playing with X demo. effect keyframes???

i just bit the bullet and decided to give X a shot. i have my loves and hates with it as most do - especially the ridiculous "magnetic" timeline horsecrap... but thats another discussion.

my question is about keyframes.

it looks like the effects/transitions are keyframeable, but all i can see is a previous/current/next control.
is there not a keyframe window/timeline where i can quickly see all the applied keyframes at a glance?

Wayne, sorry I haven't been getting forum updates.
There is a way to see all the keyframes in the Storyline. I think it's a bit awkward. It's something Apple needs to improve. On the right side of a clip in the timeline you can pop out a VFX/AFX keyframe overlay.

As to the magnetic timeline. Interesting. It's one of the things I like about FCPX. People use "magnetic" to describe the features of the time line rather loosely so if you tell me specifically what you don't like about it I can explain why I do. Not that either is right or wrong. It's a matter of style. I do think when you read about why some might like it, you get some perspective at least. It might be worth discussing in a separate thread.

craig seeman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> As to the magnetic timeline. Interesting. It's one
> of the things I like about FCPX. People use
> "magnetic" to describe the features of the time
> line rather loosely so if you tell me specifically
> what you don't like about it I can explain why I
> do. Not that either is right or wrong. It's a
> matter of style. I do think when you read about
> why some might like it, you get some perspective
> at least. It might be worth discussing in a
> separate thread.

Well, I'd be interested in discussing the paradigm behind primary storyline, secondary storyline and connecting clips. And also if it can help with some of the workflows. I mean, if it adds to my workflow, why not? But as a disclaimer, I have to say that I'm a skeptic. The more I edit and I pay attention to that part of the workflow, the more I think Apple may have over-thought the process, and the less I think the paradigm is effective for my day-to-day editing needs.



www.strypesinpost.com

I'll start with acknowledging there's a huge number of features, especially a number of "conveniences" still missing from FCPX (will what the soon coming update brings) but what attracts me to it and keeps me with it is the "paradigm shift" features including the magnetic timeline.

I've been editing for about 30 years so I've been through a lot of linear and non linear systems including over a decade on Avid from its beginnings and knew it well enough to both maintain as an engineer and train in a broadcast facility. Then I moved on to what is now FCP "legacy."

I've always felt tracks were functionally used for cross and conflicting purposes. There was a juggle between tracks as an organizing tool and tracks as a means to layer and composite. FCPX bifurcated those functions with the Magnetic Timeline and Roles (yes, both are still missing features I need).

Connected Clips and Secondary Storylines allow me to move sections around without making complex selections. The Connection itself is actually frame based so it can be moved if I need to split a clip on the Primary Storyline and move a portion elsewhere.

I don't have to worry about track management while I do this. The conflict between track as layer vs track as organizational element (lower third 1 and character C) would result in me having to insert tracks. That's no longer necessary.

Prepping to avoid Clip Collisions before moving an section is no longer a concern. I now take care of that after moving the section where I can better make decisions in context.

Secondary storylines gives me "track like" functions when I need to edit a b-roll/cut away segment.

I'm still free to move from the default ripple mode of magnetism to "place anywhere" with the switch to "P" Position tool. Generally though I find the default ripple of magnetism a logically dominant mode for me to work in.

For those who like "work spaces" actually Event based Compound Clips make more sense to me. I can create as many as I need, Show open, segment 1, segment 2, bumpers, what have you, and then place them into the storyline. I can keep them as Compounded or break them apart depending on the need. Event based Compound Clips (which are really independent timelines) are great if you need to use the same module (Compound) in a number of different Storylines/timelines/Projects (BTW this "naming" is one of things I don't like about FCPX but it's only a name after all).

Scenario 1: Syncing Rushes

Apple clearly saw this as an Archilles heel of the new design, so they added waveform analysis early to help synchronise rushes, in fact, the feature was incorporated right into the .0 release. I am hoping for a good modern solution to syncing up rushes, but many times, the best way to work with multicam rushes is to generate a sync map. As an editor, the sync map lets me know what was shot on each camera in chronological order. For the assistant, the sync map throws everything in the timeline and he can see the temporal relationship between the clips. And based on this, he can quickly see if there are any mistakes in the syncing and correct them, and also decide which clips to multigroup. So a sync map for half a day of reality footage can easily look like this (the timeline at the top is the stacks or stringout or sync map, and the one at the bottom is the multigrouped sequence):



This would require a timeline type of environment, and I've yet to see anyone do a sync map in FCP X. Determining sync relationship by clicking in the browser is highly inefficient, because the relationship between the synchronisation of clips is temporal, and you don't always want to multicam everything on the cards including the Brolls and timelapse shots. More than that, after this is done, you really want to edit timeline to timeline, rather than skim through clips in the browser.



www.strypesinpost.com

Scenario 2: Building the premise on a scratch VO read

FCP X works primarily on building the the edit on the primary storyline. Whatever the story is built upon is in the primary storyline and you have connecting clips and secondary storylines. So if we take the case of a documentary, where you start the edit with a scratch VO. That goes in as the primary storyline. Why? Because clips are connected to it- Brolls, cutaways, etc... Then you're done with maybe the first cut, the director or writer takes a look at the story, and decides to change most of the VO lines to re-work the story. So oops. You're now going to have to change the primary storyline that the edit was built upon. In the older track paradigm, I'll pop the new VO on a new track, and run through the cut and see what works, and what doesn't and change those. It doesn't seem so simple in the new editing paradigm.



www.strypesinpost.com

Scenario 3: The relationship of clips does not always link to the primary storyline

Let's take a docu-drama. We start with an interview clip, and the interviewee narrates his story through the scene. So that interview drives the story. Over it, you cut a drama scene, with Brolls and cutaways. In FCP X, the clips are always linked to the primary storyline, even if you need to link a clip to the secondary storyline as in this case, and cutting scenes in a secondary storyline is hard, because you can't put 2 layers or tracks in a secondary storyline.

I suppose in FCP X, I'll have to string the interview together, then lift it from the primary storyline, select the interview clips, create a secondary storyline, and then cut the scene over it.


Scenario 4: A clip type is not a fixed or final state

FCP X has 3 types of clips- 1), clips in a primary storyline, 2) clips connected to the primary storyline or connecting clips, and 3) secondary storylines, which holds a sequence of connected clips, but a secondary storyline is essentially only 1 track. What if I need to toggle clip types, because something that started out as connecting clips is now better off as a secondary storyline but they are on two different clip/track heights? And what if I want to break a secondary storyline into two parts?

Depending on the edit function that the editor is calling, a series of clips could function both as a connecting clip, and a secondary storyline, and more than that, because almost always, clips have both a horizontal and vertical relationship, although I am finding that a lot of my stuff on track 2 has a stronger horizontal relationship than it has vertical, and much of FCP X's paradigm is built on the relationship of clips to the primary storyline, and this relationship lets you shift stuff around with magnetism.

Also, a sequence or a scene can exist both as a primary storyline or a secondary storyline (Eg. in a reality show, you have interviews and reality segments constantly weaving in and out). Constantly toggling clip types and clip connections can be quite a hassle, if not worse than addressing clip collisions.



www.strypesinpost.com

You know what would have been brilliant? If there were a way in FCP to "bind" clips together so they behave as a group. The whole point behind this "secondary storyline" nonsense was so that certain elements that had a user-defined fixed relationship with the footage underneath. Nests already could do that; now if there were only a way to lock clips instead of tracks, or bundle those nests so that they're linked to a group of edits underneath. And if that bundle could be disabled/enabled with one shortcut or mouse click, that would be sweet. Much like Photoshop has both Linking and Layer Group functions. Brilliant.

Doing away with tracks completely is just not the way to go. Personally I think Apple's being incredibly stubborn on this one, possibly unwilling to admit a dumb design mistake.


www.derekmok.com

Without wanting to hijack this thread, Premiere has a nice grouping ability that lets you move non contiguous clips across layers as a group, which IMHO gives you much more flexibility and functionality.This is not meant as a 'Premiere is better' statement, just to point out that it's possible, and entirely workable.

Good writing Gerard,

In the environment I work we use the "Scenario 1" very often for an overview and pre-editing. It makes it easy to bring things into sync, for example if some cams have a few (or a lot of) frames offset. With the help of XML we easily can add a "virtual Aux TC" to make all tracks/clips running the same TOD TC without loosing the original TC and then decide which tracks will go into a multiclip. Missing cams for a scene/take can be replaced by a slug for the scene/take. So you with maybe three cams, cam A is always cam A (track 1), B is B (track 2) and C is C (track 3).
That's not possible any more with FCPX. Beside the TC stuff the cams can change, so with a missing B the new B will be C etc.
With FCP is was possible to export parts of the timeline to merge clips of a track, again with XML you were able to keep the original metadata. That had been (and still is) very fast and effective - as long as you know enough about the FCP XMEML and how it works.

And as Jude said the way grouping clips in PPro is way more flexible, it's doable (look at AE: null-objects work since way more than a decade) - Apple has missed something there.

-Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

>The whole point behind this "secondary storyline" nonsense was so that certain elements that had a
>user-defined fixed relationship with the footage underneath. Nests already could do that

I disagree with that assessment of the secondary storyline. As Craig said, it functions like its own timeline or track, so you can swap shots around, and insert shots into a little Broll sequence above the primary storyline, and that would be connected to the primary storyline. You can ripple trim to extend a shot without affecting the rest of the sequence, but you cannot enter trim mode, since only the primary storyline is trim mode-able. This is a pretty nice quirky weirdass feature in this regard, and you can pull a clip out from the secondary storyline, and it will be a connecting clip. Problem happens when you select two or more clips and pull them out from a secondary storyline. They don't stay togetherly, joined at the hips. And you can't blade a secondary storyline. It a creation with a mind of its own.

Nests is something else. Nests basically joins a bunch of clips as one object, and you can't as easily do things like swap edits, but it lets you move a group of shots easily. Nests is like compound clips except that you can do speed ramps. (Is there anything here that I'm missing?) I'm not getting Craig's "event based compound clips". One of the main reasons I don't nest is because I don't have immediate timeline access to the edit. To make a change, I have to step into a nest. Big inconvenience.

Groups on the other hand, lets you link clips together, and you can select the group with one click, but it doesn't make it one object. My only beef with it is that to select a group, it should require a modifier key (eg. cmd click, instead of a single left click), as the current behaviour makes it impossible to do normal clip to clip edit functions after you have a group. Also, grouping in PPro is a little moot, because swap edits do not respect sync locks if your selected clips do not have a clip on that track, so swap edits can knock things out of sync.



www.strypesinpost.com

>This is not meant as a 'Premiere is better' statement

Why not discuss NLEs while we're at it? I'll compare 2 different jobs I'm working on.

I'm cutting a lifestyle/reality show, unscripted, no scripts, shot on 5D, multicam, dual system sound. My weapons of choice? FCP 7 and Pluraleyes.
Aside from familiarity, and the fact that the production house is running FCP 7, legacy FCP would be my preferred choice anyway. Why not PPro CS6 or Avid or FCP X?

For this project, I used waveforms extensively (to quickly find talking bits), waveform syncing, multicam editing, markers (since I have no transcripts).

Between FCP 7 and FCP X, scenario 1 gave me the biggest concern as that is how I organize and sift through days of multicamera rushes, not to mention I wasn't so convinced that the paradigm shift is beneficial to the editing (scenarios 3 and 4).

Avid would be my second favourite choice, because it is a tad more stable with large projects, but generating waveforms will be an all night affair with the amount of rushes I have to go through.

Premiere? Premiere is bad with markers, and the multicam function is still work in progress. However, blazing fast waveform generation. For some other reality shows, the offline/online workflow will be a bit of a pain.


Then over the last weekend, I had a short half day gig to cut a 4 minute pitch video so the producer can use it for her meeting at 4 in the aftenoon. For the rushes, I had a couple of cards shot on AVCHD (I got the footage fresh on SD cards), 1 DVD, 1 VCD (in NTSC) and a Youtube video.

The process is very simple with Premiere. I copied the cards onto my media drive with Prelude as that does data verification, copied the Video TS folder from the DVD onto my media drive, demuxed the DAT files from the VCD into mpeg 1 with Mpeg Streamclip, downloaded the video stream off Youtube, and popped them all into Premiere, and interpreted the VCD footage as 25fps. No transcoding. Fully native. I was in God's own country. And oh yea, I watched El Classico too. With FCP, I would have spent the time I took to edit the footage, just doing ingest, and maybe even longer, and I may not have been able to concentrate on the soccer match or have met the deadline.

FCP X? As it stands now, I'll probably have to transcode everything due to the mish mash of formats. Premiere is in a league of its own for jobs like this.



www.strypesinpost.com

One thing that I'm still not sure about is the paradigm shift to "no transcoding".

I know that Premiere and Avid can both edit many formats formerly considered in FCP Land to be inappropriate for editing -- H.264, AVCHD, the like. The question is: How does this hold up in the long run?

AVCHD in Final Cut Pro 7, for example, is so touchy that if you modify the file structure a tiny bit, you end up unable to ingest at all. You would think that editing the MTS files directly would be an advantage, but all those files are called 00000, 00001, not acceptable to me by any stretch of the imagination. Renaming them would be a precarious process in my view, since you'd be modifying camera masters directly.

FCP7's need to transcode/ingest this material first added substantial prep time to the beginning of editing, but the advantage is, you can then still edit using "ingested" clips and leave camera masters alone, in the same way dailies used to arrive on tape and are only touched when they're captured, and then they can be stored away safely. But now that the trend is towards no transcoding, how secure are our edits?

What happens to this "anything goes" approach to media use when the project is in post for several months, even years? I've been fortunate in that all of my longer-lasting projects have been on professional formats with tested workflows (Arri Alexa, RED, DVCPro HD), but what about those motley prosumer formats that are so popular? What happens if you're editing those files directly without a batch list?


www.derekmok.com

Well, that's a good point you mentioned. That is why I find Premiere to be a bit quirky and in no man's land. I believe Walter Biscardi transcodes AVCHD, for sanity's sake and also he can rename the rushes for organization.

I actually don't mind not transcoding. 5D rushes is absolutely playable on a Mac, so why not re-name and edit from it? What I don't like is that I can't rename or do a cut in low resolution and right click and batch capture the sequence from the camera rushes like in Log and Transfer. For the job I mentioned, it's really quick turnaround time, with maybe an hour or two of rushes.

Another format that you probably can't rename is DvcproHD because the files are scattered everywhere.

If you ask me, I would love a 3rd party app to handle transcoding, metadata, and re-linking to camera rushes from an XML or an AAF. ClipFinder showed some promise in that it can re-link quicktime files to R3D rushes from an XML and spit out a re-linked XML. I just wished they developed it further to work with all camera formats, and re-linking based on file names or reel names or clip ID.



www.strypesinpost.com

>You would think that editing the MTS files directly would be an advantage, but all those files are
>called 00000, 00001, not acceptable to me by any stretch of the imagination.

Well, I tried copying an MTS file into a separate folder, and I could rename it and import it into PPro. Not great, but short of transcoding to ProRes (you won't have metadata anyway, unless you do it in L&T), I'll probably duplicate the AVCHD cards, and rename the MTS files and add a reel name prefix to it. I doubt AVCHD is very compatible with most online machines anyway.



www.strypesinpost.com

> I actually don't mind not transcoding. 5D rushes is absolutely playable on a Mac

It is absolutely a great option to have, especially if you're doing things like a quick promo, or in one past job I remember, assembling fast one-minute cuts for an FX artist to use in a 16-picture collage, where speed is far more important than stability.

DVCPro HD did have the same problem, but not nearly as bad as AVCHD because Panasonic cameras named their files in a way so that duplicate file names are far less likely than those garbage AVCHD systems. Also, because we were so used to having to ingest, DVCPro HD was better prepared, and was more liketly to have proper DITs or assistant editors doing their jobs well. Except my own AVCHD material shot by me, I'd say 80 per cent of the AVCHD I've ever gotten is missing elements of the file structure and needed ClipWrap, including a promo last week with 1TB (after transcoding) of media, none of which was properly prepped. The guy tried to "help" by putting all the raw camera clips into their own folders separated by category. Instead of helping, it cost four to five times more time to transcode because Log and Transfer didn't work on 40 per cent of them. In fact, I was actually amazed that FCP 7 actually managed to Log and Transfer some DSLR H.264s after I stuck them back into a self-created system of folders named after reel/memory-card names. It wasn't 100 per cent, though.


www.derekmok.com

>DVCPro HD did have the same problem, but not nearly as bad as AVCHD because Panasonic cameras
>named their files in a way so that duplicate file names are far less likely than those garbage AVCHD
>systems.

If you're talking about a project that will be in post for months with loads of footage, the DvcproHD naming convention is just as bad. Less duplicate file names, but you will still come across the occasional duplicate. The arbitrary naming scheme is horrendous. RED had a good file naming scheme. I still haven't worked on the Arri Alexa.


>I know that Premiere and Avid can both edit many formats formerly considered in FCP Land to be
>inappropriate for editing -- H.264, AVCHD, the like.

I don't think I'll trust Avid to work with H.264. I tried popping a few H.264 clips into MC6. No major issues, but it seemed to swallow up quite a bit of RAM on the few clips I had. But Premiere was out of this world with native support. I mean, I had junk formats, including Mpeg1 from VCD (at the wrong frame rate), VOB files from a DVD, and an H.264 FLV downloaded from Youtube. The fact that I popped it all in and edited the video on my laptop still astounds me. I even made a comp from the FLV file, because it was in 4:3, and I couldn't blow it up to fill 16:9 without it looking weirdly cropped.



www.strypesinpost.com

> If you're talking about a project that will be in post for months with loads of footage, the DvcproHD naming convention is just as bad. Less duplicate file names, but
> you will still come across the occasional duplicate. The arbitrary naming scheme is horrendous

Of course. I always use Log and Transfer to rename the clips. My last commercial was on the Arri Alexa and the file names didn't repeat, but they drove me crazy because I couldn't rename them to something logical. And it cost me a great deal of time just adding "auxiliary" names for the clips to denote scene/shot/take numbers.


www.derekmok.com

Gotta say, that I encountered yet more OpenCL bugs on CS6.0.2, where text became distorted in the timeline. Turned off OpenCL and it was fine. But with OpenCL off, toggling sequences sometimes showed a blank program monitor. No kernel panics now, though. I know it is hard to code for graphics cards, but considering this is the .2 release, I am a little disappointed. That said, Avid had that update in which Marquee was unlaunchable. It's fixed now, but geez!

I hope software writers for the NLEs buck up. Credit to them for weaving this magic that makes desktop editing a joy, but Avid has that slow waveform drawing problem for probably a decade now. And more than that too, all the major NLEs are still missing some key features. I'm sure many Avid and FCP guys look over at Premiere and AE's keyframing feature and go "ooh", and Premiere and Avid editors look over at the numerous plugins in FCP with envy. Premiere can't media manage for nuts. Avid's MXF is still an island, making integration with other tools a chore. You can't import different frame rates directly into the same Avid project. The only software that lets you automatically create a sync map based on TC is the Avid, while PPro has a weird interpretation of "automate to sequence" that hardly anyone uses. These are some features/problems that have been out for yonks. Does it have to be this way? Really?



www.strypesinpost.com

derekmok Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ... My last commercial was on the
> Arri Alexa and the file names didn't repeat, but
> they drove me crazy because I couldn't rename them
> to something logical. And it cost me a great deal
> of time just adding "auxiliary" names for the
> clips to denote scene/shot/take numbers.
-------------------------------------------------------

Alexa naming is actually pretty logical (as long the cams are set up correctly)
There is an explanation in one of the manuals.

– quicktime filename:
- camera index/unit 
- reel counter 
- clip index 
- clip counter
- shooting date yyyymmdd 
- unique camera ID

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]