First foray, few questions

Ha ha, so I figured i'd have a look. First quick play brings up some questions.

1) So it appears that whenever i move the mouse across the timeline, it shows a pink line that is constantly scrubbing along the footage. Same when i move the mouse over the clips. Constantly scrubbing. Constantly blaring out FF audio. Please tell me I can stop this, I already want to punch something.

2) I want to put two clips one above the other and have both at 50% size. Where's the motion tab?

3) How do I make the clips in the timeline at least 50% less high so I don't have to see the images on the clips, I can view more of what were once tracks and so my clips don't remind me of 3 year old lego pieces?

4) It appears you cannot undock the different panes, but I can have the player in my second monitor. I can live with that. But can it only be there if it is full screen and therefore I can't use any of the buttons along the bottom of the player because my dock is there and my app icons are in the way. Surely I can resize the player window when it is 'undocked'?

5) can I make the clips in my clips window be little icons like in FCP7 or Adobe? Do I always have to be looking at the thumbnail?

6) What is the point of the hand tool? It seems to allow me to move the timeline left and right... like my mouse does (left right scroll on mine) and like the scroll bar at the bottom does. Surely one of those 7 tools can't only move it left and right. Tell me it does something else.

7) How do I scrub through a clip... actually, @#$%& it, i'll try and have a read through the manual and see what's what. The way i have to scrub through the tiny thumbnails and can't use ; when i set an in point to jump back to it is pissing me off now. I did discover how to reduce the thumbnail sizes but a) it doesn't make them neat little icons, just smaller thumbs so loads more distracting colour needlessly in my peripheral vision and b) they're pretty f***ing unusable at that size as it seems i can't figure out how to scrub and mark ins/outs in the viewer/player.

So, first foray going well then.

woo-hoo, discovered event browser as list!!!!

Can't stop the pink line making constant scratching noises yet though.

it appears that when you have the clips as a list, the noise pollution goes away when you scrub over the three clips shows at the top of the clip area (thank the lord for that small mercy. Still can't stop it from making noise over the timeline.

S to get out of scrubbing world. (it's actually called "the Skimmer", probably named after a wrestler.)



www.strypesinpost.com

>5) can I make the clips in my clips window be little icons like in FCP7 or Adobe? Do
>I always have to be looking at the thumbnail?

Not that I know of.



www.strypesinpost.com

>6) What is the point of the hand tool? It seems to allow me to move the timeline
>left and right..

It is there for more precise adjustments of what you are viewing. I wish Avid has that.

>4) It appears you cannot undock the different panes

It may have been killed or it may be in a coming update.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thank you for S, that's greatly appreciated.

5) I figured out you can make them icons, which is nice.

6) thanks for the reply. read it, went back and had a look. perhaps it will dawn on me later, but still looks like it just moves the timeline left and right.

4) Right, well, that's nice then dears, thanks for that one.




So, i have kind of figured out that by tagging all my clips I can put them in folders. thing is, I used to be able to create a folder/bin, and click with shift and drag a bunch of clips i wanted in the folder on 'stage 01' in about, um, 5 seconds. And so on so all my clips were arranged where i wanted them in under 30 seconds. Ok a minute at a push.

Now I can create a new folder here (not a bin though) but I can't just drop clips in it. Um. Ok. Thanks for that. On the other hand, I can spend 5 minutes with my (not very large hand span) fingers stretched quite uncomfortable to hit the ctrl+7 (etc) shortcuts doing the same thing I would have done in 30 seconds to a minute.

I understand that things have been written from scratch, and perhaps complicated things like importing old project files were a bit of a headscratcher and perhaps there were more important things to focus on, but surely drag and drop of clips into a folder isn't beyond the realms of coding ability.

Why stop things like that which are not only a big part of how people have edited for quite a while, but are actually just common sense?

Damn, it's a shame i stopped smoking pot, because whatever they've got at Cupertino must be amazing.

And I promise to not again mention the fact there isn't a manual save option. Like I won't mention again that their last 24" Monitor didn't have an off button.

I've got to say, 10 years ago i went from using Pinnacle Studio 8 to a new Mac and FCP 4.5 and I just dived straight in and starting cutting. Wanting to cut. Sure i was slow and I was looking for buttons, but it felt natural and i was excited.

At the moment I just look at the screen and want to close the app down and pick my nose instead.

I'm sure it will get better, but for now, why when i place my clips above each other and cut a bit out of the bottom clip, does the one above have to fall into the gap. Come on apple, you invented the goddam magnetic timeline, surely you can make clips hover too... you're the future of our world and the most important tech company in the universe, you know those clips can iHover. Make them iHover. Make them stick there up in the air, because for good or bad when I do our live sessions with 6 cameras I lay my footage out on 6 tracks, reduce each to 35%, cut to the beat and then when i take 5 of those clips away I need the 6th to stay there hovering in space so I can grade equally and when i decide to change a shot i can just drag one of the other cameras back across to replace it because I know where all my footage is and it isn't all on the same track.

I've a feeling this is more a dear diary post than asking questions. ho hum. Was more fun than working in X dear lord, that's quite tragic.

Cut multiple clips at once
You can use the Blade command to cut primary storyline clips and connected clips simultaneously.

In the Timeline, select the clips you want to cut.

Move the skimmer to the frame where you want to cut.

Choose Edit > Blade (or press Command-B).

The selected clips are cut at the skimmer position.


What it doesn't say is when you do this whole procedure that the yellow highlighted moves to the left of the cut you just did so you can't actually BB forwards in time, just backwards in time.

How is highlighting clips, using CMD+B, highlighting clips, using CMD+B, highlighting clips, using CMD+B, highlighting clips, using CMD+B, highlighting clips, using CMD+B, highlighting clips, using CMD+B, etc., quicker than using BB then right clicking every place you want to cut all the clips, faster?

Am I really antiquated and old hat for wanting BB back? For preferring to use a simple and efficient method of cutting multiple clips? Is this part of the new paradigm that makes me, a cynical one, redundant?

Really?

Er, this is just f***ing ridiculous. I won't even explain why, but this is just really f***ing ridiculous and illogical and it looks like a £20 editing app with training wheels for people who want to edit but can't edit but want to believe they can edit and have a couple of weeks to give it a go before they realise they can't edit and get back to doing something they have real aptitude for... and i know what i'm talking about because I want to make music, I really do, but I can't because i'm pretty shite at it, but I played with garageband for a while thinking I was making music until I stood back and listened to what I made (or rather garage band had made whilst i pushed a few buttons) and compared it to what people made on Reason and realised I was @#$%& and so was garage band.

THIS IS @#$%&!!!

And for a comparison, I also demoed CS5.5 and although that was frustrating at times too because things didn't work as well, at least I cut something in the short time I played with it, with this I don't even want to bother to try.

I'm all for people loving it. Love your toys. I do. But X is frigging illogical, insane, counter-intuitive and childish and no, I don't want to learn how to use it, or rather learn how to do workarounds for all the simple things it should bloody do anyway, because all I want to do is edit.

Right. Short lived diary. This is going back to the shop tomorrow. Pile of crap.

I can't believe they just didn't give us a 64b it FCP8 and then they could have stuck their heads up their arses all day long for all i care, at least I'd have got another few good years out of a great bit of editing kit without having to learn over with Adobe. Which I am going to have to do now.

The only silver lining to this debacle is my work partner uses AE and when we work together he grades the stuff so no more exporting QT files, yousendingit to him and waiting for them to come back and render them into the timeline.

In many ways Apple will make our future workflow easier, better and more productive, so thanks for that Apple.

What a huge disappointment and frustration this whole debacle has been.

Even better was control v, which cuts everything at the playhead without even clicking. In FCP Legacy, I mean.

There's Avid too. Which has a very mature editing interface. I have a love-hate relationship with Avid, but I guess now it's time to love it since FCP is dead. As an editor, I have to be one step ahead, so I need to take the plunge onto other NLEs.



www.strypesinpost.com

Eyeseesound: So how long have you been working with this app before you made up your mind to ditch it? Just curious. Not trying to start something.

Michael Horton
-------------------

Admitedly, there are some nice features which even Avid would do well to take heed.

Namely, the trim mode, the option to optimize media and the badly implemented connecting clips.

FCP has pretty crummy trim tools for a long time. Now it finally has a trim mode.

The optimize media option is kinda similar to Avid. For a long time, editors had to worry about formats. Now they don't.

Connecting clips is a good idea, but horribly implemented (it came at the expense of tracks). What would be a great feature is the ability to group the clips, assign colors to groups and allow for swap edits of scenes. When assembling an episode, we needed something better than dumb nesting which causes the timeline to lose form, and not only that, swapping scenes around required quite a few keystrokes and zooming in and out of the timeline. If you can group clips together (automatically assign a group when doing an edit from a sequence) and have a command to shift the groups around with a click or a modifier, and shift scenes as if it were a single entity, it would be a great feature when you are assembling scenes. And more than that, you still have the ability to perform your normal clip edit functions without jumping through hoops.



www.strypesinpost.com

You can shift groups around as scenes, Strypes. If you make them into a secondary storyline you can shift them by dragging the shelf (or using the numbers system). Is that what you were talking about?

eyeseesound, you know Izzyvideo has free training on FCPX?

>You can shift groups around as scenes, Strypes. If you make them into a secondary
>storyline you can shift them by dragging the shelf (or using the numbers system).
>Is that what you were talking about?

I think you can. I haven't found a way to do that (I mean shifting entire scenes with a single click without nesting/compound clipping), but it should be possible, if not in a few updates. That is really what you need when you are reshuffling scenes and working on the overall flow of the story. Problem is that the price of having connecting clips turned out to be a lack of tracks. So everything needs to be keyword collected or your conform will be in trouble. I'm not so sure if that's a good trade off.

Back to the OP- if you haven't given it a proper shot, give it a good try. There is no guarantees you'll like it, and you probably won't use it for your next broadcast project due to the constraints (no XML/EDL, no OMF, no monitoring, no shared environment). But the least you can say is that you gave it a proper shot instead of just complaining about it.



www.strypesinpost.com

Eyeseesound: So how long have you been working with this app before you made up your mind to ditch it? Just curious. Not trying to start something.

Michael Horton


eyeseesound, you know Izzyvideo has free training on FCPX?


Back to the OP- if you haven't given it a proper shot, give it a good try. There is no guarantees you'll like it, and you probably won't use it for your next broadcast project due to the constraints (no XML/EDL, no OMF, no monitoring, no shared environment). But the least you can say is that you gave it a proper shot instead of just complaining about it.

ha ha, everyone is rather sensitive when making even valid comments or statements around FCPX. Didn't think you were trying to start something. Honestly a couple of hours maybe, maybe less. I have read a lot since 21/6 (or 6/21) so some of that seeped in too.

I accept that isn't long enough to fully 'get' the new way of editing, and maybe i will find some time next week to give it a go further, but for some reason I have 7 days in mind for when I have to return it to get my £200 back and I didn't see the point in wasting that.

Thing is, I don't really see the point of learning a whole new way of editing when the old way worked fine at its core. Someone above (hang on: Strypes) said it well when he said why not take the useful ideas of what they tried to do here and just apply them to track based editing.

Why couldn't everything be attached not to a 'primary storyline' but to moments in a linear timeline, with little lines going upwards so their were attached to the ceiling. You could work on tracks and then when you've got a little sequence of clips which are all stacked together and where you want them in the timeline, you can 'group' them, attach them to the ceiling and when moving other stuff around the attached stuff could rise when needed to so collision doesn't happen, but know their place and return to the specific track when collision detection mode stopped?

I like to edit initially with everything on different and specific tracks because it tells me what i'm looking at. I don't like my hand being forced. I like to put transitions etc on clips on different tracks too.

But beyond that, from my limited experience it is the things that seemed just plain stupid that make me think, why waste a single moment more on this.

Player window cannot be removed and put on my second monitor unless it goes there full screen and clashes with my dock. Why?

BB (or as Jude pointed out CTRL + V which i'd forgotten about and actually have assigned to the ` key, so only one button push as the timeline is actually playing and i can make to beat cuts on my whole timeline as a rough guide). Why this convoluted method of making multiple clip cuts?

Why can't i put a dissolve on the 'secondary' timelines?

Why can't I put a bunch of clips into a folder?

Why can't I use the bigger window (viewer/player) to scrub and mark in/out points on? What it is asking me to do is place my mouse over something in the left hand side of the screen and my eyes look at something on the right hand side of the screen. Sure it can be done. Sure it will become second nature to those who do it a lot. But is it more sensible than the mouse scrubbing underneath the exact point where your eyes are looking? I mean, they'll be better read people than me on here, so psychologically, or even physiologically, is it better to be moving your scrubber on the opposite side of the screen to where your eyes are watching? I can't believe it is.

The baby got thrown out with the bathwater. If all the above changes, and all the other irritations that other people have mentioned were simply due to the fact that without them the magnetic timeline wouldn't work, then the magnetic timeline was ill-conceived and perhaps the guy who designed it shouldn't have based a revolutionary new way of editing on an idea he had whilst possibly coming home with sunstroke.

If it is because Apple needed some sort of marketing tagline to show how goddam ahead of the curve they are and they changed everything (including the bloody terminology, for god's sake how immature are they?) just because they could and should because then everyone would say 'oooh, they really are the cool kid in the classroom' then that was an ill-conceived idea because it wasn't necessary and the alternatives, to me, just seem stupid in a lot of places.

OK, another real life example. I just reopened it to try and remind myself of other things that irritated me. In the timeline it says 'create new project'. Doesn't have the project open from last night. Create a new one. File allows me to create a new project or event. Nothing about recent ones done. Nothing about the one I shut down last night (didn't save it mind... ooops, can't do that on my own, probably get sued for wanting to use my own mind).

So where is the work i did yesterday? On the left all my directories are listed (included all my Back Up ones. I click on OS1, which is where the project i worked on was stored but nothing. I right click it I can Create New Project or New Folder.

Great, cheers. But where's my work from last night? Perhaps it is somewhere. But why am I spending even 5 minutes trying to find the bloody thing?

In fact i just looked in the folder in my Movies folder. I see a file for CurrentVersion.fcpevent, but nothing about the 'Project' (sequence) I was working on. As things stand it looks like that has just vanished. WTF?!@ Really?

No, sorry, those of you willing to try and make it work for you, go for it. But i stand by my points. This is a toy for wannabes that will never be. I know that given enough time I could cut something of value on it. It would just annoy the hell out of me doing it. I know that most people on this forum who do this for a living could cut something great on it, and if you'd rather use this than Adobe or Avid or even stick with our 32 bit 7, then go for it, use X.

It's the same as a proper music producer being able to make a great tune on GarageBand. They can. And you can on X.

But why the hell would you?

I have CS4. Instead of wasting time on X surely it would be better to spend that not-working time to learn Adobe in advance of FCP7 being EOLd in my life too and CS5.5 or CS6 being bought, or even trying Avid.

For me, this is Apple just doing what they can because it will be 'awesome', and I just don't get why? Nor feel like I want to.

And (then I shall finish) I bought it because I genuinely wanted to be able to see some value in it, to find a use for it in my work, particularly in the short term because to get CS5.5 i need £1500 for the upgrade and a new graphics card and FCP7 as much as i love it, is 32bit and i (still) want to be able to use the power of my Mac Pro. So I did want to at least like it and find value in it. Now I just want my money back.

And to know where my sequence went from last night



ps: I'm not trying to start anything either. I just vocalise my thought processes quite readily

This is hard to address when there is clearly so little understanding on the application.

You want it to be like the other applications you've used. It isn't. If you don't want to work with it and have to work with a track based application then you have other options.

Many of things you say you can't do, you can, you just have to understand how they're done. You can add transitions to secondary storylines. You can put clips in a folder. They're called keyword collections. The viewer is for viewing and transformations and effects control. Really why can't you do effects control in the Canvas in legacy FCP? There's a lot more but why bother. All projects and all media are there all the time if you have the drives connected. Every current version is in a folder with a project name. What's not to understand?

You spent a few of hours with it, you hate it, move on. If you don't want to use it and can't be bothered to learn it, that's fine. There are other applications and other forums right here at LAFCPUG that will suit you.

All the best,

Tom

There was no need to address it Tom. You are right. At an instinctive level I do hate it now (but hey, I at least tried with an open mind, it just doesn't seem to be more sensible than stupid) and I've just applied for my refund, so no worries there.

Though my point about keywords was it took a lot longer than dragging clips into a folder. So you can't drag them into a folder. You have to keyword them. I know this. And sure, I guess for some people keywording all their clips is cool fun and maybe for even some others, useful, but why can't I have the choice to not do it? Why I am forced to do something I never ever do and to slow down my prep time? It's illogical. Like not having a manual save is illogical. And with my point near the top, not having an off button on a Monitor is illogical.

And if all projects are there all the time, where is the timeline from last night? I have the folder named to the Project I gave to it (whatever Apple call a Project now) but there is no timeline anywhere in it from yesterday. It. Is. Gone.

i havent used X yet, so my terminology is probably all wrong.

i seem to remember reading that you COULD create a folder, and drag clips to it,
and that that action added the folder key-word to the clips: the reverse of the process you describe.

i dont want to force you into using something you don't want to,
but reading this blog has been interesting for me.
[fcpxmegatest.blogspot.com]

it's written by people actually using FCPX to edit a fast turn-around show for broadcast,
they are coming up against all of the problems i am reading about,
and seem to be finding solutions by buying into what FCPX is, not what it is not.



nick