2 great articles about future of NLE

Here are 2 links to 2 very sensible appraisals of the FCP X and NLE in general

[filmmakermagazine.com]

[www.philiphodgetts.com]

Somehow the articles go hand in hand...

Worth every minute of it, right down to the very last comment!

best

Paul

First and foremost, the "future of editing" does not make me choose to work in an NLE. I don't choose to cut a project in an NLE, because it will be great 2 years later, or that it has the building blocks of a great NLE. You use an NLE for what it can do for you today, not tomorrow, not yesterday.

I agree that some NLEs have gotten very complex over the years. I remember when I fired up an Avid MC about 4 years ago (MC 4, if i'm not wrong), and was faced with the start up project dialogue box, I instantly called up a friend to check if I got the right settings. It seemed too ridiculously simple, and I was afraid I'll get the settings wrong, because years of FCP editing, and seeing those hundreds of formats and codecs pop up in Easy Setup, made us all IT people. And so my first Avid question was "I have some DvcproHD QT footage that I want to ingest, how do I know I've set up my project right? Isn't DvcproHD 1440x1080? How do I set that?" And it really was pretty simple. To set the project, just choose the format frame size (it's SD or HD), and the frame rate, and presto, I was done. No scrolling through that list of a hundred sequence presets with a magnifying glass like in FCP6. Then I was told to check the Media Creation setting, because that's where the files will be imported, and I was wondering where exactly the render files will go to, because I didn't want to make a mess of media management, knowing the mess you can make in FCP when you don't properly manage your media. But that was it. Set Media Creation to the right drive, specify the format you want to work in, and when you dragged media into a bin, they automatically copy over to whatever you set as your media drive, and Avid takes it from there. And it dawned upon me how much better it would be if you didn't have to wrap your head around the technical aspects of video, because editing should be a creative form, not one where you have to understand each and every video codec before starting a project. I'm not saying that Avid is the most intuitive NLE around, because it's not. You have to understand how modes work, what AMA is, what filler is, etc.. It's not rock and roll.

But that was what I liked about FCP X when I downloaded it the night it was first released. I liked the "create optimized media" option, as opposed to the old method of Googling for the workflow for the camera when someone passes you a bunch of files, trying to figure out if you need to download a plugin for Log and Transfer, or if you have to fire up Compressor, and wade through another hundred and one video codecs and frame sizes and frame rates. I was glad for that really simple setting, because one shouldn't have to be a scientist to be able to edit videos.

But of course, FCP X and I got off on the wrong foot. I was looking to toss a short film into the app back then, so I could get up to speed on it quickly, but I couldn't. The guys had shot XDCAM EX, and the plugin to import the camera files into the FCP X was not created yet. But that wasn't the only issue, because I could just as easily transcode the footage in Compressor and figure out a workflow to do the project. But it couldn't do OMF, AAF, XML or EDLs. I needed to buy Automatic Duck to get OMF out of it. So I fiddled around in FCP X, but didn't like the fact that they changed everything including the shortcuts and the icons, and renamed just about everything. Then I went online, and the people raving about it were saying how great the audio tools were, and how they can do a professional mix in FCP X. I'm not an audio guy and haven't touched Logic since Apple bought it from Emagic in the early 2000s, but I know what an audio guy can do in a DAW. There's no way some kid off the internet can convince me that I was better off mixing the audio myself in FCP X on my laptop speakers than sending it to audio post.

And I tried using FCP X back then. It was very erratic. It would crash the moment I slapped on a simple generated text over picture, and it would crash repeatedly whenever I tried to do the same thing, then the next day that same operation won't cause the app to crash. These are bugs, which are common in .0 releases. And that happens with any app release. But there were huge holes in the app back then, and it wasn't the lack of multicam. Rather, it was a whole lot of other things that was associated with a paradigm shift, both in terms of the marketing concept entrenched in engineering and design that FCP X is about to become a prosumer oriented software, instead of a software targeted at pros. It wasn't because FCP X looks like iMovie, but because it follows the concept of having the platform centered around the products of 3rd party developers to make it "pro"- eg. workflow with the DaVinci Resolve, 3rd party apps to export omf/aaf for audio, EDL app, etc.. It couldn't capture from tape, and that night I downloaded the app, I had an episode going out on HDCAM, but yea, I guess if you are building an app for the next 10 years, you'll probably figure that tapes will be obsolete in about 3-5 years and already nobody shoots to tape anymore. No, I also don't buy the crap that support for HDV/DV and DvcproHD means professional VTR support.

But I have been keeping tabs on FCP X, because I never say no to anything that can improve the post workflow, and if FCP X does something uniquely well, that would be great. And in trying out 10.0.6, I have to say that FCP X has improved a lot. But would I use it? No. Not yet at least. There are lots of things that Apple has to fix before I can use it for my work. Like first letting me zoom into the Event Browser properly.



www.strypesinpost.com

Another problem is that it's often two steps forward, one step back when Apple releases a major update. For example, in 10.0.6 you can no longer search in the Import window, setting In and Out points in the Import window is complicated (see [discussions.apple.com]) and I have seen lots of reports of problems with sharing, most notably when burning to a DVD.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

10.0.6 is quite a few steps forward. But what you mentioned is exactly the reason I put off learning FCPX- too many things change with every release. I agree that the unified import window is better, but frack, iron out all the knobs before releasing it. But then again, I'm very new to this kind of game. It's not just the fact they are sneaking all these new features in free point 1 upgrades, but more than that, it's the release of features that kinda work, but missing other features. I mean, it's like a working idea, then the next release is a slight improvement to that idea. We've now seen through edits/add edits. I'd bet a beer that the next release will let you blade a secondary storyline without having to do an add edit. I've not seen product development done this way before.



www.strypesinpost.com

I want to work in something future proof. I can not deal with Avid. (Entirely my problem / I even went back to school to try and learn it) and whilst Premiere is doing well at the moment my gut is telling me that they are just on a roll. I started learning on a Steenbeck in film school. This gave me a really good foundation. However I never earned a single cent directly in the industry on a Steenbeck because the industry had just made the Switch to NLEs, Premiere, Lightworks and Avid. I went, Super VHS with controller, Steenbeck, Hi 8 with controller, Premiere, Beta SP with controller, Lightworks, Edit DV, FCP 2-7 and now FCP X.

Maybe it is the trainer in me but I am so radical that I would say learn FCP X and even if Apple killed it tomorrow and you never earn a single cent with it. F**k it! If you have managed to get your head around Meta Data, then you have an advantage. To the best of my knowledge the term "Data Wrangler" is relatively new. How about "Meta Data Wrangler" Might be a niche for a new forum in here ;-)

I was talking to an other editor about this last night, how as an editor one spends more and more time doing what is essentially assistant work. (Never had an assistant in my life :-0) Why not get the NLE to do this. I have done a lot of stuff where some of the functionality that is crystalizing in FCP X would have been great.

An example being a documentary about nuts in South America. We literally spent days navigating material in a tropical rain forest trying to find Don Juan's Nut tree or Don José's nut tree. GPS in the meta data would have been a huge plus. On a side note color correction in a rain forest where every thing is green except peoples eye balls is also fun! But I digress.

[www.philiphodgetts.com]

Other examples where FCP X could shine being the recent eg over at fcp.co

[www.fcp.co]

Where they literally left the cameras running for 10 minutes or so. Just to get a couple of seconds here and there! Surely workflows like this are going to become more and more common? Working with multiple cameras and multiple keywords like left skid, right skid, oil AND/OR sparks all on the same clip/multi clips. i.e. helping me to find the tipping point in the edit when the goal posts are moving all the time!

One last eg for me is the media factory where you have to share clips and repackage them amongst multiple editors. In Berlin where I am based there are lots of start ups hungry for online content. Make a report about hats, scarfs and gloves in Berlin, Munich and Cologne. Make a special about gloves in all of the above cities or how about Summer or Winter hats. Maybe I am just a geek but I love the idea of being able to sort all my summer hats according to there GPS location or prices on the bar code which I obviously also film etc. And of course decide who gets the hat clips and who get the gloves clips etc.

[alex4d.wordpress.com]

For me FCP X is a rock solid foundation just as a Steenbeck was back then!!!

Having used FCP X literally from day 1 I am only now beginning to be happy with version 10.0.6. It is weird but I really missed having a viewer and Canvas at the same time. I dont know how many times I made a creative decision based on the 2 frames that just happened to be open in my Viewer and Canvas at the same time. Oil AND/OR Sparks.

>I want to work in something future proof.

Like I said, it depends on what you are doing. If I was going to start a post house, and I want to use the foundations of a system to use for the next 3-5 years, I currently would go with Premiere, because it's quite inexpensive, and it looks like the "Avid killer" that Apple has been trying to nail for years, and most of all, it looks mostly like a solid replacement for FCP 7 today. Most Avid editors would not have much trouble adapting to Adobe Premiere CS6, in fact, I know of one who made the switch and was loving it- the trim tools, the timeline, the workflow..

GPS metadata sounds good, but this is not new for production technology. GPS has been a metadata field in MXF for years. But let's talk about the post workflow. Let's say you are going to cut a spot. That's probably not something you need, because you have about 2 hours of rushes. Not for drama either, because you really don't care whether they shot it in the studio or on location as long as it is in the script, but maybe for reality shows, or documentary, but really... If you are doing a documentary of the Malayan rubber plantations, you would probably know which rubber plantation you are at by looking at which card the clip came from. To some degree, yes, we do sort out our Brolls and create a database for Broll shots. But not for most of the show. I usually use sequences and markers.

But the metadata improvement I would like to see, is in handling transcriptions. We talked about it quite a bit here. And Adobe is the only one with a half assed implementation of it. And that is one area where I really hope metadata will improve, because right now it's in the stone age. But if you ask me, I'd say the same for word processing. Ever tried consolidating PDF or Word files?

[www.lafcpug.org]


For me, I wish there is a way to load a timeline into the browser, because I would like to see the clip connections in the browser both vertically and horizontally. There are times I draw out kind of a mind map of a scene on a piece of paper to know what is going on and to find the best way to work the scene. And yea, navigation of clips in the Event Browser has to be better improved. Currently many guys recommend working in list view, which I hate. I mean, I have list view on in the browser, but I also cut from timeline to timeline a lot because i need to view this temporal relationship of clip connections, and I can't find a way to do this by putting stuff in bins or labelling them.



www.strypesinpost.com

It's weird that Avid has used the Nexidia voice technology in almost every possible way except transcription. It's a strange omission.

I've been delving into Adobe tech recently and chatting with some Adobe employees and I've come to realize that the Adobe suite actually has many great metadata and extensibility features. The problem is that Adobe hasn't done a great job of marketing them so I didn't even know half of that stuff even existed. XMP is pretty powerful and the introduction of Prelude will no doubt lead to further improvements in future versions.

If you look in the XMP section in Premiere, you may (depending on your camera) see lots of data there but it's not really being used for anything. I hope that future versions will allow you to make better use of it.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

>It's weird that Avid has used the Nexidia voice technology in almost every possible way except
>transcription.

I thought that was because Nexidia's tool did phonetics, not transcriptions, so attempts to convert those phonetics into text will result in an unintelligible garbled mess. But that is also why it is so darn good at voice search. It only has to recognize consonants and vowels, and not have to make any sense of it.

Speaking of which, Boris has licensed that same technology and released Boris Soundbite, which I think was originally named "Get" and sold by Nexidia. But Avid's integration of the Nexidia search tool is very tight, however, I'm wondering if that type of integration can be achieved with Adobe Extension. Pond5 has a pretty well integrated plugin in PPro.


A couple of things I wish you can do with XMP in PPro:

- have things in table form, and let them be easily batch altered.

- better search tools

- find and replace tool for changing XMP data and have it update in the rest of the PPro projects.



www.strypesinpost.com

The big downside for me is that XMP is stored in a per-media file basis. There is no per-project metadata store.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

I agree GPS is not the holy grail. Could be nice to have for some jobs in the rain forest or even a trade show! Having some kind of plugin/program that will do transcripts would be great. Anyone in here work with Boris Sound Bytes formerly know as Get? Personally I have never worked with any of these transcription tools!

For me if we are talking about a post house there are a couple of things that are important, the complexity of the projects, the volume of projects, the number of people involved and the amount of regurgitation. By regurgitation I of course mean how many clips are recycled.

I will stick to my angle here as a trainer. I had to train about 100 people in house in the space of 18 months to get up to speed editing lets face it pretty basic stuff. That is explaining 100 hundred times Scratch disks, Sequence Settings and Folder Structure.....

At the time one of my bosses launched an iMovie experiment. He tried to get the young editors to edit their clips in iMovie. I protested vehemently. Saying that they would be scared for life by there iMovie experience. I can not remember but I don´t believe that iMovie has JKL functionality!

In retrospect in a way he was right. For the high volume crap we were doing iMovie would almost have been enough. Not sure exactly what the problem was in the end. Maybe something about not being able to adjust sound levels/sound fades for different tracks. But it was a close call.

The battle cry in this company was Standard clips. I used to joke that the only thing that was standard about a standard clip was the name standard. But again I digress.

Anyway because of the high volume of our Standard Clips we had very many repetitive tasks. Get the standard 10 second intro in there, have the first interview after a 30 seconds with Lower 3rd etc. We had this mad workflow importing stuff to make our videos standard.

I also have a dim recollection of a FCP X plugin that automated many of these tasks. Something that built a scaffolding for all the standard stuff that turned up in every clip Inro/Outro etc. Anyone?

One way or the other my felling is that a lot the repetitive stuff has become simpler now in FCP X, have the music and Sound effects sitting in the program or the folders on the drive can be essentially treated as "Watch Folders." Not to mention the export process which was a right royal pain in the behind. We sometimes had to export 1-5 times. Once for the Edit Manager to check, once after the in house corrections were made, then we had client corrections, and the inevitable render mistake etc. Render bar blues.

Our standard workflow was a mess we had Motion templates all over the place and often than not it was a case of trying to reconnect the templates incorrectly to get the right result! Reconverting audio files, polishing logos or even setting the thumbnail for the preview for the video..... The latter alone was probably a 5 step process!!!

And yes we were doing a lot of project sharing so the whole reconnection thing was a night mare, Fishing clips out of the root directory of a 100TB Server etc.

For me the two remaining mysteries with respect to FCP X are how the share functionality will work and how the hell are the rolls going to work. Because if I have Spanish, German, French and English version things need to some how have there place. Or maybe some can write a plugin that can tell the difference between the aforementioned languages and take appropriate action.... The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I for one am very curious to see what plugins Emerge in the not too distant future.

[en.wikipedia.org]

> There is no per-project metadata store.

Can't you tap into the XMP data via PPro?

My other gripe with PPro is how it updates the data. When you change the metadata in PPro, it changes the data in the XMP file, which means if u being it into a new PPro project, the setting sticks. Fine here. Problem is that if you change it in one project, it doesn't update in another project. So if you're doing a long form show with 6 editors, and the assistant didnt set the reel name, you have to change it individually across each project. I may be missing a step, but yea, I can't get it to dynamically update across projects.



www.strypesinpost.com

strypes Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > There is no per-project metadata store.
>
> Can't you tap into the XMP data via PPro?

Sorry, I should have said: there is no third-party-accessible per-project metadata store.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

> Anyone in here work with Boris Sound Bytes formerly know as Get? Personally I
>have never worked with any of these transcription tools!

The same technology is also used in Avid's PhraseFind tool. It is a great tool, and I would get it if I'm working regularly on documentaries in Avid. It's included on trial with Media Composer. The integration is very very neat. Call up the search window, check the PhraseFind option, type in a word, click enter, and a list shows up with instances of the spoken word. Double click it to launch it in the source monitor and it takes you right to the word. From there you can mark in/out and insert straight into the timeline. All within Avid and works like the in app search tool. And it's very accurate because it's based on phonetics, not text transcriptions.



www.strypesinpost.com