Rethinking NLE design II

digitalfilms by Oliver Peters

Many experienced editors look at the interface design of Final Cut Pro X and seemingly freak out at the radical change in front of them. The truth is that if you dig a bit deeper, many of the underlying concepts aren’t that different from Media Composer, Premiere Pro or FCP “legacy” after all. Different nomenclature and a modified way of working, but still built upon familiar foundations – IF you look for them.

Events and Projects

I think Apple needlessly confused the issue by the labels it chose, but in a broad sense, FCP X Events = FCP 7 Bins and FCP X Projects = FCP 7 Sequences. Once you grasp that, things become a bit more familiar. In FCP 1-7 a project file contained all the metadata (clips, timecodes, edit decisions, notes, etc.) for a given program you were editing. The actual media was ingested to a project folder within the Capture Scratch folder or linked from other folders on your hard drives. With FCP X, the metadata that was contained within a single project file in the past, has been distributed among FCP X’s Events and Project folders on your hard drives.

This is actually similar to the approach Avid takes, where each bin within a project is actually a self-contained data file on your hard drive. In the case of Avid, media can be stored in a common (separate) Avid MediaFiles folder or linked via AMA to other locations on your drives. The FCP X approach is somewhat similar, in that imported media can be stored in an Events folder or it can be linked to other locations. In the case of the latter, aliases are stored in the Events folder, which point to the location of the actual media. read more...