Axel

Indeed.

You must have been using it wrongly or working on a much too slow machine to say that. In 10.0.1, the demo version just crashed once you used the skimmer. I seriously considered Adobe CS then, who lowered their price to fantastic 1000 € for the converts. Saw someone cut with 10.0.6 a year later on a set and gave FCP X another try by buying it for 279 €, once and for all. (That it was stable enough by then and) The skimmer convinced me. If by across the board you mean searching horizontally, vertically and diagonally in list view or thumbnail view: YES! That worked flawlessly. What is the skimmer? It's a content-sensitive tool that makes the mouse-pointer/cursor a very fast playhead that scratches clips (means over a clip the mouse becomes the skimmer and a thumbnail in the browser becomes a miniature timeline) by gestures alone - no need to click or drag. And in the timeline, as mentioned, you can toggle it so it solo-plays video and audio clips when you hover above them directly. This is as close to actual mind-reading as one can imagine in 2016. It allows you to find things very quickly. If combined with the minimal sorting options in the browser every adult NLE provides (date of recording, clip name, duration, ascending, descending, this kind of "metadata") you can find every shot within seconds, just from visual or aural memory. And without clicking. Enter the advocatus diaboli. In his book In The Blink Of An Eye Walter Murch criticizes scrubbing with the playhead or hitting "LL". Because you didn't see every frame anymore. Fast forward on a Steenbeck or Moviola was different. He said, a cutter could subconsciously remember frames he saw at double speed, but the NLEs (by this he referred to the AVID of course) would just skip them. And the skimmer is a mighty skipper. But that only matters if you are not aware of the downsides. Because you can revert to an ordinary playhead that displays real time ("s" is the command to kill the skimmer). Or you can just skim less hectically. Many FCP X users toggle off skimming for fine scrubbing in the timeline (whereas they use it's speed to search for things in the browser). Arguably, it is. FCP X is the first editing software to structure narrational content. Whereas still being an NLE by definition, the hierarchy of the straightforward story (magnetic and favoring append-at-end) and child-clips connected to it for a reason causes the editor to think in linear sequences. This speeds up the process tremendously. Other NLEs have fully independent tracks, there is no way to tell clips how they relate to each other (you can't understand the second part of the sentence if you only know an 'open timeline'). So, as long as time is money, as long as I have to edit for a living, as long as clients don't pay for fiddling around with clips, there is no question that FCP X is superior. Finally, let me quote Nick (page 1): They were. The argument back then was that the non-destructive, non-linear nature of it made the editor lazy. He could cheat, just repair something that didn't work instead of questioning the whole thing. The same was said of Word. If you just delete a passage of a novel and write two or three new sentences, the whole book in the end will be a patchwork. True. And anyway, even earlier, when there were physical film strips to actually cut and splice (and never tracks btw, A/B editing never had independent clips!) in linear sequences, editors never thought of them as linear. Spielberg: "Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning." We should become aware of that. Never go for the first that comes along.

Don't get this one. Since they came with clip skimming, I thought: this is really it. As good as it gets. Explain. Tried scrolling timeline with FCP Hacks? On every FCP X wishlist. Skim and scroll and vomit on your keyboard. There are reasons why some features have never been published. The right jobs would be those with a close deadline or those you don't want to spend too much time for. Like in I don't want it perfect, I want it good, and I want it monday.

To understand the basics is not as hard as it may seem. I know vintage FCP and Premiere up to CS5.5 (and followed it through my friend who also teaches Adobe) very well. Under the surfaces (which from some distance are almost identical, compared to FCP X) there are a lot of things that got built in over the years, adding new functions, trying to fix bugs, adding new bugs by becoming too bloated. If for you Premiere approaches as the NLE equivalent of an Imperial Star Destroyer for all it's size and power, it's ridiculously weak in organizing footage. The features for that, despite Prelude (a separate app in the CC), are practically non-existent. And so, if you are new to the software, you right-click or so in the window that obviously is some kind of empty browser and import. In FCP X, if well advised, you do a lot of preparation work before you even start a project, make a cut. As Matzdorf says (34'25">>) he doesn't want to work with Premiere because he finds it "very clunky, (...) handicapping in many ways". I deliberately set aside the track management for now and start earlier, with playback and navigation. In order to load a clip to the viewer (the one to qualify footage clips), you need to double-click the clip (list name or thumbnail, there is only a thumbnail view for hover-scrubbing, there is no skimmer) and then use spacebar, jkl or drag the playhead. If you had bothered to sort your clips in folders to kind of rudimentarily organize them, you of course have to first double-click those folder-icons to see their content. All this is absurdly redundant, all this useless clicking, key-hitting and shoving costs so much time and energy and mental health. This alone disqualifies Premiere for me, I could never go back. The paradigm of the open timeline with independant tracks, on the other hand, slows down editing when you have to deliver news or when you just know in advance how the cookie will crumble, like for instance in wedding videography. In Final Cut, I compose the whole thing in my mind whilst viewing, favoring and tagging the footage. The actual timeline work is little else than an execution of that, with the aid of the primary storyline concept and the magnetism. Some rearranging, some trimming, that's more or less the extent of it. The point is, as always with unique virtues* (for example low light capabilities of a camera can be bad if they make you think you didn't have to know about lighting), that you can easily forget to care (see my motto). Nothing. But an NLE is a tool. If creative decisions look too obvious, they are the worse ones. Editing means trial & error. Repetition. The power of starting over with more experience, like reincarnation with conscience about your karma. Tracks facilitate error and encourage creativity. In consequence, because we don't want to make bad films, we have to raise the bar in FCP X. We have to aim for the 'future of storytelling'. People are ready to follow much more complex and fragmented narrations (one hesitates to say stories), in fact they favor them!

Track-based NLEs have worked reliably for decades. Editing on computers had always been that way. And editors are used, trained, conditioned to the way of thinking which independant tracks demand, which is arranging ideas in time. You can place your first clip three minutes or hours into the future with FCP X too, but the program strongly discourages this. It gently forces you to compose your story linearly. Each clip you add seems to strengthen the magnetic pull, resulting in self-suggesting cuts. This can be a trap. You so early see the outline of your whole project that you rarely think twice. It has the efficiency of a mind map. A mind map, through visualizing the connections of your seemingly uncorrelated fancies on a certain topic, organizes these ideas. Happens almost without effort on your part. Vague thoughts are rendered concrete, they become storylines. The process is dramatically abbreviated, doubts about alternatives have no time to sink in. In mine too. But the above arguments are from my best buddy (with Premiere), and I know he wishes just the best for me. A way to approach FCP X: more experiments. Don't start with clip one. Edit chunks in own projects, compound them. Edit compound clips. Rearrange everything, start over if things seem to fall into place too readily. Use gap clips (delete) to break up shock frozen structures. Use connected clips more to avoid storylines.

Opened my old projects, which needed to be updated (with a warning that they wouldn't open in older versions). Everything looks and feels terrific. Beautiful clip:

With new GUI, workspaces, flexible audio-transitions, audio-roles (and probably video-roles) shown as "lanes" (like intelligent tracks), wide color gamut, what have you. Check out Ernie & Bert:

Film is also a language. Static tripod shots are a way of saying (because they are understood subconsciously in that way by the audience): "Look here, I wanna to show you something I have selected for your consideration". The fast zoom of the late seventies and early eighties says: "And it's THIS !!!" Until Godards À bout de souffle (Breathless) of 1950, hand-held camera meant either POV or amateur. Suddenly people realized that a doc-style hand camera did NOT say: "this is something witnessed by a camera operator, there is no structured narration", but that it added emotion to the scene. It said, "what happens here is (or WAS) not fully controlled or understood". Godard, also a film-philosopher, explained that cinema showed "death at work". The viewer of a traditional movie was like someone who sits in a train, in driving direction. He could anticipate everything because it slowly moved into his field of vision. Cuts with perfect continuity or with a too obvious narrative function, motifs carefully framed and presented in cold blood. A deterministic world view, down-to-earth (or down-to-your-knees!) morals, Pleasantville. Every 'film of life' has the same curve bending from the cradle to the grave. Revolting for the existentialistic Godard. He wanted audiences breathless. I think that a gimbal or IBIS stabilized shot that is deliberately made shaky in post does NOT transport this. People who want "total stabilization" often also demand HFR, 48, 50, 60 fps. This smoothes motion, true, but it effectively makes motion blur (or lack of motion blur!) almost invisible. They smoothed motion, but they also stopped (e-)motion. Film is a language, and it needs as much differentiation as possible. Sharp - unsharp, stable - shaky, smooth - choppy, contrasty - misty, giant - tiny, what have you. Film is not about technical perfection. If a gimbal shot looks as if made by the Terminator (I own the Ronin M, so I'm not a hater), you don't need servo sounds for the audience to sense this, imo. RS already has it's place in the vocabulary of contemporary cinema. If there is an explosion or sth. like that filmed in the aforementioned Nouvelle Vague fashion, RS will add emotion AND authenticity. Of course not in the long tripod shot in which Daniel Craig escapes with the explosion on the horizon. Let me add another semiotic polarity: UGLYYYYY - nice ... EDIT: I can't remember which film it was, but only recently I saw RS flashes (images torn in their middle) in an, er, blockbuster. Viewing habits have already adopted that look.

Probably. I had the 7D years ago. Loved it. Don't need full frame. Nikon F was my first camera. If for stills you do everything manually (and aren't a sports photographer), I'd say any preference between Nikon and Canon is a matter of personal taste. But I may err.

@IronFilm Yes, Nikon is seriously underestimated. Privately, I have the Nikon D3300 (~$ 400) for stills. Someone told me it was useable for video, so I gave it a try. Well, it almost is useable. Virtues: > Colors are a revelation, particularly in portrait mode. So beauitful ... > No moire > 1080 50p > apparently very good DR Weaknesses: > hard to focus, no video-usable AF, no video-usable focus-assistants, poor resolution of display > profiles can't be edited, i.e. to get a flatter image to facilitate CC > Image looks a little soft, but pleasing The first weakness could be worked around, to some extend and to some expense. The second not, a.f.a.i.k.

I see what you mean. It's the famous Canon color palette. Obvious virtue. I know I repeat myself, but I recommend to be suspicious with unique features and obvious virtues. What contributes to these skintones are good profiles and the right (Canon) glass. Let me cite Andrew Reid from his article Summoning the Devil: .. and he refers to the Sony A7rii of course of which you write: Believe me, I hate them psychotically. Fortunately, by best friend loves Sony and Canon and has some kind of color blindness, because he can't see what distinguishes them colorwise. I am getting a lot of A7rii & FS7 footage to edit and grade from him, and I occasionally borrow the A7rii. Though I admit that nobody can link to a Sony clip in which the skin is as good as in your Netflix example, I know you can get very close. So close, indeed, that even for the ugly hater, me, the difference ceases to be relevant. Take this clip: It's shot with not very good settings (you wouldn't dial up saturation and sharpness). But yet, with just the tiniest bit of secondary CC (I saved it as a one-click-filter actually) you could make this skin look very healthy and alive. To a degree, I promise, where original Canon footage looks as if it needed some work when cut side by side. Would have been impossible with Sony lenses in this case! The same principle can be applied to all advantages and disadvantages of the cameras you compare. Perhaps you should make a table including your accustomed GH4. Think hard about the weaknesses and how you can compensate them. The best camera is not the camera with the best specs but the one you know by heart and whose flaws you successfully overcame.

I liked this for the, er, thought-provoking text. The images seemed to me somewhat exchangeable, anything could have fit. People don't think properly for a reason. They don't remind themselves often enough that they need to know the sources of their own motivations at least BETTER. Know thyself! Our cerebrum is a proliferation of the cerebellum, the system HD, if you will. We aren't rational by nature. And the more we worship intellectualism, we forget that special power we have but rarely value, a power that could save the world: empathy. Think about it.

Every special AF technology needs special AF lenses, with extremely short ways on the focus ring that make them bad for manual focussing. Just a side note, that with AF you actually need two lenses for the same angle of view ...

Then poor skintones have survived the evolution from GH2, the last time I used Panasonic. Funny enough, I have said the exact same thing about Sony skintones, those of the A7S and the FS7. Now I mostly get footage from the A7rii (I own none of the cameras myself), and the colors are much improved, FS7 as well - due to intensive research of the operators.. That said, the skintones in particular are really nothing to write home about. Nowhere even close to what I had with the Pocket back then, let alone what can be depicted with Ursa mini. Nobody has done that, as far as I can see, so I guess it's not possible. Right now, comparing from what is available to me, I think I would prefer A7S/Sii/rii over GH4, and then because of DR and colors. Lowlight capabilities are not so important (don't like night-for-day-shots. On the other hand, the aforementioned detail in the shadows of a normal shot also has to do with this), too shallow DoF is not desirable (but then again, you can close the aperture inside a room because of good lowlight). Back on topic, for the GH5 to be attractive for me, it had to have good colors in 10-bit.

Because even people using (first A7S, then A7rii) the Sonys didn't initially realize it fully. Better image? Well, for stills of course. But for video, the expectations had been set so high, most were disappointed at first. For a feature known as 'worse colors', which proved to be hard to overcome. But it can, and then you are rewarded with a feature that was advertised but never actually showed: stunning fifteen stops of DR! DR couldn't be used to show off because of >ridiculous 8-bit with >poor color science >a log-profile utterly inuseable in combination with the corresponding official LUT. Images never look HDR. You just have little clipping on both ends of the spectrum, much less, in fact, than with most other cameras. To a degree where you don't accept that this shadow has no detail as it would have had with the Sony, but it looked okay in the display (6-bit typically). Another point is, for video the ergonomics are bad, pushing the bar for the most difficult to use video camera of the millennium. Full frame has advantages and disadvantages. For instance, I'd like to adapt more glass.

I've dumped everything but After Effects, for which I now pay 23,79 € each month. The reason, since I once bought Motion for 50 bucks and can use Fusion 8 for free? There are quite some advanced tools in AAE, for me the most important is Mocha, which I use for rotoscoping exclusively. That's for compositing of course, and for that you also need to match the colors of the layers, color correction. The way Adobe organizes tools was always terrible and will remain so in general. But fortunately AAE has also Lumetri, which finally compounded everything you really need to perform a simple CC in one effect. If I just needed some motion graphics like animated titles or logos, Motion was actually much better for that. Premiere loses against FCP in just about every respect. What about dynamic links - since I mentioned I use AAE? There is a strict, but really fail-save workflow for that, that even doesn't require the $200 Ximport (f.k.a. Automatic Duck). I make a sloppy pre-comp in my FCP X timeline, complete with keying, rough roto and effects. I make it a compound clip, name it properly and export it as XML, process the file with XtoCC and import that in AAE. None of the effects are recognized there (one shouldn't use transform tools, which are and one must be careful with retiming, because only constant speed changes will translate), but that's how I want it. I queue the render files and replace the compound clips of the same name. Sounds more complicated than it is. Dream on. You sound like those people who demand a GH5 for $1500 with 4k raw internally. I even don't find it likely that it will have 4k 10-bit internally, but of course, if it has, I won't object that.

You are right. It aren't the limitations of our cameras. But people continue to mix needle droppers or vinyl scratches and rumbling to their music mixes. Not to make the audience remember the good old times - most of them never heard a real record player in their life. They add a technical layer that tells you, subconsciously, found music, sampled music, heard-before, meaningful, indirect, subtle. Interesting idea. Tell a story in 120 fps, 8k, 20 stops DR, no vignettes or shallow DoF allowed, no drastically reduced color palettes permitted. Of course no grain (a technical layer that tells you, processed material, not real-time recordings, supposed to mean something). In earnest, I think it could work. You just had to pull any other string available to you. Sets, costumes, make-up, acting. Good storytelling.

In March 2015 - I already had the Pocket - I saw this on Vimeo (shot with BMCC and BMPCC): Just as an example. Yes, and I have seen people 'shitting'. Right now there is a discussion between Brawley and some professor Kino, like a fight of Jaeger vs. Kaiju. Entertaining though these arguments are (for a while), they don't help much. With video I rather trust my eyes. If what I see pleases me, that's all I need to know. Then I read reports on the problems and how they can be solved.

Did anybody ever say anything else? The subject of this film seems to be the stream of consciousness, which is, but not just, a narrative mode. As I see it, it's the way one actually thinks. ... and the filmmaker, as is his job, erodes the boundaries between an actor seen as a motif on screen and our inner screen, bewildering concept, but this art's bread and butter. The title reminded me of Gaspar Noé's Enter The Void. Or Down The Rabbit Hole or Through The Looking Glass. Or A Descent into the Maelström. A good title is hard to find. This one 's great, promises a real adventure. Looking forward to see the whole film.

Lousy camera operator. Existential decision. Spent too much time and money and wasn't creative. The best film is the film that is actually made. And the worst excuse in summer 2016 is that I didn't own the right camera. I always had the right camera. The Ursa Mini would have been the momentary object of my NCD, a more reasonable one perhaps the upcoming GH5. What I mean is, if a fail with the Pocket, I fail with any other camera. If I succeed with my iPhone, the success would only be gradually better in the end had I had an Alexa instead.

I had been listening to people who told me, look, it's not even real HD and UHD is the way to go nowadays. They were right, I saw the Pocket's limits in resolution, and it started to bother me. I sold it and every piece of equipment associated with it. Now I have tons of footage from the said people in glorious 4k and I can watch it in native resolution and I can compare it to my old Pocket footage. And I could cry. Resolution isn't everything. What about handling? People have exact CWB, various implementations of AF, AE or - and this is not exaggerated - millions of combinable profile-settings. None of these has the Pocket. And yet, all these funky functions don't seem to help much, because of the image quality. You don't believe that or see that? Then be happy, stay happy ...

@M Carter Amazing. Of course I am only a wedding videographer who practically never needs to touch an old project. Part of the marriages go sour before I would feel the urge to free disk space. Lucky me. I wonder why you then don't buy a Pegasus R6 or R8. They are getting faster the bigger they are. @Mat Mayer Agreed.

I consider most original footage (aside that from BM cameras, ProResHQ or Raw) to be "small". For archiving, I use FCP X camera archives, which back-up the whole cards prior to import. These files, though they look proprietary with their elsewhere unknown padlock-icon, show all camera folders on a Windows system, just one extra "something.fcarch" file. With FCP X, there is one big advantage over finder-backups: all archives that are connected to your Mac whilst FCP X starts up are indexed and recognized, no matter where you stored them or moved them. That means as long as you know these archives exist, you can trash any copies, and FCP X will spontaneously make a new copy if you want to see the clip. Footage clips can't go offline then - re-imports from AAE can, and that's where I feel the difference. I need to manually create folders and subfolders (and, if the project takes longer, backups, it may be careless, but I only timemachine my system). Even with a maxed-out nMP I believe I would work with optimized media. Faster machines may make H.264 4k editing smoother, but I always want the smoothest editing experience. For that I put up with an hour or two transcoding my favorites to ProRes "in the foreground". BTW, that's the only time I noticed my iMac had a fan that made noise. I don't hear it during export, because I toggle on background-rendering when my images are locked and I start fiddling with audio niceties, and therefore export times are just a few minutes with no rendering involved. It may well be that ProRes typically takes 8 times the disk space compared to original media. As my Library-Manager screenshot shows, this ratio is much more reasonable if you don't transcode everything but just the usable stuff (it's german, but I think you will understand): Everything you see here is a copy already. With a camera archive, you can't leave files in place, you have to copy them. That means I can unconcernedly trash them all once the project is finished. Recently I discussed this with my Windows buddy, who finds the option to consolidate projects with referenced H.264 originals and Premieres smart rendering to be superior. True is, in the example above he would end up with, say, 60 GB of disk space to archive the project compared to 233 GB with FCP X camera archives ...

To me - a cineaste if there ever was one - contemporary Hollywood cinema is like this: Modern TV series - particularly the Netflix approach - are better entertainment. Traditional series used to have a cliffhanger. The hero literally hangs from a cliff, and you have to wait a week to see him rescued, which of course happened. Suspense in the new series is created by slow character development. The end of each show promises that things are explored deeper, that more is revealed. Even, as with Daredevil, if there is a hero and a villain, you can't know how the story unfolds. In Rectify, the authors even play with the prejudices of the audience. Fair is foul and foul is fair, nothing comes in the expected package. Comparing this to the latest blockbusters is like comparing Shakespeare to a Punch&Judy show. I found out for myself, that generally only the first season is worth watching (= spending many hours). Exceptions prove the rule. The third season of Six Feet Under is unbelievably good. But it only works if you know the first two seasons.

The audience realizes in retrospect what Rosebud meant to Kane. His whole career, everything he accomplished, Xanadu, didn't define the man. A tragicomic truth, because most of us follow storylines that lead us away from what we really want. And like genre movies the plans we make for our own lives are often trite. We call life chaotic, but by that we ignore it's actual conditions, which don't follow our arbitrary beliefs. Connected to chaos theory is the law of self-similarity, where billions of individuals eventually resemble each other. Were our lives recorded in three-minute time-lapse clips and published on Youtube, you would stop watching those after the fourth or fifth, because the individual histories would seemingly repeat themselves. As I see it, life only takes place in the moment. The past is gone, we compound it into a sequence we wrongly deem meaningful, the future a bunch of prejudices and projections from the made-up past. We should run for our lives, save our asses. Now.