Re: New blog post from Philip Hodgetts. Worth the read.

[David Lawrence] "I'm also skeptical of metadata driven auto assembly. Sure, maybe as a first pass instead of an assistant's manual assembly. But to do anything good beyond that, there's never a substitute for knowing the material. "

I can see it working particularly well in the cruise industry, where you have essentially one voyage video that you are updating every seven days with fresh footage to include the passengers of that voyage. If you always shoot the belly flop contest from the same angle, etc. fast rough assembly by the numbers could make something like that work pretty quickly. Using table number and seating assignments, you could probably design a system that insured that passengers buying the video could get themselves seen in it, at least at dinner and a few other pre-arranged spots.

When I first heard of FCP X's "powerful metadata" underbelly, I thought it might be working along these lines; I was kind of surprised to see that it wasn't.