Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Motion & Video => Topic started by: Morgan_Moore on January 12, 2014, 04:28:30 pm

Title: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Morgan_Moore on January 12, 2014, 04:28:30 pm
I tried final cut x and hated it.

But FCP6/7 will break in a few OS time, Im not tempted to go to CS and monthly fees... which leaves the dreaded X?

What is the score? BTW - 'events' totally suck IMO - I want to put my assets where I want them.

S
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Christopher Sanderson on January 12, 2014, 05:23:48 pm
Events are now (as of 10.1) more sensibly buried, along with projects, within an overall container called a Library.

Sure there remains the silliness of everything being stored by default in your 'Movie' folder but that can quickly be changed. Assets can be stored wherever you want. FCP X has grown up a lot.

I find myself able to organize things pretty much as I did in FCP 7 - but by using keywords (Lightroom-like). All media is orgnaized on the fast drive(s) you need.

Since the whole program is metadata based, it is wickedly fast and once you get the general principles, you can bend the beast to your will.

Chris
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Morgan_Moore on January 12, 2014, 05:41:56 pm
Events are now (as of 10.1) more sensibly buried, along with projects, within an overall container called a Library.

That language sends shivers down my spine. I never got along with LR or iphoto or any of that stuff.

I tend to work like this.. (tend! - ive got 12 years on 23dupliated hard drives done 'by date')

I have a folder.. (which would be the start date of a multidate project - mainly I do single day stuff)

2014_01_12_ClientName

Inside might contain..

2014_01_12_ClientName.FCP
Card1
Card1_prores
Card2_prores
Stabilised_Shots
Graphics
Audio_card1
Audio_tunes
Audio_wildtrack

and the like.

This might be on my computer HD but quickly moves to a drive (or two)

I just want to shunt that round. (one can even pass it off intact to an editor/client - if they have FCP7 installed they just double click and are golden)

Even with FCP I end up with renderfiles on my HD that clog it up then get deleted and then need re-rendering if the project is re-activated, so ideally Id like another folder 'render_files' in that core directory.

Im aware that this system is not perfect because it is not so easy to add 'the interview with the MD you did last year' to a current project.

As long as ive got that on an external (even the .fcp) basically im good to go even if my computer died/got nicked.


Can one work like this?

--
Of course that is before getting to the elastic timeline and sucked sweet look which may or may not be acceptable..

S






Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Christopher Sanderson on January 12, 2014, 10:04:09 pm
Yes, you can work like that...

Library is the item at the top; then the single starred icons are the events that are the media containers.

I have ad-libbed some keyword org
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: bcooter on January 12, 2014, 10:13:15 pm
Events are now (as of 10.1) more sensibly buried, along with projects, within an overall container called a Library.

Sure there remains the silliness of everything being stored by default in your 'Movie' folder but that can quickly be changed. Assets can be stored wherever you want. FCP X has grown up a lot.

I find myself able to organize things pretty much as I did in FCP 7 - but by using keywords (Lightroom-like). All media is orgnaized on the fast drive(s) you need.

Since the whole program is metadata based, it is wickedly fast and once you get the general principles, you can bend the beast to your will.



Chris


Beast is a kind word.

I've tried the move to x so many times I've lost count.

Even contacted a x expert tutor to come into one of my studios and run me through it for a few days, if I can find time in one place and not be under deadline.

The thing is I hate it and yes hate is a strong word.

The inability to do multiple sequences easily, synco drives on the go for backup, and actually do the intuitive thing of opening up a clip, dropping In Filters and making key frames without having to go to a separate window pane is a pain and non productive.

No other NLE on the planet uses FCPx nomenclature and why I don't know.

It,s like apple decided to call a computer monitor a potato and a keyboard a dog though you have to work the keyboard (dog) across the room using the potato upside down.

I've heard the line from every 15 year old that editors who moan about x just are mired in The past and that's bs, as the only people I know that love x are the people like Larry Jordan who sell tutorials.

One wannabe editor in our studio just loves it and says he can do anything with it so I gave him a complex edit in 7, a drive of all the clips and graphics and said just give me one minute of "this" video.

Two weeks later he started learning 7.

Bottom line is the only thing x is actually good for is simple edits without a lot of key frames and clip blending.

It's faster sure it will kind of run 4 k but it's not close to widely adopted By editorial houses doing heavy lifting.  They either stay with 7 for short form and/or have moved on to premier or avid which both have some major differences and issues.  Most pros moved to avid and round trip color to divinci.

Last month I needed to lay off some worked and we contacted 12 or so editors in LA, NY, London and not one will work with x and all have some version setting on their computers.

They say apple is making a push to bring the pros back though they have had to search far and wide to find a newspaper and a few people with bbc that actually use it and those people were managers of the departments not editors doing the work.

If apple would just sell the 7 to someone else in 64 bit with a better browser they'd have 15,000 buyers in the first hour.

BC
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Morgan_Moore on January 13, 2014, 03:11:45 am
Last month I needed to lay off some worked and we contacted 12 or so editors

To me this is critical. Operating within a 'standard' that one can pass around - I believe Resolve to be a 'standard' Edit? - I dunno - but I do know a lot of FCP7 ers!

S
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: bcooter on January 13, 2014, 05:20:56 am
To me this is critical. Operating within a 'standard' that one can pass around - I believe Resolve to be a 'standard' Edit? - I dunno - but I do know a lot of FCP7 ers!

S

Hey, I'm all for change if it makes things better.

But this is about one single company that was supported by 90% of the creative community, changing the dialog of editorial workflow and not for the better.

Talk to any editor that works day in day out on short and long form and ask them about X.    They're not mad like changing the color of an Imac or something silly, they just see a decade of knowledge and muscle memory thrown out the door, because  . . . well I guess because somebody thought there was more money is selling a suite that is easy for the 5d2 guys, but hell for the experienced.     

To really explain the difference between 7 and 10 is to take photoshop, take away the ability to make duplicate layers, without finding a button that links to a  panel and burying the psd file and settings in one apple only document.

This doesn't even touch on the insanity of losing the viewer/canvas windows.

Apple dumped the market that kept them alive for a decide out of arrogance, but it doesn't matter because they're not going back.

It's just a system designed for the people that want it  easy, but as they say, do we really have to slow down for these people?

The only option is to change, as painful as that is and premier may be hanging around, but I've yet to find any editorial company that invested in it.  It's either Avid or FCP 7 in the mainstream, unless somebody writes a new system, or apple sells fcp studio to another company, because apple is going to make fcp 7 go away whether we like it or not.

i mean you have to remember that Apple didn't create the original final cut pro, macromedia did, just like they didn't invent Itunes.   The modern apple gave us aperture, so I guess fcp X makes sense.

IMO

BC



Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: KevinA on January 13, 2014, 05:38:26 am
From my very limited perspective and limited needs, X works just fine. I worked out what I needed to know for constructing a sequence pretty quickly. I've had little real experience of editing other than a few years back some time with Media 100.
To me X is straight forward in use, maybe if I was using multi cameras and a high production quality output I might find it lacking something. I do get the event project thing muddled up on occasion, (I want to call an event a project and v a v). But all in all does what I need so far, which is nothing special.
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Christopher Sanderson on January 13, 2014, 10:23:51 am
Hey, I'm all for change if it makes things better. ...

Certainly the change from FCP7 to X was for the worse. Just as certainly that change has and will chase a large proportion of the FCP 7 user base into other software.

As I recall at the beginning of the NLE era, the pro editing community laughed at Final Cut for the first few years as 'toy' software. It took several years and iterations of FCP to get it up to speed. Seems like that story is repeating itself. It will be interesting to see how long it takes this time.

With the current emphasis on 4K resolution & higher, my guess is that FCP X and the new MacPro will start stemming the tide flowing away from Apple in the next couple of years or less.

Was the change worth it? No, for most FCP 7 users. Yes, for new users. For the pro market, time will tell.
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Morgan_Moore on January 13, 2014, 11:25:59 am
From my very limited perspective and limited needs, X works just fine.

It seems that we all have a need to not lose our media and be able to pass it to clients, around discs/computers X seems to fall at this hurdle.

Surely such simple tasking is within anyones limited needs?

S
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Christopher Sanderson on January 13, 2014, 02:28:58 pm
It seems that we all have a need to not lose our media and be able to pass it to clients, around discs/computers X seems to fall at this hurdle.
The latest 10.1 update addresses these questions and pretty much solves them. It is very easy to Consolidate media on a single drive and/or copy the basic Library to any drive. Also assuming that two copies of the original media exist in separate locations, it is dead nuts simple to exchange XML files of both Events & Projects so that collaborative or parallel editing is achievable.

Media Management is at a whole new level in FCP X 10.1 and really works well
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Hywel on January 13, 2014, 03:53:05 pm
I think it is to do with how one's mind works.

I always found FCP 6/7 and PPro got in the way when I was editing. FCP-X on the other hand I can just FLY with once I have it set up.

If your mind thinks like the old-style FCP editors, you'll probably not get on with FCP-X. You might hit problems with some bit of specific workflow like Cooter has with frame blending and keyframing being too many mouse clicks.

If your mind thinks more like meta-data and non-destructive editing and rough cuts with I-O-E over and over then go back and tickle the cuts to make the whole thing flow, you might like FCP-X. It's certainly faster, and the improvements since the original 10.0 launch have addressed all my own personal issues. With its in-built native handling of RED media so that I don't even have to grade destructively (I can always go back to RED Cine to tweak the grades, which it does based on the raw media, immediately reflected as soon as I drop back into FCP-X) I cannot imagine going back to FCP 6/7. Ever.

And my wife, who had previously sworn she would NEVER be able to edit a video, now does 80% of our output. She took to FCP-X like a duck to water. She's non-techie, being an actor-writer-co-director.

The general feeling seems to be that a lot of one-man-band producer/director/cinematographers like it, the people who are operating in bigger teams still find collaborative work flow issues. For us, as a two-person-band, it works really well. You just have to get used to dragging projects and events around. I gather the 10.1 updates automate this by providing a library feature (we haven't upgraded yet as I don't want to install Mavericks on my production machines yet).


But then, I generally seem to think in the way Apple engineers think. I do all my photo finishing in Aperture. I find its meta-data, non-destructive, work on the original raw media approach very natural. I've always HATED photoshop with a deep and abiding passion, indeed I hate pretty much every Adobe product I've ever used. Who designs those tiny little icons in dark grey on a mid-grey background with an even tinier triangle in the corner to actually find the tool you need? I've got a 30" monitor and those things are like one pixel wide. I can't hit them with a graphics tablet. Lightroom is modal- a style of program I was told was on its way out when I was a computer analyst fresh out of college- 20 years ago. Even After Effects, by far the strongest of the Adobe stable, drives me nuts with what is to me a completely counter-intuitive way of tackling things. Motion is far from perfect but I can generate better results in a tenth the time.

Sam, if your brain just isn't wired like FCP-X, don't go anywhere near it. PPro and others continue the basic user interface of old-style editing from FCP 7 and presumably deliver a decent enough set of features.

For me though, going from FCP 6 to FCP-X was like swapping lead boots for a jet-pack.

  Cheers, Hywel.





Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Morgan_Moore on January 13, 2014, 03:59:59 pm
The latest 10.1 update addresses these questions and pretty much solves them. It is very easy to Consolidate media on a single drive and/or copy the basic Library to any drive. Also assuming that two copies of the original media exist in separate locations, it is dead nuts simple to exchange XML files of both Events & Projects so that collaborative or parallel editing is achievable.

Media Management is at a whole new level in FCP X 10.1 and really works well

There are two issues here.

Linguistics
Library? = WTF is a library?, I send my library to a client - does a library include my projects for other clients? - even the titles is a no no, Media? Consolidate? Event? Project? These words mean nothing to me apart from maybe Project

IMO there are files and folders/directories on a computer nothing else.
I drag files into folders.

Im not saying you are wrong just the linguistics create a wall

Take up.

That is the desire to use what other people use so projects can be passed to other editors etc..


Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Hywel on January 13, 2014, 04:35:50 pm
But there aren't just files and folders. There are links, too.

In FCP-X up to 10.1, the structure goes like this.

There are two folders on your working drive(s).

Final Cut Events and
Final Cut Projects

Events contain media, or, critically, links to media. Projects contain timelines which assemble media from different events into final output timelines.

You can organise your raw footage and final output files however you want to, FCP-X doesn't care. I have one folder per film, in an organised and numbered sequence like RE0101_Ariel_NorwaySaxonPrincess. I put everything pertaining to the film in there- RED files, stills, sound files from external recorder, behind the scenes go pro footage etc.

Then import to FCP-X. You can import the whole folder, or just the bits of it which are relevant for the video edit. (I don't bother bringing in Hasselblad stills files unless I'm actually going to need them in the edit, for example). It goes into an event. Call it RE101_Ariel_NorwaySaxonPrincess inside FCP-X to help keep track of everything. Make sure the "Copy to FCP" option is DESELECTED.

The import will then leave all your footage in your original organisation structure, making links to it in its internal Events structure.

Final Cut Events will now have a sub-folder called
RE0101_Ariel_NorwaySaxonPrincess

which in turn contains folders called
Original Media
Render Files
Transcoded Media->Proxy Media (if you asked FCP-X to generate proxies for you)

Original media now has a set of links to the original footage, or copies of it if you asked FCP to copy it across.

When you make a corresponding project or projects, you get a folder in Final Cut Projects called (say)
RE0101_Ariel_NorwaySaxonPrincess_RoughCut
RE0101_Ariel_NorwaySaxonPrincess_Trailer


Now file management is a doddle. When FCP-X isn't running (just to avoid confusion), you can copy the event folder to a different Mac. If you have proxies, it'll copy them across, maintaining the links to the original media so you can edit on proxies on a laptop whilst preserving the links so when you get back to base you can instantly export from the original raw media.

If the new Mac can see the original Mac's drive with the data on (via network shares or whatever) it'll just pick it up.

If you need to move the original media, you can relink the files.

Once I'm done with a film, I move its projects and events out of my working disk Final Cut Events to an archive, which in my case is on my main data store and is called Final Cut Project Archive and Final Cut Event Archive. It all goes in parallel with the same naming convention as the film raw folder, and I find it easy to keep track of. So easy I have a couple of automatic shell scripts which back up the current state of my events and projects to the data store.

So... it maybe takes a little willingness to open the Final Cut Projects and Final Cut Event folders and drag and drop a few things around. I did try copying the projects and events into my film's main folder when I was done, but I found it was just easier to keep the FCP-X stuff in parallel, it is just two more folders and the naming convention I use makes it crystal clear what folders go with what film.

I actually find it a lot more logical and easy to manage than the FCP6/7 mismash.

If I need to go back to an old film, I just need to drag the corresponding Event and Project(s) back from my archive to my working drive and bing! everything's back where it should be.

Cheers, Hywel.





 
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Christopher Sanderson on January 13, 2014, 05:18:47 pm
Library? = WTF is a library?

In FCP X 10.1 the Library is (or can be) the central container for everything - much the same as Lightroom's Library

I should add that the term Library is new to this version and did not appear in previous 10.0x versions
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Morgan_Moore on January 13, 2014, 05:53:48 pm
Well Im a LRoom idiot too (Im a C1er - and I dont use their management system). These centralised databases (if that is what they are) have not in the past handled removal of files to offline well. flashing up hundreds of 'missing file' warnings all the time

(not missing - I took it offline)

Of course a 'container' implies that is where the media is stored (contained), and AFAIK you can only store media in a folder(directory).

In a database one would store URLs (or the local equivilent - paths?) to the media and data appertaining thereto.  

As Coots says - it does no favours when a company starts calling bananas guavas

A side note - it is really interesting to see some young DITs in action - they scare me and I scare them;
Me: Have I got 7gb off this card? - sure appleI
Them: run some software checker that takes 20mins.
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: Morgan_Moore on January 14, 2014, 04:46:45 am
BTW - Chris I appreciate your info and know you didnt design it!
Title: Re: Is X hateworthy
Post by: bcooter on January 14, 2014, 08:58:15 am
Hywel and Chris,

Appreciate the input.

If I didn't have to start doing 4k output, I'd never think about X.

To me it's like eating soup with chopsticks.

I had hope that Di-Vinci was going to try and fill the void of fcp 7.    I personally don't think Premier is the next fcp 8 just because it's adobe and the interface is old school goofy, think after effects.

Avid, I just can't warm to.  It's great if your a full time editor that's in the chair for 12 hours a day, working in one location off a server and working on long form, but for short form, "anything under 15 minutes), it's not a learning wall, but a steep learning curve and the word is Avid has turned a profit in a long time. (keep in mind this is just rumor).

I guess the things that is the most aggrivating is Apple is intentionally trying to stop FCP 7 use.  I have two new machines loaded with everything, one runs mountain lion, the other runs maverick (god help us).

FCP 7 will crash in Maverick every 15 minutes and in both machines you get out of memory errors every 30 minutes.

I can take the same edit, port it over to a 8 core older desktop and run for weeks without issue.

There really is no reason to hobble the software use in newer machines.

IMO

BC