First foray, few questions

"Though my point about keywords was it took a lot longer than dragging clips into a folder."

I'm sorry but I just don't get this. You make a new keyword collection Shift-Cmd-K. You name it, just like a bin or folder. You drag clips into it. It is EXACTLY the same, albeit the keyboard shortcut is different. They become keyworded. So what? It just tells you what bin they're in.

"where is the timeline from last night?"

I have no idea what this means. When you open the application it opens in exactly the same state you left it in. The project IS the timeline. It IS the sequence. You can have as many of them as you want. You can put them in folders. It looks different, but in this respect it's the same, except that the application is actually creating separate, identificably projects/timelines/sequences on your hard drive and not lumping them all together into one single project file that just keeps getting bigger and bigger until you are forced to have to split it into manageable sizes.

All the best,

Tom

For the record, I'm with you eyesee. Yes, it can do a lot of the things that seem at first to be missing, but they are invariably more complicated to get at than the old version of the same program. That's not really progress, to me.

For example, there is an overlay edit but it's hidden. It's not in the obvious choices. You can add a dissolve without auto adding an audio crossfade, but it's ridiculous workaround taking several steps. You can turn off the skimmer and work with the jkl keys, but the interface that simulates the 'viewer' or 'source' is much smaller and more difficult to work with with long clips, even in list mode, which is as close to controllable as I can get. You can add transitions to clips that are not on the main storyline, but you have to make them a 'secondary storyline' first. I'm just personally finding the deeper I go the more frustrated I get.

I think I was like you - excited and willing to give it a shot to see what very slick new thinking Apple had come up with - I mean, did you see me feed the tweets from the Supermeet to the forum live? I sincerely wanted to love it. I was just surprised at what a mess it really feels like to work with.

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]

Cheers Nick but I applied for a refund and it was approved an hour later.

I'm sorry but I just don't get this. You make a new keyword collection Shift-Cmd-K. You name it, just like a bin or folder. You drag clips into it. It is EXACTLY the same, albeit the keyboard shortcut is different. They become keyworded. So what? It just tells you what bin they're in.

Right, i'm guessing you mean you can make a folder and give it a keyword and drag the clips into it. Fair enough if that's the case. I did create a folder, named it, highlighted a bunch of clips, dragged it to the folder and it didn't drop it in there, so that was my experience... which didn't do what I thought it should do, thus my posts.

"where is the timeline from last night?"

I have no idea what this means. When you open the application it opens in exactly the same state you left it in. The project IS the timeline. It IS the sequence.

Well, again my experience, but i left a timeline open with a bunch of clips on it i was messing with last night. I opened it today and the timeline wasn't there but it asked me to create a new project. Perhaps it is a bug. perhaps it was anomolous. But what if instead of it being a timeline with clips i was messing with it had been 2 hours worth of work that wasn't there today, and it isn't there, it really isn't? That's hardly good is it? I still don't get why we can't manually save projects into a project folder whilst having every key stroke also auto saving (which I believe other systems do). It beggars belief that there is no manual save.

For the record, I'm with you eyesee. Yes, it can do a lot of the things that seem at first to be missing, but they are invariably more complicated to get at than the old version of the same program. That's not really progress, to me.

Cheers Jude.

I guess at the end of the day some will love it, some will make it work, some will try it and think 'sod off'. We are each of us correct because our own opinions are valid, but for me, my opinion, is that it is a stupid idea because it reinvented something that didn't need reinventing. There are some good ideas I suppose, but they've missed a trick by not basing the good new ideas on the structure and format used before which worked really rather well, and by making things frustrating.

I have no doubt it will sell by the bucketload, but I find it hard to believe that it will generate a higher income rate for users than other systems will (when the users incomes are added together from using the specific apps) even if 10 times as many people used it. I read today about a music executive saying that garageband is £3 and how exciting that is in terms of the ability for music to be created... thing his, how many people actually make records that sell, on garageband? And how many who can and do make records that sell would choose to do so on Garageband? When Logic X comes out it will be the same thing. In fact, from my experience (limited admittedly) of talking to people who do make music, Logic has become a toy useful for things now and then and Pro Tools is what they use.

Again, this has been said before, but the antipathy comes not from Apple doing something new, but for killing something that was very easy and good to use (and integral to many people's livelihoods) and replacing it with something new that, despite the power under the hood (that i'm assuming is there because others have told me it is) isn't as good to use as FCP7. I said before I wanted to like it and use it for stuff because despite feeling jilted by my bride I've been married to Apple for a decade now, but this time she really hurt me and the new perm mohican she's come home with has proven to be the final straw. I liked the long natural flowing locks. Sure, cut it a bit, style it, make it more modern if you wish my dear.... but a mohican perm?! Dear Lord, no!

I've been beating on FCPX nearly daily since it came out. My hindsight is nearly 12 years on Avid since it came out and 10 years on FCP legacy. Preceded both with close to 10 years linear (and overlapping into my NLE work).

There's a few things that are extremely awkward in FCPX and I hope those get fixed. Transitions need much better control. Dual mono audio needs to be easier to use. Color Board could use some improvements. Audio mixing is a must improvement.

The other stuff that some people complain about are major leap forwards if you know how to use them. Event/Project organization is leagues ahead of bins for me. Dare I say I like the "trackless" timeline. I use Clip Connections or Secondary Storylines as I need them. They serve different purposes. Secondary Storylines needs some improvement though. Both make it easier for me to shift around sections of the timeline though, along with the magnetic timeline. Since I'm not blocked by the occasional clip collision on complex moves, I can easily rejigger the things once the move is done if there are some odd overlaps. Compound clips are what nesting should have been. The trimming in FCPX is leagues ahead of FCP7 compared to X (or Avid as well). The two up needs to happen on keyboard trimming as well. I love the Skimmer. It speeds editing tremendously. It's a accurate as I need it to be. I can change from skimmer to playhead in an instant when I need that control. The scopes are a tremendous improvement . . . now if I could control the default display on them.

If you can't wrap your head around FCPX organizational methods and timeline functions you aren't going to like it. You will not get it to work like FCP legacy or other NLEs.

>>"where is the timeline from last night?"

>I have no idea what this means

I think he means the changes he made disappeared. Some users have complained of FCP X not saving occasionally so that could be the case.

No issues here. If you like it, more power to you. I'd say, give it a go and if you don't like it, go over to something else.

Tracks vs no tracks... I never saw tracks slowing down my edit. The new design may slow down quite some operations that used to depend on tracks, such as dropping all the VOs by 6dBs, or disabling all the VOs, or toggling off the subtitles.

Right now it is all film strip view in the timeline, and you cant switch it to single thumbnail preview. That's a deal breaker for me, because i need to see the pattern and pace of the cuts, and not have every frame jump out at me. This would have been a good feature, but they decided that everyone needs to love filmstrip view.

I agree with Tom that keyword collections is the new bins in FCP X. Create a bin and give it a keyword, and drop the clips or a portion of the clip into the bin. Problem is when you want to figure out what you haven't keyword collected yet. To do that is quite workaroundy.

Not too sure about the benefits of compound clipping, because it is largely like a nest except with a few new features (speed ramps, etc) and maybe less of the problems we had with nesting. But nesting was a bit problematic in classic FCP.

I'm not too sure I like the scopes compared to the ones in Color, because they killed Color for the color correction tools in FCP X. I very much prefer a dedicated environment for color correction, because you're much speedier on it. But yea, the Resolve is the new Color.

Some of the issues are fundamental- as Jeff pointed out... What if you work on many projects and you need to limit FCP to folder in FCP? This is a normal scenario where a machine will have many projects (*cough* events). Most NLEs will show you what you only the stuff you imported into the project but in our case it shows you everything you've ever edited. There is a workaround, but this is one major fundamental oversight which they could have fixed if they bothered consulting editors.



www.strypesinpost.com

> Most NLEs will show you what you only the stuff you imported into the project
> but in our case it shows you everything you've ever edited. There is a
> workaround, but this is one major fundamental oversight which they could
> have fixed if they bothered consulting editors.

I would worry about a much bigger problem than just hiding projects from clients. What if you had one piece of media -- or several -- hiding in the system that cause FCPX problems? We used to be able to create a version of the project for troubleshooting where we can whittle down the accessed media until we arrived at the culprit. That troubleshooting approach is now much complicated because Apple took away the user's control of what is actually in the project. And I'm willing to bet this "see everything all the time" approach is based on casual home editors who have just 10 little projects in their history, not a professional editor who has 300. What sane person would want to look at 300 projects worth of material at one time? If I had to random-access 300 projects, all I have to do is organize the stuff at the OS level so that each one can be accessed logically. FCPX's system is for people who don't know how to manage files at the OS level. Again, designing for the dumb.

I've been learning Pro Tools, and one of my major complaints is how fussy the media management is. Every single edit results in a new "region" whether I want one or not. The Region Bin gets filled up at lightning speed. Edit one piece of master sound and you get two dozen of them crowding your interface after 10 minutes. Major problem for those of us who are used to taking control of media management.


www.derekmok.com

Philip Hodgetts' assisted editing has an app for that. Easily switches out the projects to been seen and not seen.

If you're having issues it would probably be better to do it on a separate drive or disk image to isolate it.

All the best,

Tom

I'm against the idea of separate drives. Because many of us use high speed arrays. Partitioning drives is a bad way to organize your media. Disk images is slightly better, but going into disk utility to start a project (event) isn't very elegant.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote

I've been learning Pro Tools, and one of my major complaints is how fussy the media management is. Every single edit results in a new "region" whether I want one or not. The Region Bin gets filled up at lightning speed. Edit one piece of master sound and you get two dozen of them crowding your interface after 10 minutes. Major problem for those of us who are used to taking control of media management.

i remember wen i was using PT, that really bothered me, too,
and i tied myself up worrying about it.
i think i got myself into some trouble too, trying to manage it manually.

i did eventual find a simple control (from memory by right clicking in the region list, or at the bottom of it??)
which was to "delete unused regions not including whole regions" or something like that.
it really cleans up the list.
and you can choose to only show whole regions, too.

my experience is years old now, so it may be different.
back then there were no "region bins" so EVERYTHING was in there!


nick

Philip's utility doesn't require separate drives. It just uses project and event shuffling.

All the best,

Tom

Thanks, Tom. That's nice, but still one thing short- associating events to a film project. Eg. My Great Movie- XDCAM EX shoot day 1 (event 1), R3DOne shoot day 2 (event 2), My Great Movie Redux- Day 1 Cam A (event 3), Day 1 Cam B (event 4). And another option to open events outside of project related events, such as ep 1 editors are able to access generic Broll events, etc..



www.strypesinpost.com

> which was to "delete unused regions not including whole regions" or something
> like that.

Yeah, you can do that. But it's still not as good as dragging a take into a bin only when you're satisfied. That "automatic region creation" is actually very similar to FCPX's automatic saving, in philosophy. The software doesn't trust us to save something on our own, so it has to try to do our work for us, which actually makes things harder. Pro Tools also doesn't allow me to use the longer file and track names I use for organization.

> back then there were no "region bins" so EVERYTHING was in there!

The version I'm learning on is Pro Tools 7 LE. Everything is still in there! They just call that general area "Region Bin". You can't create sub-bins. That is something Avid really needs to learn from video-editing software. The ability to create sub-bins in Pro Tools is such a no-brainer.


www.derekmok.com

I wouldn't do it like that. I wouldn't put each camera in a separate event, but make one event for each project, and then break the event using smart collections or keywords or bins or whatever. You can also consolidate events by dragging one onto another.

All the best,

Tom

>You can also consolidate events by dragging one onto another.

Admittedly, that's a nice feature.



www.strypesinpost.com