will continue to work with new OSX upgrades. How happy is that person to find out that X can’t handle any of that. By the time of the white paper that person had probably already switched to either Avid or Ppro and was in no mood to hear anything Apple had to say.”

That sums it up very well Herb, not very difficult for anyone to understand how much of in issue the launch was. Of course those who are keen to reversion the past will completely ignore it!