The Herd

Posted by fcpxpert1 on November 29, 2013
Posted in: Opinion. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

I am a trailer editor. In practice, that means that what I cut from day to day is mostly TV commercials for movies. There are only so many actual, theatrical trailers that get cut for any given film and there are significantly more TV spots to go around, so that’s what most of us end up doing. In the grand scheme of things, there aren’t really a lot of people and companies that cut this stuff.

The competition is friendly, but fierce. Like any business, everyone pretty much knows what the competition is doing, and everyone would be happy to be working on whatever someone else is.
So. . . in a fiercely competitive business, if a tool came along that required some work to master, but would ultimately cost you less and probably allow you to work more quickly and maybe get a leg up on everyone else would you:

A-try it out or even put it in place and see how it worked.
or
B-get mad at the creator of the tool and/or disregard it as useless without really trying it.

That tool is FCP X and, up ’til now, the choice that seems to have been made in our little niche, is B. That’s not to say that nobody is using it, there are a lot of people using it quite successfully. Network promos, News, TV shows, Features, Documentaries. . . All being cut on FCP X. So, why isn’t anyone cutting trailers with FCP X? Well, there are some legitimate workflow concerns with FCP X (for now), but that hasn’t stopped companies in other, related niches from deploying it. And yes, it requires some retraining, but that hasn’t stopped some companies in our niche from switching from FCP 7 to Media Composer.  I’ve said it before, as far as I can tell the main reason nobody in our business is using FCP X, is that nobody else is.

Why do I care? Because I use FCP X. I like it. And I don’t want to have to blindly follow the herd onto some competing NLE. The fact that Adobe Premiere is really similar to the old FCP or that Media Composer has gotten “better”  has zero appeal to me. It’s a negative really. What I like about FCP X is that, once learned, pretty much everything I need to do is easier than it is in other NLE’s.  Not creatively, that’s the same in any NLE, but technically. I can spend exponentially more time in X just cutting.

There are some folks who really like the fact that there are 5 ways to pan an audio channel or 20 preference panes or 30 built in tools most of which you don’t need. I am not one of them. I like simplicity, and that was one of the big appeals of the original FCP. It was just easier to work in compared to the alternatives. And for me, that’s the case with FCP X now. I spend a lot less time manipulating the application, and more time editing. And, it’s fun to cut in. I’m perfectly capable of navigating a complex UI, but if the app I’m in can take care of some of that drudgery for me, it makes me smile. I can spend my time figuring out what to do creatively, rather than how to do something.

There’s a new version of FCP X coming out soon, if you’re reading this later in December it may already be out. In addition to the usual bunch of new features and improvements, I believe it will make collaboration much easier. This is a pretty big deal to folks in the trailer business and – other than the crappy launch (ancient history) and needing to learn the app (not that difficult once you bother to try) – it’s been one of the biggest stumbling blocks for X’s adoption. The next few months should be… interesting. 😉

Tips and Stuff You Need

Posted by fcpxpert1 on November 26, 2013
Posted in: Tips, Workflow. Tagged: , , , , . 12 Comments

What follows is mainly directed at folks who cut in FCP “classic”. It also assumes you either have not used FCP X, or have tried it at some point in the past, stared at it in confusion, and given up. Finally, it assumes that you cut “professionally” and know what you’re doing.

Anyway, first thing you need to do when you open FCP X is . . . forget everything you know. Not about the actual creative process of editing, but the technical process that your brain and muscles have memorized over the years. Tracks, Bins, Subclips, etc. It’s all there but it’s. . . different. X does all the same stuff, some of it better, but it ain’t the same. If you have this attitude:

“I’ve been cutting 40 hours a week for over a decade and I know what I’m doing so just show me how to set I/O’ points and cut clips in and I’m good to go.  I can figure the rest out” 

. . . you might as well stop now. You’re gonna get confused and annoyed, give up, and become part of the FCPX is no good chorus. You can’t just figure it out without help. You know too much. Trust me on this one. This tip brings me to the first thing you need. Tutorials. Macprovideo, Ripple Training, Lynda, YouTube, there are a million of ’em. Get one. Also, get the GEM manuals here. They’re really inexpensive, and really good. Spend a little time to understand the X workflow, especially the project timeline, before you even launch the app. You’ll spend less time swearing at it. After you’ve gotten a basic understanding of FCP X, Here are a couple other timeline tips/ways of looking at things that might make the transition a little easier. . .

–Forget tracks ever existed. X is clip based. No more patching or track tetris.
-The Skimmer will drive you nuts. Use it. Especially Clip skimming. Don’t fight it, it’s really great once you get used to it.
–The Magnetic Timeline will drive you nuts. Just go with it, you’ll get used to it too, and figure out how to control it. Then you’ll wonder how you ever cut in a “normal” timeline.
–Sync Audio rides with the video, if you have a multichannel source just cut it all in, you can disable/enable the channels later if you need to. If you need to move the audio to cheat dialog or something you can detach it, or expand it in place to edit individual channels. It’s really nice.
–Assign Roles to everything as you import it. Video, Dialog, Music, Effects are in the default list, you can make as many as you need. You can do it at any time, but it’s best to assign Roles to Master clips. You can assign Roles to multichannel sources by opening them in a timeline. Proper assignment of Roles is easy, and really important!
–Everything sticks to whatever it’s connected to in the Primary Storyline and….
–The Primary Storyline works like Media Composer in ripple mode. Gap, the stuff between noncontiguous clips, is treated like media, even though it isn’t. In some ways, the X timeline is easier to “get” if you have some MC experience.
-The Position Tool is your friend. It lets you move stuff around in the primary without Rippling everything.
-The tilde key (~) is your friend too. It overrides clip connections when held down. Also, something you won’t find in the manual… If you press ~ and then SHIFT and release the keys, it locks the override until you hit ~ again. Useful!
–You can work like FCP 7 if you cut in everything as connected clips. You’ll need to make secondaries or move clips to the Primary if you want to add transitions, but it’s great to be able to rough out chunks as connected clips, and then dump each section into the primary once it’s kind of where you want. Popping in and out of the Primary is kind of like having Media Composer and FCP 7/Pr all in one.
–Secondary Storylines are invaluable for things like music beds made from cut up clips that you want to keep together, or may not want to them to move when you move a chunk of video and the clips connected to it. Put these clips in secondaries connected to the Primary at the head of the timeline and they function more or less like tracks used to.
–The timeline index is really useful. Assuming you’ve assigned Roles properly, you can do things like mute, solo, select all clips for particular Roles. And more…

**Edit: 12/21/13 As of FCP 10.1 -The ancient Project Library/Event workflow is gone. It was confusing as hell, and has changed. Ignore anything you hear or read about it. 😉

-Libraries are (kinda) the new Projects They hold a collection of Events and (FCP X) Projects
-Events are (kinda) the new Bins.
–Keyword Collections are the new Folders (though there are still actual folders), Smart Collections are super Folders. 😉
–Projects are the new Sequence

I could prattle on forever, but that’s a start. If you need to move back and forth from X to FCP 7 and/or Premiere, you absolutely can. Easily. 7toX is $10, Xto7 is $50. They work really well, so you have a safety net if you need it. Great to have when you’re just diving in or need to swap stuff with folks on other NLE’s. Getting in and out of MC is do-able, but’s it’s unfortunately a PITA.

You’ve also probably heard that X can’t export OMF’s, EDL’s, Change lists, and other esoteric things that “pro’s” need. And in the app itself, this is technically true. But, believe it or not, not everybody needs this stuff, just like not everybody cutting in FCP 7 needed AAF’s. Remember Automatic Duck? Remember how much it used to cost? Well, If you’re using X and you need these features (I do) for about the same price you can do all those things and more. Smoke and Resolve currently open fcpxml files with no translation, but to talk to other post workflows here’s a little list of the basic stuff you’ll want:

Compressor– $50 – X has a subset of compressor built into it, but for all the random export formats we need, get this. Make presets in compressor, access them from X without switching apps.
Motion– $50 – Open and tweak 90% of X’s built in effects. Make your own effects, generators and lot’s, lot’s more. Get it.
X2Pro – $149 -Makes ProTools (and other DAW) compatible AAF’s. Set your Roles properly and it’ll create a perfectly split out session with 1 or 2 clicks. It’s awesome.
EDL-X – $99 – Generates CMX 3600 EDL’s. Also you can edit the source table, and any markers you add to your sequence will show as comments in the EDL.
Clip Exporter – Free – delivers your entire timeline to After Effects or batch exports selected clips as Quicktime movies or Nuke files.
Resolve Lite – Free – Pretty much the same as the full version but only up to 2k resolution.

That pretty much takes care of the basic post needs and more for $350. Auto duck was $495 before it got EOL’d, so we’ve still got $145 to play with right? So…

Get Slice-X with Mocha for $99. In app Planar Tracking. It’s freaking amazing. Save the rest of your $ to put toward this. It’s in Beta testing now but allows for full 3D .obj files and texture maps, up to 8K in size. Sort of like Element3D inside FCP X.

OK, I really will stop now. But that’s just scratching the surface. Google will find you pretty much anything else you can imagine. Have fun….

What Is All This?

Posted by fcpxpert1 on November 23, 2013
Posted in: FCP X. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

Hi there. This is a little blog about FCP X. “The internet is full of blogs about FCP X”  you say. “Why bother?” Well, I just thought I’d add my opinions and experiences to the 800 billion others out there. Also, I am selfish. I Like FCP X 😛

Quick Links: FCP X Essentials | FCP X Versioning Workflow | FCP X Naming (Opinion)

Looking for crap to download? Shortcuts to the vast collection of GeekCo.® free stuff:
Slate/Smoke/MPAA Bands/Bars
Strobe | Role-O-Matic (deprecated)| Share-O-Matic | Letter A | Better Basic 3D

It Doesn’t Suck…

Posted by fcpxpert1 on November 23, 2013
Posted in: Opinion. Tagged: , , . 3 Comments

 “Nobody in town uses it.”
~ the echo chamber

“It” is Final Cut Pro X, which -if you’ve been under a rock for the last 2 years or so- is Apple’s replacement for the aging, but much-loved, Final Cut Pro 7. “Town” is Hollywood CA. And, in the context of this rant,  “nobody” is, allegedly, everybody who edits movie trailers and TV commercials for movies. Interestingly, that quote has been repeated to me in the office in which I work. Why interestingly? Because in this office I cut movie trailers and TV commercials for movies. On Final Cut Pro X.  Does that seem. . . Odd?  It reminds me of. . . something. . . (insert time machine noise here)

A few years before the turn of the century, I worked for a little trailer company in Hollywood. One day in 1999, Apple released a brand new editing program called Final Cut Pro.  It looked pretty cool, was relatively inexpensive and I’m kind of a geek, so I immediately bought a copy. I tried cutting something in it. It crashed. At version 1.0, it was kind of useless for what I do. Most “professional” editors believed it was basically a toy. No OMF output. No EDL output. Maybe good for home movies, certainly unsuitable for real work.

But, I kept messing with my little copy at home. After a few updates I felt it kind of was useable, so I brought FCP and my recently retired Performa into my office, set it up next to my Media Composer, and started cutting stuff on it. Media Composer was definitely more “powerful”, but my little FCP rig could do a bunch of stuff MC couldn’t. Also, FCP was kind of fun to cut in.

People at work thought it looked interesting, but didn’t take it seriously. Then, in January or February of 2000 (FCP 1.2?) I somehow managed to get a TV spot cut in FCP approved, and finished . . . maybe it wasn’t so useless. Conveniently, we were needing to replace our aging Avid systems and the folks who ran the place decided to dive into FCP one system at a time. Eventually we switched completely to FCP. Many others followed. 

Now clearly, plenty of other people were using FCP, but not in our little trailer-cutting niche. More importantly for FCP’s broad adoption, the first TV show cut in FCP came out at around the same time, the “new” Oxygen Network began using it, eventually somebody cut a “hollywood” film on it, and the floodgates opened. FCP became an “industry standard”.  A few more years passed. I went to work at another little trailer company. . .

One day in 2011, Apple released a brand new editing program called Final Cut Pro X. Being a geek, I immediately bought a copy. I opened it up. Tried to cut something in it. It crashed. A lot. It was really weird. It was also really really cool and fun in a lot of ways. But at 1.0 it was not ready for what I do. Like many others, I recoiled in horror, gave up, and continued working away in FCP 7.

But after a few updates that addressed my workflow, I gave it another try. After a bit of hair pulling and a couple tutorials, I discovered I actually liked it. So, I loaded it up on my work system and started cutting stuff on it. Then, in May or June of 2012 (FCPX 10.4?) I somehow managed to get a theatrical :30 trailer cut in FCP X approved, and finished. But things are different this time. . .

In spite of the fact that people in this business have been cutting real, national spots in FCPX for well over a year, despite the fact that one can quickly do quality graphics and compositing in X that would normally need to be done in another application, despite all the features of X that make life as an editor easier, many people in the trailer business still don’t take FCP X seriously. Nobody wants to try it because. . . nobody wants to try it. Honestly, had that attitude been prevalent 15 years ago, there probably wouldn’t have been a Final Cut 7 to cling to like a sinking lifeboat. It’s time to let go.

That’s not to say there haven’t been legitimate reasons not to use X. When it came out, FCPX wasn’t even close to being ready to do everything that FCP 7 could do. That is no longer true. If you now, for some reason, require fixed tracks or another specific feature (that is actually missing, not rumored to be) then it may not be for you.  If you learn it, and just don’t like it, fine. But there’s another, illegitimate reason people don’t give it a shot. Apple botched the launch of FCP X. It looked like iMovie and they “killed” FC Studio which, even though it still works, made people feel that Apple was “abandoning” pros. That scared a lot of people off initially, including me.

I spent the first year of FCP X’s existence re-learning the MC interface and learning the much improved Premiere. Fine NLE’s, but they just didn’t have the same “feeling” as good old FCP. And FCP X just sat there on my system, getting updated, but not getting used. Until the point alluded to above that I felt that if I did something with X, I could get it out to finish. So I waded back in. Now, my hair pulling moments come when I’m in FCP 7 or Premiere. There are still things other NLE’s do better than X, and there are things X does better than the others, some things X does others can’t do and vice-versa. And there are some things that you can only do in FCP X. But because of the initial bad taste people got, there’s still a ton of wrong information floating around in the echo chamber.

Despite what you may have heard, you can exchange sequences from X with FCP 7 and Premiere in both directions. For X, the one big sticking point has been the ability to easily share work in a multi (FCP X)-editor workflow. It’s do-able now, but kind of confusing.

[UPDATE: This was written before 10.1 was released. Now, sharing stuff works almost exactly as before, maybe easier. Export XML of Project, Event, or Library from one system, import into another. EZ] 

Current versions of Resolve, Smoke, Logic and others all open FCP X projects. It’s likely that a lot of other things will be able to interact with X as well pretty soon. In our little niche we need EDL’s and AAF’s, and for what Automatic Duck used to cost you can do all that and get enough really cool plugins to make your head explode. And cutting in X is fun. That’s right, Fun.

At this point FCP X is a viable replacement for the original FCP. It’s different. You can’t just jump into it. You need to take the time to learn it. But, as someone who does this for a living, believe me, it’s worth it. If you’re an Avid person, stick with MC. If you like Premiere, stick with it. But if, like me, you’re someone who really likes cutting in FCP 7, I’ll just say this. . . once you learn how FCP X works, once you get past the point of having to figure out which button/keystroke/menu/window does what, once you get comfortable with it, it feels the same. It’s hard to define, but. . .  you know what I mean.

If you cut on FCP “classic”, unless you just freeze your system in time,  you’re going to have to learn a new NLE. If you run a company based on FCP “classic” you’re going to have to switch NLE’s. And the prevailing wisdom is that FCP X is not a viable choice. “Nobody in town uses it.” Well, the prevailing wisdom is. . . misinformed. I use it. There are plenty of others who use it. If you need to switch from FCP 7 – and you do – you should give X a try.