My apologies to David for hijacking this thread. I think that our dialogue here started out as a very interesting conversation about how to represent an edit, but now that we've both made our main points, we've ventured off into minutiae and I'm not sure how much value we're adding here anymore.
Chris, if you choose to start a new thread after this, I'd be happy to continue our conversation next week.
[Chris Kenny] "This "ridiculous case" is, in fact, a real-world use case. I agree that it's ridiculous. The fact that it's used is a symptom of a desperate need for more metadata in modern workflows."
I didn't mean ridiculous as an insult -- I figured from your tone you thought it was ridiculous, too, and I agree that is shows how important metadata is.
[Chris Kenny] "You don't regularly online other editors' offline projects, I think? See, for online editing work, everything that's not a corner case comes over fairly automatically... meaning that 90% of the time is spent dealing with corner cases."
I do a few onlines every year, and I think that properly dealing with corner cases is a significant part of the value an online editor adds. My work is mostly short-form with heavy compositing or graphics, and I gather your work is mostly feature, though, so we do probably have totally different biases.
If you do predominantly online, I can absolutely see the appeal of an auto-collapsing trackless timeline. I can also see why you'd want an offline editor to use metadata/tracks in a way that would make your online easier (and more cost-effective for the client).
I'd guess that most of the metadata usage of multi-track editing is in for broadcast or corporate deliverables that don't see separate offline and online.
I'd also guess that most of the "scratch" usage of multi-track editing is in broadcast or corporate as well as creative offline.
[Chris Kenny] "How many video tracks are you going to create for organizational purposes? Six? Eight? However many you create, you have to assign them roles that encompass everything happening in a sequence that could easily have over 1000 shots in it, that need to be layered in assorted different ways. I just think the spatial approach doesn't scale all that well."
I say leave it up to each individual editor. Add (and encourage) proper metadata tools -- especially for offline/online work -- but don't remove spatial organization from the timeline.
A piece with 1000 shots and dozens of footage roles all needing separate track types is also a corner case. Most features don't require this kind of layering, and the ones that do usually have shot-based compositing anyway that will reduce the number of footage roles. I think that most pieces which are heavily-layered in the NLE will be shorter form, not having 1000 shots. In both cases, the number of tracks needn't be totally unmanageable.
Weren't you arguing for the median editor last week anyway?
Walter Soyka
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