[Walter Soyka] "No, it can't. The self-collapsing trackless timeline inherently prevents you from using the spatial position in the timeline."
It stops you from using
solely spatial position to categorize things, but given metadata tagging the app could (but, admittedly, probably won't) offer a spatially arranged
view of that metadata.
This is one of the great things about metadata -- it allows the software to "understand" enough to present or organize the same data in many different ways.
[Walter Soyka] "By the way, you could mimic all this in FCP7 today. Just constantly collapse your timeline as much as possible and use color-coding. Would anyone really prefer to work this way?"
This is sort of a silly point. The new paradigm is something that all hangs together; the trackless design, the use of metadata, the clip connections. Obviously nobody would want to give up this kind of spatial organization in FCP 7, because it would be more work for the editor to manually collapse everything, the environment does not have a toolset designed with this in mind, and you wouldn't be getting any of the magnetic timeline's benefits in the process.
[Walter Soyka] "This is a strawman argument, and a terrible use for tracks for all the reasons you've defined. The origin of the footage should be metadata already associated with each file and clip. What the NLE needs is a tool for selecting clips based on that metadata, not to force the editor to double-encode that metadata in the project."
I thought you were arguing that the use of tracks to arbitrarily categorize footage was on of their benefits.
[Walter Soyka] "Further, the offline editor's job is not to make the online editor's job easier."
In an ideal world the offline editor could do whatever they liked, and the online editor would figure out how to replicate in the online, however long that took. In the real world (of indie film, at least), an offline editor can easily cost the production silly amounts of money by not taking steps to make the online editor's job easier, and online editors are consulted about how sequences should be delivered, by productions that wish for that to not happen.
[Walter Soyka] "The timeline now has one track divider, which separates the audio tracks from the video tracks. Let's add user-definable track dividers, so the editor can separate groups of tracks from each other. The editor could manually move a clip across the dividers, but the software would honor the track dividers in the event of clip collision, adding tracks into the groups defined by the dividers as necessary."
This does solve some of the traditional problems associated with track-based categorization, but to me, anyway, it seems like a lot of complexity to add just so that you have snap things into rigidly defined vertical slots. And it does still have a few issues when it comes to picture. For instance, presumably you've got your text track group that's over your camera footage group. Now there's one shot in the whole program that requires camera footage to be composited on top of text. You have to create another camera footage track group on top of the text track group, to hold one clip in a two hour long sequence (or whatever).
Another nice (related) bonus of having a freeform timeline + metadata is that metadata can be attached at any time without worrying about changing the edit. Some creative editors aren't great at organizing things. When it comes time to organize them in preparation for the online, tracks make this a very hazardous process, because when you move something to a different track to (change its categorization), you may be unknowingly changing the picture as well. You have to keep checking. Simply going through and tagging things doesn't have this problem.
--
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