Re: Markers or Metadata - The Debate!

[Bill Davis] "Just poking my head back in on the way to dinner, and curious as to why if Pancaking is such a big efficiency driver - and it appears to have been available for such a long in other NLEs (as this thread implies) - I never heard about anyone using it much until months and months after X was released?

Anyone want to speculate?"

I'll speculate that you weren't aware of what Premiere could/couldn't do because you didn't use it and you didn't hang out with editors that did use it and discuss with them the finer points of editing with Premiere Pro.

And I think that goes for a lot of editors given that, prior to Apple killing FCP Legend, Premiere's user base was much smaller (especially in the film, cable/broadcast and web/digital realms) that it is now. I'm not surprised that the editing community at large wasn't talking about Premiere Pro editing techniques prior to the editing community at large starting to use Premiere Pro. It's like asking why mainstream movie goers weren't talking about Christopher Nolan before Batman Begins. Were his previous movies bad, or were mainstream audiences just ignorant to their existence?

Being able to easily stack/pancake timelines is something unique to Premiere Pro given how the GUI works. It makes seeing and referencing multiple timelines much easier than in other NLEs. You could do it with FCP Legend but the GUI really didn't lend itself to it so I don't think people really did it (they just tabbed or moused between multiple sequences in the timeline window. I don't know how you'd do it in Avid because you can only have one sequence open in Avid (the timeline window is either referencing the Record monitor or the Source monitor).

The basic process, editing from one sequence into another, is of course not new or unique to PPro, but the variation/improvement in how PPro lets you do it is what's really nice. When I first started using FCP (either v2 or v3) being able to have multiple sequences open was amazing to me and one of the biggest things I missed (and still miss) when I use Avid MC. When I first started using PPro and figured out you could stack/pancake multiple sequences it instantly became a feature I missed when working in other NLEs. I've always gravitated towards organizing via sequences and markers, and editing between sequences so I'm not surprised how much I enjoy pancake editing in PPro.

EDIT: fixed a few typos (probably more in there).