Episode 83
FCG083 - FCP Features (feat. Michael Matzdorff)
Cold Mountain for FCPX? Maybe. In early 2014 news started to leak that a major Hollywood film was being cut on FCPX. Many people have said that would be the tipping point for the acceptance of Final Cut Pro X. I don’t really agree. However, Michael Matzdorff, was the assistant editor on the project and he has some great insight into the workflow and what worked well and what needs improvements in FCPX. We hope you enjoy this episode and remember. “DON’T CUT WITH YOUR STEMS!!”Sponsored by:
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Featuring
- Chris Fenwick
- Michael Matzdorff - @FCPXFeatures
Transcription
00:00.001: I met Michael last month, last.
00:00.080: Crazy.
00:00.080: You know, it's just little things and the director's like, Oh, I'm gonna want to see that again and I just put a marker on it and then when he goes, Hey, remember that thing I said, Yeah, and then I search for, you know, the ke the the word that I associated with that marker and it
00:00.080: to make a clean version of, I search it and I'm like I I I search the f the the five files and I'm like, okay, I need archive one eleven, one twenty four and one twenty eight.
00:00.080: Yeah, exactly.
00:00.160: And I tell you, there's some amazing things.
00:00.160: Hold on.
00:00.160: If you said, hey, how about 10 o'clock at night?
00:00.160: And you're like, well, where's that button over here?
00:00.160: You know, if you're going to make a a tectonic shift like this and walk away from something that, you know, like everybody else does it this way, I don't understand.
00:00.160: you know, I'd watch everything and I'd I would uh stop along the way and mark favorites and then I would go through and
00:00.160: Yeah, I noticed another thing you said that I think I don't know if you did it in keywords or in renaming clips, but you were naming them or keywording them in such a way that
00:00.160: And everything else just sort of hangs.
00:00.160: To sound again, you let them know that, all right, well, we use the stems for this part and this part and this part, and then here's the new stuff.
00:00.160: And they don't have all the little chop, chop, chop, chop cuts, because they've actually made it all wonderful.
00:00.160: I mean, I know in olden days I used in seven, I would organize things way up on a higher track just so I would say, oh, there's my bumper graphics.
00:00.160: In the same spot because there's nothing to keep it up there.
00:00.160: He rips off half a sheet of a notepad and he scribbles down the names of them and the instructions.
00:00.160: And then the file that's on the cloud version of the Dropbox will resync on anybody's personal desktop.
00:00.160: And the software is called Disk Tracker.
00:00.160: Tef, definitely turn an old man at that point.
00:00.160: But it's a bit of rock and roll kit that is really, really cool.
00:00.160: I've had this happen before.
00:00.160: He just says, Yeah, graphic starts here, ends here, done.
00:00.160: You know, a guy like Michael, he's totally available.
00:00.240: that was cut in Funnel Cut 10.
00:00.240: The assistant editor is the guy that really holds it all together on a big project because they have to keep track of all the little bits and bobs.
00:00.240: I was very lucky to meet him and he was very gracious to finally.
00:00.240: After Effects, Final Hit VII, Premiere, you can get them all and it's awesome because you can sift through them and sort them and say I'm only interested in these.
00:00.240: So at this point, we're going to go down to LA.
00:00.240: Okay, I'm in the closet at my bedroom.
00:00.240: Your 7 a.
00:00.240: and I wasn't one of them, but I was able to kind of get over the hump, start meditating, forget everything I'd learned, and then it was awesome.
00:00.240: Yeah, I th th uh we first met first of all, Sam kept telling me this podcast has become the Sam Messman show.
00:00.240: And I was always the guy who was willing to try new stuff that no one else wanted to try.
00:00.240: A tweet by me.
00:00.240: Started putting on weight and getting back problems for the next 20 years.
00:00.240: I edited a feature for New Line.
00:00.240: who were very cool and patient, as they always are and continue to be.
00:00.240: Tried to go be an editor and I did that for a bit.
00:00.240: I'm going to not be negative about it, and I'm going to try getting back into it.
00:00.240: I said, hey, this is a perfect opportunity to learn this new Final Cut Pro.
00:00.240: All I did was, you know, throw some things out of sink and frustrate myself for like forty five minutes.
00:00.240: And then why?
00:00.240: it's super powerful, but it it's those things.
00:00.240: No.
00:00.240: The same thing kind of happened on a Fox movie back in mid 90s.
00:00.240: Can you assist on it?
00:00.240: I was the assistant on that and it was an avid show and there was one, two, three, three editors, one avid assistant and like three or four film guys and a visual effects crew.
00:00.240: Yeah, and that was bad.
00:00.240: Well, I'm going to ask you something that's kind of off topic.
00:00.240: I literally like, I don't know, like, what, do I start watching this one and then cut, you know?
00:00.240: Right.
00:00.240: But it plays off something that you said earlier when you're looking for a button or that thing and it's just not there and it's just different.
00:00.240: or takes, or I would drop locators, none of which is searchable, and then just go through and build it that way.
00:00.240: The doors are made of wood, okay?
00:00.240: It's like, I don't, I would never want to go back.
00:00.240: I went back at one point.
00:00.240: Drop the quick times into an avid that was built into a screening room and play out from the AVID.
00:00.240: you know, the avid at the time, I think it now has surpassed the nineteen twenty mark.
00:00.240: five minutes, ten minutes worth of fiddling just to get back into it.
00:00.240: the connection point.
00:00.240: Avid's been around so long and just sort of slowly marching forward.
00:00.240: There are still people that absolutely swear by it.
00:00.240: He had been giving me a hard time about some of the things that I had said about Avid on the show, and we were going back and forth on Twitter.
00:00.240: I said, okay, come tell me why.
00:00.240: is three clicks going to kill you?
00:00.240: and all that.
00:00.240: It's really cool.
00:00.240: Fenwick, you're an idiot.
00:00.240: I was the first assistant.
00:00.240: stems, which everyone says don't cut with your stems, then everyone cuts with their stems just because it sounds better, and then gotta go through and sort of make a patchwork of things.
00:00.240: you know, the friends and family screening or what was the cut of that in preview two and going back and finding things.
00:00.240: And you also have separate elements, a 5.
00:00.240: let's say a reel is twenty minutes long, a reel of you know, they still go and work in reels in in movies.
00:00.240: They're going to make it sound good.
00:00.240: But I could mute them all from there or maybe even mix from there.
00:00.240: and hit one button and have it turn off the sound.
00:00.240: Which you would do if you had to use your stems and then re-enable something, the work that you've done with sort of checkerboarding the components goes away.
00:00.240: Yeah, well, that's it.
00:00.240: Just so there was no redundancy in namings, things were easy to search and all that.
00:00.240: You know, that first 45 minutes where you couldn't do five minutes worth of work, you hit your head on the learning wall and you never got over it that day.
00:00.240: My string outs.
00:00.240: in the time line matched like that sort of role layout from top to bottom, that would be smart.
00:00.240: Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:00.240: it sort of renders the proxies useless, actually.
00:00.240: Let's say you're taking an event and you drop it into a library, a new library.
00:00.240: And so when you move it, you say, I don't want the optimized, I just want the proxies.
00:00.240: I would call it Chris.
00:00.240: Steve Martin or or Mark Spencer, who were you know, they they sort of keep uh one of these little Thunderbolt sleds around that doesn't have a drive in it.
00:00.240: Yeah, and so also if you use something like that, I love this idea of just saying, oh, well, here's a copy of your SSD.
00:00.240: you know, if we ever need to get back into this, we'll just plug this thing right back in and it'll hopefully I was going to say spin right up, but you know, do it does in there.
00:00.240: on the next show I think it it's a it's a smart uh it's a smart thing to do because people people need things later and uh
00:00.240: Oh, yeah.
00:00.240: Awesome.
00:00.240: Little five minute customer testimonial videos.
00:00.240: They're three terabyte spin wheel drives that are like one hundred bucks now, maybe one tenth, eighty nine, something somewhere around there.
00:00.240: And then that database is searchable.
00:00.240: Let's say they average out to be two terabyte drives because some of them are older.
00:00.240: Where it's just magic files somewhere in there and they're associated with an application or whatever.
00:00.240: I was just going to mention this.
00:00.240: Mic Prees and everything.
00:00.240: But here's what's really cool.
00:00.240: Still have a affinity for old rock and roll kit.
00:00.240: And actually, had to get your stuff to color and back, and get yourself to sound and back, and get yourself to effects and back.
00:00.240: An event management system, piece of software so that the editor never has to keystroke any text.
00:00.240: Thank you, Chris.
00:00.240: He's directed, he's produced, he's produced his own films, he has edited his own films, which I gotta say has gotta be probably a difficult job to do.
00:00.240: Anyway, that's it for this Monday up episode of the Grill.
00:00.240: A guy who actually dabbled in the art of stand-up comedy for a while, and I gotta tell you, comedy is timing at its very best, and you gotta know that affects the way you cut video.
00:00.240: on Twitter and uh totally available dude.
00:00.240: I really try and bring the people that have amazing experience and amazing insight, and these are great people.
00:00.320: Now, I'd never met him before that, but we had a great time hanging out, and being on that show was really fun.
00:00.320: If you've snooped around at all, you probably know the film in question, and it is being heralded as the
00:00.320: Designing and building the workflow and dealing with the colorists and dealing with sound and dealing with the editors.
00:00.320: Pour over, and we were talking about we got to talk about my podcast and this show, and
00:00.320: And everything I cut gets scrutinized by lawyers, and they come to the room, and it's oh, it's funny.
00:00.320: And we were talking about accepting money.
00:00.320: You've been tell me a little bit about your history and how you got to where you are today, so other people do.
00:00.320: And so where how I got here?
00:00.320: I always like the challenge of uh setting precedents and figuring it out.
00:00.320: about how to how to cut a scene, basically.
00:00.320: I think and it I mentioned this in the sort of opening uh to the book or something where like everyone's
00:00.320: So you're an accomplished editor.
00:00.320: And I'm sure it's more powerful than I give it credit for, but I, to be honest, just did not give it a lot of time.
00:00.320: all this other stuff.
00:00.320: Apple and the things that they did that you thought they were crazy, but then you went, eh, yeah, I guess you were right.
00:00.320: Okay, so that's interesting.
00:00.320: Um well, let's see.
00:00.320: you know, sort of just put the movie together and we we made it work as we went and figured out what was what needed to be fixed along the way and just kind of made it through.
00:00.320: just extremely tolerant and helpful and smart and really on board with making something unproven work.
00:00.320: Communicate to people that, you know, just because everybody bought a VHS deck doesn't mean it's better than Betamax.
00:00.320: all of the third party people and all the people at Apple were super on board with sending us beta versions of things and helping us out and helping us solve problems.
00:00.320: Walk me through, and you can focus on the Final Khat 10 specific isms, if you will.
00:00.320: How would you go about doing that in Final Cut X that might be a little bit different than the way you would do it in, say, Avid or Premiere?
00:00.320: there's six angles and four or five takes of each angle, which, you know, that's that's a scene.
00:00.320: Yeah, yeah, I think so.
00:00.320: like lines one through three and four through six.
00:00.320: It's still going to be there when you get back and not have to go hunt it down.
00:00.320: the favorites and the filtering by favorites and then the filtering by unused.
00:00.320: Right, right.
00:00.320: Yeah.
00:00.320: And we wanted to kind of feather over the tracks and be sure everything was smooth.
00:00.320: tool on the Avid where it's if you park on a frame on your source and you park on a frame on your record side and you hit the blue arrow, it fills out from that frame end to end.
00:00.320: So that's kind of nice.
00:00.320: twenty five years or twenty four years, I guess it is now, of development.
00:00.320: Final color conformance sound.
00:00.320: Industry, all of our subcontractors, we're all using the same stuff, but don't rock the boat.
00:00.320: So I think that if Avid comes up with an audio workstation tool that is appropriate, and LogicX is a lovely, powerful piece of software, but it's not
00:00.320: all of mine, I won't say all audio plugins, but a lot of them do.
00:00.320: It's a little bit of the tail wagging the dog, but it's also a system that works.
00:00.320: Yeah.
00:00.320: that's a really huge deal as far as being able to organize and keep things in line and bring in when you get into like preview stage and you start bringing in
00:00.320: one hundred percent of his work would have been for final.
00:00.320: I realize in a feature world that that actually means something.
00:00.320: And when you are done, you have let's say you're in 5.
00:00.320: Fine.
00:00.320: Yeah, and it comes through differently too in Pro Tools.
00:00.320: we were working with Lightiron and with the ColorFront system, and all of us were kind of finding our way through this as far as how it ought to be.
00:00.320: call them what they are.
00:00.320: And I'll comment on one thing that's, I think, important and missing in a minute.
00:00.320: Because again, there's the learning spectrum.
00:00.320: the way they edit is something is in a particular spot.
00:00.320: in everyday work, you'll have maybe like four or five categories.
00:00.320: Just all the dialogue or all the effects or all the music on the side.
00:00.320: Try something on the fly, whether or not it was an iPad with a mixed you know, basically all the roles that were in your sequence with a fader attached to each one that you could sort of do a general global adjustment on a roll.
00:00.320: Original media, it should say audio only media, optimized and proxy.
00:00.320: I start with a media folder.
00:00.320: But then there's the additional media that Final Cut is generating.
00:00.320: and then have it respect the finder tags when it uh you know, keyword for finder tags when it brings the stuff in.
00:00.320: because then you don't need to find your tags.
00:00.320: But it's been a slow transition, and essentially what you just said there
00:00.320: Yes, I think that where it's kind of cool and like because it sort of spans media types, you have all your stuff for day one and you say, well, all right, day one
00:00.320: Yeah, and anyways, I think you use multiple tags and you can search by multiple tags and you can say, yeah, all right, this is
00:00.320: And he stands up, his bag is packed, and he goes, Oh, forgot to tell you something.
00:00.320: Okay.
00:00.320: But yeah, I mean, that's the way we work.
00:00.320: But not the files, of course.
00:00.320: Anybody can open it at any time, search the database.
00:00.320: Very cool.
00:00.320: But anyway, it's a you know, if we make that, you get your 5%.
00:00.320: On the DL1608, and it basically looks like a mixer.
00:00.320: Um and the iPad becomes all the controls for the mixer, except for the gain knobs, which are physical gain knobs.
00:00.320: Nice.
00:00.320: perhaps I'll throw up a WordPress blog or something.
00:00.320: talk them through, you know, some stuff that we learned and help them with their milestones like getting started, turning over to sound.
00:00.320: Before the book comes out, if people want to call me up or buzz me on Twitter and ask questions that are short, I'm happy to try to answer them.
00:00.320: Because Ted, um you know, the Ted conference people, they are now all Final Cut Ten.
00:00.320: In the encoding process.
00:00.320: It's very cool.
00:00.320: there's a lot to be said for talking to the people that have actually done it.
00:00.400: Awesome in supporting what we're doing here.
00:00.400: go support what they're doing.
00:00.400: Pun intended, premier ecosystem for plugins for your Macintosh.
00:00.400: looking for a relationship between what they've done and what they're going to do.
00:00.400: You know, the optical drive, you don't miss all those other things.
00:00.400: How richy time that was.
00:00.400: Crazy when Apple took the floppy out of the iMac.
00:00.400: And one of the guys over at Apple, is it okay to name names over there?
00:00.400: But yeah, no, too hard.
00:00.400: To take a typical scene, and I don't know, let's invent a typical scene, you know, a couple people in a room having an argument with good coverage.
00:00.400: with a a printout of your day on paper, you know, thumbnails and basic descriptions, and you sort of watch everything and take notes as you go, Oh, I like this and this ticket, I like this and this take.
00:00.400: I have changed my own workflows from, you know, at the beginning of doing the show in the first 10 or 20 episodes
00:00.400: The ones that are not detached.
00:00.400: And saying, okay, oh, I want to do a split here.
00:00.400: That you want to do something, it matters that we have this entire system in place from the mixing stages to the workers on the sideline who are cutting music and effects and dialogue and all that stuff.
00:00.400: And so it integrates into a system.
00:00.400: some of the like once we sort of figured out how to really use roles to our advantage, ROLES.
00:00.400: There is things with muting and disabling, and yeah.
00:00.400: To use in our timeline index when we access our roles, and we could talk about roles a little bit, it would be great if not only could I select and highlight them
00:00.400: which then turns on all of your dialogue.
00:00.400: disabling portions of a clip component.
00:00.400: If you have your main categories, dialogue effects, music, and everything should be a sub role of those.
00:00.400: whether it's an individual's microphone, a background plant mic, anything that's sort of recorded on the set.
00:00.400: Again, a relational sort of association.
00:00.400: Yeah, I'll tell you, I've never I can't remember the first time I heard sub rolls.
00:00.400: you know, you can kind of prepare for it.
00:00.400: Yeah.
00:00.400: Well, you know, you can relink and move around, but the relinking, you know, gets messy when you're going back and forth back and forth between the machines.
00:00.400: So it's just that was an overzealous step at organization.
00:00.400: Right.
00:00.400: is I want to tag the picture.
00:00.400: It is one of my favorite pieces of software, and um I use that thing every single day.
00:00.400: Doing a job years or whatever.
00:00.400: It's just like kind of a Lightworks controller idea for the final cut because there's nothing that's any good, but just a bunch of tactile buttons.
00:00.400: So I would go to you.
00:00.400: but and also assisted at very high levels.
00:00.480: Cold Mountain or whatever what was the Walter Murch film?
00:00.480: Well, thank you for finally availing yourself of my petty little schedule here.
00:00.480: Um so I know a little bit about uh the infamy of Michael Madsdorf, but um
00:00.480: And so from there, I sort of hung with Cruz for a couple movies and then moved on and then eventually got really tired of assistant editing.
00:00.480: They were right about some stuff.
00:00.480: May of last year as the time I sort of sat down and started fiddling with it.
00:00.480: And I had basically touched an avid like for a week, three years prior to that.
00:00.480: And this may be smart or not smart.
00:00.480: I'm sorry, one of the things I read in one of the first chapters, I think it may have been the preface or any or something, but you said it's really great if you can get everybody on board.
00:00.480: Um I have on occasion I I don't cut uh you know scripted stuff.
00:00.480: And just watch everything.
00:00.480: And then I would just use to select all and hit E and add it all to a new timeline and then go through it and see how it works and see what needs to be changed.
00:00.480: And either build a select role as I'm going.
00:00.480: I was still doing string outs for my B-roll.
00:00.480: Can we see the stuff that hasn't been used?
00:00.480: Yeah, I'd be really tempted just walking with my laptop.
00:00.480: or earlier, which is now it's Pro Tools eleven is where it's at.
00:00.480: Was that, you know, it absolutely thrills me that all of my audio plug-ins show with not all, you know,
00:00.480: But it's not, it doesn't fit within that other world.
00:00.480: But the fact of the matter is, you know, you just cut a gigantor movie on a $300 application.
00:00.480: Once we figured out a VFX pipeline, it was fantastic.
00:00.480: And those individual elements are the stems.
00:00.480: Or I guess in some worlds you would take it out.
00:00.480: the clips that have the integrated media, as you were saying.
00:00.480: Just expand the components and then turn off the components.
00:00.480: Because you can work around it, but it's kind of a it's not as easy as it should be.
00:00.480: Yeah, well I mean and we had to figure it out.
00:00.480: Let's see.
00:00.480: In 10.
00:00.480: I would sort of use the finder tags for what instead of using the folders that you're using, I would use the finder tags for that.
00:00.480: brings it into my world, you know, where I'm organizing media and graphics.
00:00.480: I know where this breaks down though.
00:00.480: Right, which speaks to a you can do multiple tags on things.
00:00.480: uh SSD for sort of each one of their little projects that they do.
00:00.480: In the last two years.
00:00.480: The software I use again, I've mentioned it many times, it's called Disk Tracker.
00:00.480: Has a mirror of that Dropbox folder with a copy of the file in it.
00:00.480: In your Skype inbox there?
00:00.480: It's at FCPX Features as in feature films, but features.
00:00.560: So an assistant editor, as we know, after talking with Austin Flack a couple of weeks ago.
00:00.560: I will never take money from a product I literally don't use and believe in.
00:00.560: Hello, hello.
00:00.560: Well, fine is what I'm going for.
00:00.560: I could no longer plug in my ADB trackball to my Mac.
00:00.560: No.
00:00.560: uh based on where things are connected is kind of a trip.
00:00.560: And so I gave him the whole hour and I said, you know, tell me what because his contention was Avid will never be replaced in broadcast television.
00:00.560: there is other there's other people involved.
00:00.560: those moments where it the stuff really did click and it saved you tons of work.
00:00.560: once we kind of figured out the best way to keep our old stuff in order so we can go back and leech from it from time to time, like what was it what was the cut of that in
00:00.560: general a lot of the help that we got too, the cooperation from the third party guys and from Apple too, was really cool and pleasant surprise.
00:00.560: how much help are we going to get when we need it?
00:00.560: and have them string along because once you get to the stage of previewing and mixing, you're not going to have a
00:00.560: You know, you're going to have changes, but you're not going to have extensive changes, probably.
00:00.560: Okay, so um let's talk a little bit about about a little more about the roles and how you were using them in the film.
00:00.560: and have it be have it record that as a as a move, a keyframe move in some way.
00:00.560: had I had we been on Ten One Two, if we were still working on it, I would have put all the media on a sand.
00:00.560: To kill the finder and folders.
00:00.560: And anything is cert findable in minutes, you know?
00:00.560: I'm saying it now.
00:00.560: Yeah, well there's a lot to know and there's a lot to you know you could throw a rock in Los Angeles and you're going to hit somebody who can run the avid.
00:00.560: Well, very cool.
00:00.640: Michael is somewhat Internet nerd famous for being the assistant editor on a film that I can't talk about yet.
00:00.640: Seriously.
00:00.640: And I'm excited to see a more fleshed out version.
00:00.640: Yeah, you know, I just made a big audio change.
00:00.640: you can work really fast.
00:00.640: looked at it and figured it out and I dealt with a very guy who's still my friend so I must have done a good job Mike Tronic and
00:00.640: little numbers next to each line of dialogue, and then our line script, and then all of the lines and final cut were keyworded in groups of three.
00:00.640: But um I was like, oh man, this just takes so damn long.
00:00.640: So we went through some of the things that were a little bit challenging.
00:00.640: Well, some of the keywording techniques were super helpful and hard to do, but really beneficial from an editorial standpoint.
00:00.640: then you your picture goes away.
00:00.640: In something that I read today out of your book, that there's a big difference between muting something and disabling it.
00:00.640: As is the case quite often, and I will fully and completely admit that I am guilty of this, that when on many occasions when you get into these discussions, you realize
00:00.640: That you glaze over little details, you know?
00:00.640: or sinks to the bottom, whatever.
00:00.640: they have actually removed the ability to go work on proxies alone if you are syncing your own audio.
00:00.640: they are needed for the proxies and they're needed for sequences.
00:00.640: I'm going to put it in there and I'm going to organize it by camera and card number.
00:00.640: On any given day, I could work on four or five projects that may have media shot on day one.
00:00.640: And then he wa and then and he's out the door.
00:00.640: And the feature film talent pool is really small.
00:00.720: So go check out Nodes2 on fx factory.
00:00.720: Except that there's watermark until you decide to pony up the cache.
00:00.720: I tried to use it.
00:00.720: So so yeah, you got the you got the crew on board and everybody was behind it.
00:00.720: Well, they had started it.
00:00.720: And basically, a way to sort of hunt lines down because when you're dealing with long takes and sometimes people getting off book and you have
00:00.720: a piece of software that's better than Pro Tools and can accept all the plugins from Pro Tools and is cheaper than Pro Tools.
00:00.720: They will take that market over.
00:00.720: And just back up a little bit from where you started.
00:00.720: And a disable comes through as an element being off.
00:00.720: I remember that.
00:00.720: He had even said it scanned a sixteen terabyte RAID in like two minutes.
00:00.720: Done.
00:00.800: I'm clinging to my laptop with an optical drive in it.
00:00.800: That you would give them another you would give Final Cut 10 another crack because you don't use your AD you don't miss your ADP ports anymore.
00:00.800: Walk me through, but I have on many occasions been asked, you know, hey, do you want to help me with my film?
00:00.800: Okay.
00:00.800: Let's say you go to a mixing stage, a dub stage, and you mix your movie or your show or whatever.
00:00.800: and or your sound goes away.
00:00.800: And you cut in your stems, you run into the issue of, all right, well, now I want to stop using the stem and I want to go back into dialogue.
00:00.800: You know, even though they didn't have to be up there.
00:00.800: they have sort of the the way the libraries work and the way the way Final Cut manages the media and how you can like all put it in one place
00:00.800: On the sand.
00:00.800: Okay, so hear me out.
00:00.800: I had a matter of fact, I had a producer who came in for the morning.
00:00.880: then I sort of got back into the editorial business because some friends asked me if I could do this movie that they were thinking of doing on Final Cut X.
00:00.880: I bought it like the day after it came out, after I saw the really cool demo.
00:00.880: I can't even imagine it.
00:00.880: For something.
00:00.880: what were some of the challenges that relate to the real world, if you will?
00:00.880: Um hm well for the fact that like Picture and Track are married uh
00:00.880: Like you can disable within a component, which is actually a mute.
00:00.880: You call it what it is.
00:00.880: And so there's a little bit too much flexibility.
00:00.880: Gear, there's I'd like to see some sort of roles-based mixing, like roles-based subgroups in a box where you could just control
00:00.880: And kept the libraries local and just put everyone's libraries pointing at that same media folder.
00:00.880: proxy media is going to be stored someplace.
00:00.880: 300 terabytes worth of data, and it's searchable in seconds.
00:00.880: Nothing.
00:00.960: Just how to work it because the first time I tried to work it, I was sitting with my wife putting together a video that she needed to put together and
00:00.960: And so I switched back to Final Cut 7 and I accomplished the task, which should have taken five minutes in about five minutes.
00:00.960: They were basically working.
00:00.960: you can figure it out.
00:00.960: There's final cut, for better or for worse, like the magnetic timeline, which is lovely ninety eight percent of the time.
00:00.960: Okay.
00:00.960: every bit of stock footage and call it stock footage.
00:01.040: m.
00:01.040: Okay.
00:01.040: Wonderful piece, by the way.
00:01.040: You know, I mean, yeah, everybody bought it, but it doesn't mean it was any good.
00:01.040: He was there once, and I said, Well, you know, I wanted to do this, and we're trying to do this.
00:01.040: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of super powerful stuff, as you know, and I know, and a lot of people out there who use this stuff know.
00:01.040: And you know basically simple, simple, simple, simple.
00:01.040: Or, you know, preview one, music stamp, preview one, just so assign roles based on what it is.
00:01.040: You're blowing my mind here.
00:01.040: And so yeah, I mean, you talk about the and it's actually it wasn't Steve or Mark, it was Alex that talked about using that sled.
00:01.120: you know, sixty pieces of film which represent one section of the scene.
00:01.120: How do I want to say this?
00:01.120: But once you get it, it's like, okay, yeah, got it.
00:01.120: You know what I mean.
00:01.120: I'm glad you mentioned that in the beginning because I know that it's in the draft of the book that you shared with me.
00:01.120: That computer's purpose in life is cutting that film.
00:01.120: And it is a total godsend when you're trying to find something.
00:01.120: Are you doing like a website for that too also?
00:01.200: and 7 p.
00:01.200: But but we met at the virtual user group, which was fun.
00:01.200: And it ended up being okay in the long run.
00:01.200: I use the word track in the generic term.
00:01.200: And the only time we stepped outside of those groups was when we were working with STEMs.
00:01.200: like something will slide down or over or up based on what it doesn't want to bump into.
00:01.200: It's in the cloud, whatever.
00:01.200: Uh the comfy controller?
00:01.200: Anyway, that's way cool.
00:01.280: So decidedly less cool.
00:01.280: So you had already been messing with it, and then some of your friends said, Hey, we're thinking of doing this film in Final Cut X.
00:01.280: Issues along the way in respect to making our best guesses and then having the best guesses be wrong.
00:01.280: and sort of having to shift paradigms and change things up as we go.
00:01.280: So you find all the favorites.
00:01.280: I think there within an industry, there's a difference between an individual user and all in a guy who does everything from ingestion to
00:01.280: Funnel cuts are never going to replace Pro Tools.
00:01.280: The ability to not have to transcode everything was pretty great.
00:01.280: I call it the trim library.
00:01.280: And it's all scanned and database.
00:01.360: So this film, big Hollywood budget, big Hollywood actor, very well known.
00:01.360: He wanted the audio to sound really good, so he was like sitting in the closet.
00:01.360: And I I did the second movie ever done on Lightworks.
00:01.360: this would be a nice sort of workaround to have.
00:01.360: the clips that you have that you have the the blue ones that are on top, the ones that are connected or I don't I don't even know the word for it, Chris.
00:01.360: It's kind of a little bit like a replace from start, except you can replace from the frame you're sitting at.
00:01.360: which is why if you're working in components, you should use keyframes and audio adjustments rather than the beautiful feature that is there, which is
00:01.360: Yeah, yeah, no, I I think so.
00:01.360: 12, we saw the advancement of being able to how do you say this?
00:01.360: along for the ride because it doesn't do it otherwise.
00:01.360: I want to tag my original library from that day.
00:01.360: It's really cool.
00:01.440: Hey now, welcome to another episode of Final Cut Grill.
00:01.440: And he said, Well, you really need it for it to work.
00:01.440: And so there's just sort of more direct contact with your material, I think, in Final Cut.
00:01.440: It's mind-numbing.
00:01.440: But what we did, which it's like I forgot this was a hassle.
00:01.440: I didn't actually cut it.
00:01.440: I'm going to send that out to, you know, audio, you know, to sound mixing.
00:01.440: But there's just issues because if you disable like let's say you disable a dialogue role, which is all of the audio that is integrated with your picture and any other talking bits.
00:01.440: when you get into disabling components of clips and you it's a toggle.
00:01.520: A little bit, and I got an internship after college, and basically
00:01.520: And can you get us up to speed and get us through the speed bumps?
00:01.520: which I still probably haven't found but just don't care anymore.
00:01.520: They've said they've reached out to Avid and DigiDesign to make things more together and make have everything translate.
00:01.520: And so you kind of mix and match your editorial audio with your mixed audio and feather it in and smooth it out and try to take out any bumps so you can move on to your next screening.
00:01.520: So, you know, preview one, dialogue, stem.
00:01.520: Do you use that feature, question number one, and follow-up question?
00:01.520: Nice.
00:01.520: There is a future where we will not have an operating system the way we have.
00:01.520: It's got a bunch of gain knobs on it and a headphone jack.
00:01.600: Nicholas Bond and his team at FX Factory, they have made the
00:01.600: I regarding editorial, I mean, I was an assistant editor way back because I thought I was in photography school and I stumbled into film and I found editing really interesting because you kids play God.
00:01.600: And I mean, it's the process on Final Cut and or Avid or whatever is not super different in that area.
00:01.600: it doesn't seem well suited.
00:01.600: And I mean, there's a a pile of hugely powerful stuff that's available for you know, what stuff that's in there, plus third party stuff.
00:01.600: And I think we talked about this before.
00:01.600: Clearly, the guy with the machete in front is the guy to talk to, and you've fought through all the vines already.
00:01.680: He's like a prince.
00:01.680: Hello, hello.
00:01.680: Yeah.
00:01.680: So, how much exposure and experience had you had with 10 before you said, I think I could do that?
00:01.680: And I would just show the favorites and then I would probably go through and watch those again.
00:01.680: Anyway, Mike, thanks for your time.
00:01.760: m.
00:01.760: Like they had started trying to work it out like a year prior, I think.
00:01.760: Then what they're going to do is they're going to rep send back to me multiple tracks that are the length of my reel.
00:01.840: I hope that's the case.
00:01.840: It's going to be a long road.
00:01.840: So um while we're on that subject, what else would you like to change?
00:01.840: So so here's the thing though, and and this is a little bit of a can of worms.
00:01.840: You once you sync that up and you say, hey, now you're a mixer, you could pull the iPad out and walk around the venue and mix.
00:01.920: I could have done that.
00:01.920: I could not wrap my head around it.
00:01.920: And even like even at that level, I would say I had a role that was Preview One.
00:01.920: So hey, I just wanted to I just sent you a little file of something that I was talking with another Final Cut Pro person about the other day.
00:01.920: This has absolutely nothing to do with Final Cut Pro.
00:01.920: It's uh t trying to trying to take that uh be helpful, but uh then be helpful and get a paycheck as well.
00:02.000: At the very least, go check out their website, premiumbeat.
00:02.000: And I don't know if I've mentioned this one before in the past.
00:02.000: are exactly the times when my kids are in complete implosion mode.
00:02.000: What was the motivation for you to say, eh, I'm going to give it another try?
00:02.000: Yeah.
00:02.000: So and so when then so that's why you did so when was it calendar wise?
00:02.000: The only way that sort of that portion of it is overcome, and based on conversations with people at Apple that I've had, and I don't know how factual this is, but
00:02.000: Show X day one, show X day two, show Y day one, and sort of filter stuff out that way if you need to.
00:02.000: I can't remember.
00:02.000: Yeah.
00:02.000: Oh, Skype inbox.
00:02.080: Why why the two part question?
00:02.080: And I said, Well, you know, maybe they're right.
00:02.080: It's just something from simple text.
00:02.080: We were screening and the opportunity for screening was to make a bunch of QuickTimes and then
00:02.080: So you had said earlier, you have to just find it's not that it doesn't do it, it's just that the button isn't there like it was on your Avid.
00:02.080: And I think the let me see.
00:02.080: Yeah.
00:02.080: But what you do is you take an iPad and you slip the iPad in, and the iPad lights up.
00:02.160: I don't even know what it's called.
00:02.160: Well, how we were using them and how we should have been using them, which is like something we learned later.
00:02.160: You can have Final Cuts stow all the media into one central location and still have access to your sort of breakdowns of it.
00:02.160: He had mentioned it before, and you had brought it up on the virtual user group that I was on.
00:02.240: He is here today, and I'm excited to have him.
00:02.240: I mean, I was just cutting a little piece about a car company in England today, and it was a cool little piece actually.
00:02.240: And I looked over my shoulder and I said, As a matter of fact, we can.
00:02.240: I'm totally open to hearing why.
00:02.240: I think maybe when it comes to the next upgrade cycle, would they and let I don't want to hear because I know I'll get the comments
00:02.240: Yeah, I mean, we are by nature visual people.
00:02.240: Good luck to you.
00:02.240: So you should look him up.
00:02.320: I looked at Premiere and Premiere just reminded me of a bad version of Final Cut VII.
00:02.320: I want to tag the sound rolls.
00:02.320: Wow.
00:02.320: Yes, well, that's I've done that many, many times.
00:02.400: Yeah.
00:02.400: That's a good question.
00:02.400: Great, great conversation.
00:02.480: There we go.
00:02.480: But somebody.
00:02.480: So you have to go in and mute the dialogue.
00:02.480: I think there's there's not really any sort of audio outboard
00:02.560: It would have been.
00:02.560: There's a you know, a lot of the stuff was sort of solved in 10.
00:02.560: Just the last episode, I was talking with a guy from TED, Michael Glass was his name.
00:02.640: We finally hooked up with Michael, and it was funny at the beginning of the interview, I cut it out.
00:02.640: This is not rocket science here.
00:02.640: And now try and try tell me the last file you created that would fit on a 1.
00:02.640: So, um so again, it's the the un the unmentionable title still, correct?
00:02.640: And it and I'll say it takes a little getting used to when everything wants to be, you know, regardless of what it is, it wants to be
00:02.640: I have been saying for several years now that Apple is on a five-year mission, whatever it is, maybe ten.
00:02.640: And it's not even trying to thumbnail the files.
00:02.640: It's like Portents or something, but if you search for DISK tracker, no space.
00:02.720: But when you get deep into something and there's really complicated stuff going on, all flaws are revealed.
00:02.720: Too hard for me.
00:02.720: 1 mix of just your dialogue, a 5.
00:02.720: But I just want let me just let's reach back for just one second because there is an important thing that I want people to be aware of and Apple to be aware of because I complain about it.
00:02.720: And again, it has nothing it has absolutely nothing to do with Final Cut, but I'm I
00:02.720: I'm out.
00:02.800: I've never shied away from just like saying, yes, let's try this.
00:02.800: You know what it should be?
00:02.800: And I mean it's in a track, but it's also like even if Final Cut had well I have this idea about regions where all the dialogue sort of floats to the top and all the effects sort of float to the middle and all the music floats to the bottom.
00:02.800: So you're saying that taking and just manually cavemanning the audio files over to your proxy drive doesn't allow you to resync them?
00:02.800: So anything that is time-coded media or anything that's rolling video, and most of my stuff is coming off of CF cards.
00:02.880: Let's just say that of Belair.
00:02.880: To the business.
00:02.880: Your credits are way more than mine will ever be.
00:02.880: Yeah, I mean, it was rougher then, and I think some of the tools weren't there.
00:02.880: But that was sort of interesting to get around.
00:02.880: I mean, we archive things not to SSDs.
00:02.880: And on that Dropbox is the database.
00:02.960: And I said, Yeah, exactly.
00:02.960: You're still going to have multiple angles, and then at that point, you say, you know, wide, medium, tight, reversal, blah, blah, blah.
00:02.960: There's just a lot of stuff.
00:02.960: But they've said that the response has not been they're they're not in a rush to do it over there.
00:02.960: It seems better suited to music than it does to television or film.
00:02.960: Now, what we've done in our office, and this is getting a little nerdy, but what we've done in our office is we have a kind of an office-wide Dropbox.
00:03.040: Okay, this is a podcast.
00:03.040: So can't talk about it.
00:03.040: And they say, well, do the people know that you're accepting money?
00:03.040: And nine times out of ten, there's just not that button.
00:03.040: You know, with sheet metal stretched over it.
00:03.040: Well, you'll have video, you'll have dialogue, you'll have effects, you'll have music, and then maybe you'll have titles or something.
00:03.040: But I think the idea is I've got a book that I want to peddle.
00:03.040: I appreciate it.
00:03.040: So if you're interested in knowing more about Michael, you can find him at FCPX Features.
00:03.120: I started the project, the unnamed project, uh in September of last year, and I would say probably like
00:03.120: I think one of the things that excites me the most, and we talked about this on the virtual user group where you and I were together.
00:03.120: So you you could go inside of a clip and disable the components.
00:03.120: On the the movie, on the unnamed movie, we finished in 10.
00:03.120: And keep in touch.
00:03.120: We'll be back Friday with um an interesting guy.
00:03.200: And I ask you, I literally, I'm just asking you as a friend here.
00:03.200: Yeah, I know.
00:03.200: I edited a season of Monk.
00:03.200: I just use it.
00:03.200: I think that's the thing that's that's the biggest difference is that it seems to me that you mentioned it's not searchable.
00:03.200: How do I do a split?
00:03.200: Like just a mute comes through as actually a volume down.
00:03.200: Yeah, nothing slips by you.
00:03.200: Yeah, well, that's why I think the idea of the simple roles is good because then you'll have you know, you'll have
00:03.200: And it's, you know, whatever it is, do the math.
00:03.280: Well, I figured, like, the you got a lot of people that are fanboys or whatever, or you know, the smart people who are on board the whole time.
00:03.280: Okay, so this is a real critical transition that I love hearing from people.
00:03.280: And as I'm watching, I would stop and mark favorites.
00:03.280: But we we learned as we went on some of that.
00:03.280: Do you ju do you ever just take out the or do you always leave it in the time line?
00:03.280: A lot of people say, well, we keep dialogue on one and two.
00:03.280: But basically, like if you're if you're syncing audio or using things that are audio only, all those audio elements go into the original media folder.
00:03.280: Right.
00:03.280: Wow.
00:03.280: And like I was saying earlier, a lot of times we talk like we know what we're doing, but until you've actually literally done it
00:03.360: All right.
00:03.360: And was that sort of a four man script sync, if you're familiar with the Avid script sync, which is a really cool tool.
00:03.360: Well, they still do.
00:03.360: I'm going home.
00:03.440: And they were extremely helpful with sorting out little details that reared their heads that were unexpected.
00:03.440: I mean it's definitely on topic, but it's sort of out of the realm of what this show usually is about.
00:03.440: And the system is pretty it works for people.
00:03.440: I know.
00:03.440: We have 150 drives that are scanned into this thing with years and years and years of data in it.
00:03.440: Um as as are most of the people I think uh that we talk to.
00:03.520: And that was just what, 97, 98?
00:03.520: I would never, and I'll even say that in the last year, just doing by virtue of doing this show.
00:03.520: So I guess my real question is where what would you name that folder?
00:03.520: I mean, in that situation that you're talking about, and I haven't actually used this in practice, but I think it's a good idea.
00:03.520: I want to tag the still photographs that came in from that day.
00:03.520: Five different projects.
00:03.600: And I some of the things I would not live without now, like the trackpad and my external trackpad.
00:03.600: You know, a few episodes ago, I had a LA-based editor on.
00:03.600: Well, people who are fast on the Avid are fast.
00:03.600: In your world, you're going to work on this film for six to nine months or something like that, or a year.
00:03.680: Yes, exactly.
00:03.680: And I was an editor.
00:03.680: And all I did was.
00:03.680: Here, can you just plug this in?
00:03.680: But keep it use sub roles, keep it simple.
00:03.680: But you can cut a piece of something in and it'll just push something down when it could go it could leave it alone and cut itself in underneath it.
00:03.680: And by the way, somebody was just tweeting me just today about that.
00:03.680: Yeah, I just I instant messaged you on Skype this and I'm sure you're going to edit this.
00:03.680: And the graphics are being generated from
00:03.760: Not so much any of the organizational stuff or any of the power of the database, as they say.
00:03.760: You know, the thing where you can say, just show the favorites.
00:03.760: Right.
00:03.840: com.
00:03.840: Integrated, thank you.
00:03.840: All right, Chris.
00:03.920: I always forget the name of it.
00:03.920: Hey, I don't use picture.
00:03.920: I edited a couple of independent features, one of which I had written and directed.
00:03.920: So I went back and I just took a breath and found my way through it.
00:03.920: But a lot of people they have, well, you know, we have our machines.
00:03.920: We should be able to lock things in place to a degree because certain people are looking for certain things in certain places and it just bugs them out.
00:03.920: So this is a gigantic, to me, sort of tectonic shift in computing.
00:03.920: Yeah.
00:04.000: This is episode, let me think, it's 083, and today we're talking with Michael Matzdorf.
00:04.000: I just try to accommodate, but when I try to accommodate, it gets like to be really long in the tooth.
00:04.000: I think one of the things we you and I would both like to see is the ability
00:04.000: With some sort of hardware mixer?
00:04.000: And he said, and these aren't, you know, hundred million dollar films.
00:04.000: So FCPX features on Twitter.
00:04.080: So anyway, that's fxfactory.
00:04.080: I don't miss my floppy drives.
00:04.080: I mean, we I was totally out of that headspace, in fairness to the advant, but I I do just find it really a lot slower.
00:04.080: It's not just picture editorial.
00:04.080: And so if you go back and if you drop them into your editorial timeline, you can sort of start to cut them up
00:04.080: I you know, it seems to me I read that just
00:04.080: Now whether you're doing the optimized media, I don't, or it's
00:04.160: And I can't, I'm not smart enough to really figure out how to utilize it, but it is one of the most amazing pieces of code I've ever seen in a plug-in.
00:04.160: You can download it for free.
00:04.160: Yes.
00:04.160: Correct.
00:04.160: Because in olden days, we actually had to assign it to a track.
00:04.160: And I think that's one of the things that is sort of making people a little sketchy about doing it.
00:04.240: The idea of maintaining sync
00:04.240: Come on, Mike.
00:04.240: If V turns off the whole clip, it should be like option V or something.
00:04.240: Okay.
00:04.240: You know, you may, if you've missed that, you might want to go back and listen to that.
00:04.320: It's not dated.
00:04.320: We had some we had a hard time uh hooking up in terms of us picking a schedule, but um
00:04.320: Yeah, and if you go back, and if you're old enough, and I realize that some of the people that listen to the show are not that old, it was.
00:04.320: I've great respect for people that do it, especially people that do it on a a strict time line and a and a budgeted for time.
00:04.320: And I'll also say, Mike, like I'm just curious, like, you know, next time somebody asks me to cut a film, an indie film or whatever
00:04.320: He wanted to sit with me and we were finishing out that thing with the the cars I told you about, the old wooden cars.
00:04.320: So but if you scan something on any one of the desktops, you just hit save and your save will relink, will resync with the Dropbox.
00:04.400: Watch this.
00:04.400: And it's just it's not totally intuitive if you want to extend the tail of something or extend the head of something.
00:04.400: But all the plugins that I've purchased for the audio work that I do, they all magically show up in Pro in Final Cut.
00:04.400: I want to break down some of the things that you just mentioned there.
00:04.400: Geekery is the best.
00:04.400: I'm always interested in these sort of deep conversations.
00:04.480: And I've learned to accept and love.
00:04.480: Yeah.
00:04.480: Well, you know, as a simpler yes, yes to what you say, but there's an issue with the
00:04.480: And I mean, there's merit to that as well.
00:04.480: I could find or tag every bit of camera media.
00:04.480: You know, he's out the door
00:04.480: And it's drawn from the event management system.
00:04.480: Thank you, man.
00:04.560: Sorry, Mick Jackson.
00:04.560: If I'm cutting my piece and I have some gnat sound and I have some dialogue, and true, a lot of it might get replaced.
00:04.560: But then after you get over there, there's you just keep learning more and more of the tools, and that's how I got away from doing my
00:04.560: But if you try to take your proxies alone, you're going to have a bunch of offline audio.
00:04.560: I don't want anybody to think, oh, I could just solder that into my Mac.
00:04.560: So everybody's got a Mackie mixer sitting on their desk to adjust the volume from their Apple T V and their Edit Suite.
00:04.560: And Michael Matzdorf, you're the guy who's actually done it.
00:04.640: So as a friend, go check out Premium Beat.
00:04.640: And I said, Dude, turn the camera off.
00:04.640: And there's just the crew on the movie and they may be listening, so you know who you are.
00:04.640: Like, and so that's kind of
00:04.640: I know that.
00:04.640: Like, let's say you want to work on scene eight.
00:04.640: It's not doing anything like that.
00:04.640: Yeah, I'm doing I'll do three of these a day.
00:04.720: Hello, hello.
00:04.720: How the fuck camera?
00:04.720: Okay.
00:04.720: You and I both assistant does all the real work.
00:04.720: So two times a hundred and three or you know three
00:04.800: com.
00:04.800: Director, producer, writer, composer, editor, unemployable.
00:04.800: So I went from assisting it for commercials to television, like Movie of the Week stuff.
00:04.800: Utterly unusable.
00:04.800: And I was like, you know what?
00:04.800: And so I think one of the things in the workflow of an industry like television or film industry is that
00:04.800: And I think that when you're dealing with an industry where all the equipment's already purchased, maybe, you're talking about people still using their Pro Tools 9.
00:04.800: 1, you have a 5.
00:04.800: 1 mix of just your effects, a 5.
00:04.800: That's what I would do on my little work.
00:04.800: But basically, the idea is like, keep the roles as simple as you can.
00:04.800: And so you can just have all that stuff available as a tag instead of as a folder.
00:04.800: So I was talking with another guy about this the other day, and we might kickstart it.
00:04.800: It looks just like a mixer.
00:04.800: I'm thinking about it, but as of now, it's Twitter and
00:04.880: Walter Murch cut it in Final Cut Three or Four or whatever.
00:04.880: You can figure it out.
00:04.880: Then you got to go back.
00:04.880: I edited a couple of TV movies
00:04.880: But I'm not sure that the time line for updates is going to accommodate that request.
00:04.880: But um what we did was, you know, that's right, because you did your stuff at 2K, yeah?
00:04.880: Because you if you turn off that role like you can turn off roles and that's fine.
00:04.960: But I love the tweet right in the beginning.
00:04.960: And so it's a really bad movie.
00:04.960: And at your position, at the assistant editor level, you're the guy who's going to have to deal with this.
00:04.960: And he goes, I need you to open up these projects, strip off all the music and graphics and kick them out clean.
00:05.040: And I just sort of slowly went through and figured out one thing at a time
00:05.040: Yeah.
00:05.040: You know, and let's face it, in the beginning, it was landmark and
00:05.040: That's why we got into this business.
00:05.040: But what it actually does is it takes the original and the proxies.
00:05.040: I remember back when we used to have folders
00:05.120: And I I'm sure that things will uh I'll be proved wrong.
00:05.120: And was the impetus the unnamed project?
00:05.120: Uh it's e again, once you understand, oh, it's just I hold down these keys and I click here and then it it shifts the uh the sync point.
00:05.120: We had a VFX guy in house.
00:05.120: And this is getting into some technical stuff that may be for another entire hour-long podcast.
00:05.120: And when you mute when you disable a component, it's actually a mute.
00:05.200: One of these days I'm going to secretly record one of those conversations.
00:05.200: So in, out, add to a sequence, in, out, add to a sequence, which sort of I think throws the flaw off a little bit.
00:05.200: I don't think it's a gigantic hump to get over, but once I was over the hump, I just was like, I got in the flow of it.
00:05.200: I said, yes, that works.
00:05.200: Like if you had a show name, you also I saw this really cool thing, and I think it was either Steve or
00:05.200: And you can literally open up a database window, take your disk icon from your desktop, drag it over, drop it onto the window, and it
00:05.280: You can play with it.
00:05.280: If you want to turn that off, you're more than welcome to.
00:05.280: Ah, yeah, I remember that.
00:05.280: That that drives me crazy.
00:05.280: Like there's a blue arrow on the ab it, my favorite.
00:05.280: And so, you know, if you're on a twenty minute reel and you have, you know, a change around five minutes that lasts for a minute or so, and then you have a change around twelve minutes that lasts for a minute or so.
00:05.280: Sorry, if you disable picture with dialogue attached to it, your picture goes away.
00:05.280: And so what you're doing is you can assign your cache file and your media generated your generated media outside of the library file.
00:05.360: Give me a level second.
00:05.360: But because of that track record, you decided.
00:05.360: And just to be honest, I mean, some of the tools weren't there when we started.
00:05.360: Oh my goodness, that's so huge.
00:05.360: Is that what you're saying?
00:05.360: Beautiful.
00:05.440: And I returned it about a week later.
00:05.440: Yeah, and I and I said, Yeah, like I always do.
00:05.440: If so, where do you assign it to?
00:05.440: And then I'm going to use leave in place, but import that media into my project or library.
00:05.520: The first one was California, which was really cool, and the second one was The Beverly Hillbillies.
00:05.520: You'll give it up.
00:05.520: Yeah, nice.
00:05.520: And I deal with stems when I deal with my audio buddies.
00:05.520: And so you could say I want the audio and the proxy, and then it would just take that stuff
00:05.520: I mean, you can't go work remotely proxy only and have all your elements if you sunk your audio or used any audio only elements.
00:05.520: He goes, Here, do this, and he's out the door.
00:05.520: Total geargasm.
00:05.520: Right, yeah, I heard that.
00:05.600: And I got to a point where I kind of said, you know what, I'm just going to
00:05.600: And you're still married.
00:05.600: But
00:05.600: That's kind of standard these days.
00:05.600: Yeah.
00:05.600: It may have been you or Michael Garber mentioning it.
00:05.600: We're still using spinnable drives.
00:05.600: Because literally, the guy gave me the name of the file he wanted me to clean.
00:05.680: Today is September, so I met him in August of twenty fourteen at the Pixel Core Virtual User Group.
00:05.680: All you got to do is search around.
00:05.680: I had a discussion with one of my clients.
00:05.680: It was volcano, like this Tommy Lee Jones and Hait thing.
00:05.680: And until people see like bottom line things which make a difference
00:05.680: And so, all right, well, okay, so dialogue is on one and two, got it.
00:05.680: Sweet.
00:05.760: Yeah, remember what an absolute like
00:05.760: And it was like it took me I mean, first of all, I'm the Avid, I'm helpless without my own settings.
00:05.760: I mean, and you know, I'm when I'm in the groove and using my own settings, I'm pretty fast on the Avid.
00:05.760: Well, everything slips by and then you got to figure out how to figure when there's when there's no precedence, that's what you have to do.
00:05.840: The other thing I want to say is I want to again, once again, thank the people at Premium Beat.
00:05.840: They got rid of that and they got rid of the floppy drive and they got rid of
00:05.840: And it really wasn't, if you're old enough to remember what that even means.
00:05.840: Okay, so the guy Peter, you maybe you know Peter Steinauer.
00:05.840: And I like look around in the hard drive for a while and I go.
00:05.840: Yeah.
00:05.840: I don't know.
00:05.920: Utterly unusable.
00:05.920: Forgive me.
00:05.920: No, you lost me already.
00:06.000: And so big, big Hollywood names attached to this thing.
00:06.000: You sound stellar.
00:06.000: Well, I think, you know, let's say it's a scene and there's
00:06.000: Right.
00:06.000: Yeah.
00:06.000: And those finder tags are part and parcel to that machine and therefore that film.
00:06.000: Yeah, so it's just replicating something from the olden days.
00:06.080: I've talked about that in the past on other episodes.
00:06.080: com also supporting this show.
00:06.080: So you apparently pissed off less people than I did.
00:06.080: Yeah, exactly.
00:06.080: So I will not reveal.
00:06.080: What were some of the things that were the giant like, oh my goodness, we are in we are living in the future?
00:06.080: And my one feature that I keep pounding for is a mute button.
00:06.080: Well done.
00:06.080: The only problem is on the surface where you expect to see the faders, there's nothing.
00:06.160: And so it's a fascinating story.
00:06.160: I read that.
00:06.160: And then I'm going to lay those back into my time line, and I'll mute all the original audio that I had sent to them.
00:06.160: And he gives me a list of five different projects that I have done for him.
00:06.160: It's purely the file name, okay?
00:06.160: So it's called X.
00:06.240: And I go, Yeah, I think so.
00:06.240: Something that you know would take me a ninety seconds in in final cut.
00:06.240: 1 mix of your entire show.
00:06.240: No, it's really interesting.
00:06.320: No, wrong, wrong nod that one.
00:06.320: You can have full functionality of every bit of it.
00:06.320: And I said, You may see something that looks like this, but it's not these frames.
00:06.320: So we had built these we had our reels built and they were surround and we were putting them together in the Avid and
00:06.320: And the fact is that Pro Tools is standard for the industry.
00:06.320: I won't even call it a learning curve.
00:06.320: Yeah.
00:06.320: It'll be more like your crazy iPad.
00:06.320: I got to say, the life of an assistant editor, very, very interesting.
00:06.400: When did you sit down and say, eh, I'm going to give it another try?
00:06.400: And they're going to make it pretty.
00:06.480: You know, it's funny because like
00:06.480: You don't remember me.
00:06.480: 1 mix of just your music.
00:06.480: And then,
00:06.480: And I'm used to reaching for something that's right there.
00:06.480: I have a question for you.
00:06.480: I want to tag the PDFs of the script supervisor's notes from that day.
00:06.480: It's roughly
00:06.480: Yeah.
00:06.560: I know, but I can't recall the last time I put anything in it.
00:06.560: It's make it a sub-role of dialogue.
00:06.640: And so that was Michael's job.
00:06.640: And I said, This is ridiculous at 140 characters.
00:06.640: But it seems to me that a lot of those things are a byproduct of
00:06.640: And so you take the scene eight event and you drop it into a new library.
00:06.640: And yes, you're right.
00:06.640: They showed me a photo.
00:06.640: I think you're gonna like it.
00:06.720: I'm good with that.
00:06.720: I would have done anything else.
00:06.720: There's a lot of the same buttons, but there's a lot of different buttons.
00:06.720: Something like that, yeah.
00:06.720: And it doesn't always work out.
00:06.720: Walk me through the process that you would do
00:06.720: Yeah.
00:06.720: Yeah, that's the new term.
00:06.720: It works.
00:06.720: Once we figured out like sort of library organizational schemes, that was a big help.
00:06.720: So there there was a lot of things with just like accessing original media, organizational schemes, database capabilities.
00:06.720: So you have and and it's so difficult because everybody works a little bit different, but like in my world
00:06.720: And you know what?
00:06.800: I do you know corporate you know sales ETH type things.
00:06.800: Believe me, I get that.
00:06.800: If you have anything that's dialogue,
00:06.800: Yeah, it it's this kind of thing that just lives in the room and you want to just
00:06.800: I could find or tag every PNG document, every PSD document, every illustrator document.
00:06.800: Right.
00:06.800: That's Michael Mastor.
00:06.880: It depends on your fan base.
00:06.880: Yeah, and there there's there's ways to do that just to in I mean, I know you have more that you want to say on the topic, but there's that is an area which needs improvement because
00:06.880: And there's
00:06.880: I mean, that's the main gist of it.
00:06.880: You heard it here first, folks.
00:06.880: Anyway, Mike, I should let you go.
00:06.960: People have been talking about it since January.
00:06.960: Right.
00:06.960: Yeah, and and it's like, you know, there's the there's the button on the AVID, whatever that button is, it's your favorite button and you know, you've programmed it to your favorite key and
00:06.960: Does that make sense?
00:06.960: Oh, let's talk about how you should be using them.
00:06.960: And what it's doing is it's recreating the directory structure
00:07.040: And yeah you know, I would start
00:07.040: And I think that
00:07.040: I put always put stem in it so I can search for stems.
00:07.040: 1.
00:07.040: And uh they they're doing some crazy stuff where they're doing all their lower third graphics.
00:07.040: You know, you you're you're hearing from
00:07.120: And she looked at me and she's like, You do this for a living.
00:07.120: But I looked at it, I'm like, I just don't like either one of these things.
00:07.120: Kind of getting off the question here.
00:07.120: And then underneath that, Preview One Dialogue, Preview One Effects, Preview One Music.
00:07.120: So if anybody opens it,
00:07.120: You know?
00:07.200: Well, that's a different story.
00:07.200: But anyway.
00:07.200: I think technically, I think that's called a filter, where you filter out and say, just show the favorites in this.
00:07.200: Yeah.
00:07.200: It's a great system.
00:07.280: You've seen him.
00:07.280: It'll probably help bandwidth.
00:07.280: And so
00:07.280: And had we been a little smarter at the outset
00:07.280: 2 for me, speed, organization.
00:07.280: The smart play is like if you
00:07.280: Congratulations.
00:07.360: I had a couple of tweets back and forth with Steve Martin and Mark Spencer.
00:07.360: How long ago?
00:07.360: If you can go through and watch all the lines from that quickly, that's that's what we were doing, just keywording.
00:07.360: Or forget the real world.
00:07.360: Yeah.
00:07.440: I mean, I say thank you for the generous support.
00:07.440: Well, where I am today is unemployed.
00:07.440: This works for us.
00:07.440: So we would ba people who get confused about roles, I always just tell them, it just
00:07.440: I'm holding one in my hand.
00:07.440: Wow.
00:07.440: We're all in this together.
00:07.520: And it's not just plugins for Final Cut 10, it's plugins for Final Cut 10 in motion.
00:07.520: Like that's it started with Lightworks.
00:07.520: And you can like as you're going, you can mark a favorite and move on and know that
00:07.520: Did you say the director over my shoulder today is like, so
00:07.520: Um um um
00:07.600: Thank you.
00:07.600: I mean, the um
00:07.600: But what is different is like if I were doing the same thing on the Avid, I would go through
00:07.600: Yeah, I totally agree.
00:07.600: And if you, and I could probably do a half-hour lecture on this and show the history of it.
00:07.600: And then each machine in the office
00:07.600: Cool.
00:07.680: No, I won't.
00:07.680: No, absolutely.
00:07.680: So what were some of the
00:07.680: And it doesn't seem like th like a lot of that stuff is like really like how many people really use that and
00:07.680: I could find or tag
00:07.760: There was a young man from Nantucket.
00:07.760: Well, it's a lot of clicks.
00:07.760: You mentioned earlier about getting into something really deep, and I think that
00:07.760: 1.
00:07.760: These are like, you know.
00:07.840: I also want to thank, in the same light,
00:07.840: So, yeah, the assistant editor is the guy.
00:07.920: So you have more control over them.
00:07.920: And that's everybody experiences that with Final Fat 10.
00:07.920: Right.
00:07.920: FCPX features and
00:08.000: But I hope I'm not embarrassing you, Mike.
00:08.000: Dialogue affects music.
00:08.000: They tweeted a photo of their shelf.
00:08.080: Six months ago, a year ago, three years ago?
00:08.080: There was 2012 then.
00:08.080: And he said, Well, what you really need is for that to work.
00:08.080: 1.
00:08.080: It's part of the cost of doing business, and here I'll keep a copy too.
00:08.080: So I'm not ready to give away my give up my folders quite yet, but I do see that
00:08.160: And it was like it was when people started taking Final Cut a classic.
00:08.160: I can tell you it's the Schwab people.
00:08.160: And it was a it I I I've never sort of
00:08.160: I mean, there was plenty of like
00:08.160: Yeah, it does.
00:08.160: Quite often I refer to the learning wall, which is what you experienced with your wife.
00:08.160: Well, it's interesting that you point that out because back when you were talking about having a physical mixer
00:08.240: There's a little um camera icon.
00:08.240: Roll record?
00:08.240: Right, right, right.
00:08.240: Do you just put it in a folder called media or what do you call it?
00:08.240: So everybody has the database accessible to them.
00:08.320: He's
00:08.320: Thank you, FX Factory.
00:08.320: Yeah, it's even more than just a system.
00:08.320: Makes the best coffee anyway.
00:08.320: And you could put the the kinds of jobs we do, we can put ten or twenty of them on a j on a drive.
00:08.400: And I said, sure, let's do it.
00:08.400: We're you know, we've won Emmys, we've won Academy Awards.
00:08.400: Yeah, well, there's that.
00:08.400: That would be cool.
00:08.400: It's got all the jacks on the back, and inserts, and the power switch, and
00:08.400: Thanks for doing this.
00:08.400: And a fascinating story.
00:08.480: Integrated audio.
00:08.480: And I think that if Avid if Apple comes across with
00:08.480: So if you have to turn them back on and off
00:08.480: I hope that I can consult with people on their films and
00:08.480: If they want to ask questions that are long.
00:08.560: I don't like the Avid.
00:08.560: You used the phrase, don't cut with your stems.
00:08.560: And further down the line, Foley gets added to that list.
00:08.560: Understood.
00:08.640: And he was very much involved in like
00:08.640: No, this is not going to work.
00:08.720: But it's hysterical, the stuff that they that they
00:08.720: And so it was hard at first, just because I
00:08.720: And it's so basically what you're saying is because of that track record,
00:08.720: And you know, if there was like two favorites of the same line on different takes, just pick one.
00:08.720: The original audio?
00:08.720: That'd be great.
00:08.800: And you know
00:08.800: That means that in both directions.
00:08.800: His name was Austin Flack.
00:08.800: Yeah, no, I follow.
00:08.800: But again, it's a little bit different than
00:08.800: And if you're in a place where you need extra consulting or something like that, or you need an assistant for a big job,
00:08.880: Let's talk for an hour.
00:08.880: And hopefully, when the book comes out, this information is helpful and
00:08.960: Clips move when you don't necessarily want them to.
00:09.040: This car company is 100 years old.
00:09.040: It gets quicker once you do it.
00:09.040: And then when you get into like using your stems, using your mixed tracks
00:09.040: Um something that is just like built to si have a trackpad sit in the middle.
00:09.040: You have to probably I'm sure there's an app you have to get.
00:09.040: And I think a lot of times people
00:09.120: Yeah.
00:09.120: And I think once you stop looking for your button,
00:09.120: You obviously have experience in things other than Final Cut 10.
00:09.120: And it's, you know, things.
00:09.120: Yeah, no.
00:09.120: No, I see what you're saying.
00:09.120: So you got to turn your dialogue roll back on.
00:09.120: And so you should have it should break out things a little bit further, and it should say
00:09.200: I it's like half of the guests are recommending hey, you should talk to Mike, he's really great.
00:09.200: 4 megabyte floppy drive.
00:09.280: But in the long run, yes.
00:09.280: And I think that
00:09.280: What were some of the challenges that took you
00:09.360: Well, I'm working on matching your record.
00:09.360: And a lot of people
00:09.440: It's kind of a booth.
00:09.440: And
00:09.440: The part about watching everything?
00:09.440: Instead of just saying, here's the dialogue.
00:09.440: Or maybe you'll have stems.
00:09.440: And that's kind of a
00:09.440: Yep.
00:09.520: Brad Pitt or Jim Varney.
00:09.600: So, anyway, I've been flipping through your book.
00:09.600: What did you say?
00:09.600: Right.
00:09.600: And I did port everything over to 10.
00:09.680: And so it's really kind of the first Hollywood film with a big budget.
00:09.680: No.
00:09.680: Explain what you mean by that.
00:09.680: So it's something that needs to be clarified and simplified.
00:09.680: I was like, what?
00:09.680: It's pretty fast.
00:09.680: Yeah.
00:09.760: It would be great to be able to have that those regions as you as you put them.
00:09.760: Beautiful.
00:09.840: Come be on the show.
00:09.840: Not to mention
00:09.840: Trying to find it here.
00:09.840: Yeah, yeah.
00:09.920: I there I really have to customize the settings.
00:09.920: And there's other things like, well, you know, the solution that we had short term was
00:10.000: And I went and sort of
00:10.000: But you'll have
00:10.000: So, I'm going to summarize a little bit.
00:10.000: And they have like a
00:10.000: If people want to follow you on the Twitter thing, what what do they look for?
00:10.080: I think it's really slow and it crashes a lot.
00:10.080: Yeah, so sort of getting used to that.
00:10.080: But if you turn off that role, like the dialogue role and there's
00:10.080: You just want to take it away and work on it over the weekend.
00:10.080: 140 answers are free, 150 answers, I'm going to send you a bill.
00:10.080: So um that's that's the goal.
00:10.160: So yes, you know I take their money.
00:10.160: Final Cut X is completely unusable?
00:10.160: Okay.
00:10.160: And in a lot of cases, it's Pro Tools nine.
00:10.160: It's really like an ecosystem.
00:10.160: You have more control over them when you put it out to Pro Tools.
00:10.240: Financial sector stuff is very highly regulated.
00:10.240: And understandably because it's their competition.
00:10.240: And he goes, Fenwick, how do I keep track of this data?
00:10.320: And then I got a couple of features with a crew.
00:10.320: And I thought back to the day when
00:10.320: You know?
00:10.320: But the short run,
00:10.320: So it's like one of those things where
00:10.320: I think that
00:10.320: Oh, there's one big one that's important.
00:10.320: Do you have it in your
00:10.400: No.
00:10.400: And I think that was a big concern going in is how
00:10.400: I don't know if you use it at all.
00:10.400: I pull them off the shelf, load them onto you know, little USB three trays.
00:10.480: So you're looking at the history of
00:10.480: Give me some examples of some of those type of things that you ran across.
00:10.480: Right.
00:10.560: You're terrible at this
00:10.560: Yeah, go ahead.
00:10.560: But another issue with that is you can edit in the components.
00:10.560: What's a sub roll?
00:10.560: So, we'll be back Friday.
00:10.640: You don't miss
00:10.640: They still make cars by hand.
00:10.640: And it was great.
00:10.640: Just I want to be able to click on a piece of picture that has sound.
00:10.640: And if you know that it's coming.
00:10.720: Oh man, I had a list.
00:10.720: And to be fair, Michael's done it all.
00:10.800: Um
00:10.800: But it's not the case with Final Cut.
00:10.880: And I think that's the thing that's really difficult to
00:10.960: I was trying to devise a workaround.
00:10.960: Or I would take notes based on time code.
00:10.960: And then you got to go through and find them, especially if you're watching them in a screening room.
00:10.960: But at first, I was looking for certain things.
00:10.960: But if like the positioning of the element
00:10.960: Hold on.
00:11.040: And so, you know, I guess basically.
00:11.040: Oh my God.
00:11.040: Yeah, no, it's really cool.
00:11.120: And that's when you start shaping the cut of it.
00:11.120: And that system that you sit down at
00:11.200: You know, with everything being searchable, it's
00:11.280: It's fine.
00:11.280: And I think that
00:11.280: It was you know
00:11.280: You know, he had been.
00:11.360: Boom.
00:11.360: There's an app for that.
00:11.440: It's called Nodes, and it's currently Nodes.
00:11.440: It doesn't matter
00:11.440: Boom, boom, boom, boom.
00:11.440: I barely do, but
00:11.520: Oftentimes you'll sit there and
00:11.520: I'm not even.
00:11.600: Sorry.
00:11.600: Like if we had a scene with ten lines of dialogue in it, there would be
00:11.680: Now
00:11.680: But let's go to Michael Mattsdorf down.
00:11.680: And then when you hand off to
00:11.760: What can I say?
00:11.760: Like this whole
00:11.760: 12.
00:11.920: I should have should have had it ready.
00:12.160: But however, I've said this many times.
00:12.160: So, yeah.
00:12.160: I don't understand how anyone works with the stock settings.
00:12.160: Thanks for listening.
00:12.240: You want only the proxies.
00:12.320: This is it is the
00:12.400: They have been
00:12.640: There's my chapters.
00:12.800: There we go.
00:12.800: Utterly unusable.
00:12.800: Yeah.
00:12.880: You know, the talent pool is small.
00:13.120: Have a great week.
00:13.200: And
00:13.440: Okay, got it.
00:13.520: Yeah.
00:13.520: Yeah.
00:13.520: And
00:14.080: Later, later.