@A Cautionary Tale for the FCP Switcher

Walter, thanks for that article. No question that is frustrating.

The other day, I was in a Twitter conversation with you, Marco Solario and perhaps a few others, about the notion of what offline and conform means today.

I think what is needed here is a redefinition of what exactly an offline/online and conform really means in today's tapeless world. With tape, the method is proven. You capture from tape at one resolution, you edit, trim, and recapture just what's needed at a higher resolution using the same video connections and hardware. It's a relatively straight forward process where the format is handled in combination with the capture card, deck, and NLE. The difference here with tapeless (and this was something Marco Solario brought up) was that he (and others) really don't work in a traditional "offline" mode today. I know we don't unless we are working with Red material. There is simply no reason for the particular work that we do to make lower resolution transcodes, and then retranscode those an "offline" or reconnect back to their native resolution later.

But what IS needed is a way to make things portable in a concise package. Along with that we also need flexibility.

What I would like to see from a modern NLE is a comprehensive rethink on what native editing means, and what we need to do with it. CS6 definitely has an aspect of this correct, as does Avid, but Avid is still relying on an older method, and CS6 is ignoring a basic need of portability. When I say portability, i am not tailing about taking the project home with you, I am talking about taking only the USED footage from the timeline, conformed in to a common format/frame rate that will be easier for color correction applications to understand and deal with, and it will not involve sending absolutely every last piece of shot media.

Also, it seems every camera shoots a variant of some tapeless standard. Some are proprietary, some are less proprietary, at any rate, the NLE has a lot of work to do to understand all of these differing formats, and then be able to reach in to these differing codes and standards, and make sense of them to combine or consolidate them in to a concise package.

What format/container would that be? What codec? Can every single content creation software read that format and codec for the utmost flexibility?

It's a daunting task to be sure, but I can do it manually with Compressor and some time, so it seems that something could be automated in this sense, or at least partially automated.

There's so much media being thrown at us these days, from everything to 5k to small web movies, and clients just want it to work.

A modern NLE should take this approach head on, but also give you an out. It should allow you to switch between conformed material and original or "camera native" footage easily. I am talking about (if you need it) a clip by clip decision on what you're looking at. This way, if something did go wrong with the auto conformed clip, you can switch back to native and manually fix it with whatever tool makes you the most happy.

I know, this will be a programming challenge. It's asking to have parts of an asset manger and an NLE in one. Unfortunately, I think this what an "online" means today, and eventually what a modern NLE will need as there will only be new formats, new codecs, and more fragmentation. It means transcoding all kinds of material in to one or two related formats in order to send off to ether applications/facilities. We need access to multiple variations of an one clip, but it shouldn't halt the entire workflow during work or output.

I think the goal here is flexibility, but with that comes a lot of data management and tracking. All of that is really hard to get right with today's crazy multitude of "standard" media types and all the other types that don't fit in to a standard.

I think then, at least, we could have a glance of what our media is and if there's anything that we need to do with it, like change the frame rate, or change the frame size, or whatever needs to be done in order to conform for an eventual high quality output. I also think that the media should be able to be tracked back to camera native or DI at any point. It's a lot to ask, and I'm not sure if it will ever happen, but it would solve problems like this much more easily.

Thanks for writing, Wally. This is truly a modern dilemma of editing and finishing today.

Jeremy