@JohnnyRoy

It seems like FCPX has some great features that may be worthwhile emulating. I think this was one of the main reasons JohnnyRoy moved from Vegas to FCPX - Would like to hear his comments / experiences too.

it also has a cool auto-sync feature which makes lining up multicam shoots a lot easier. it doesn't nail it every time, but it at least gets you really close.

UWQHD monitor(s)

Luvin’ this thread’s User participation.

@Kinvermark : Kudos! 😎

I need a powerful relational database with video preview functionality so I can find clips in my archive of 21,000 video clips and 4000 audio clips that I've spent several years deeply tagging in Media Manager, and I need it to import my Media Manager libraries.

My suggestions for improving Media Manager are in this comment.

Well you did ask.

I did read through your suggestions. Most are very specific to media manager of course, but still informative.

There are two major elements we are talking about here ( at least) : finding media and organizing it before it hits the timeline. They are related of course.

In my case, metadata tagging would allow me to find the clips I need (don't really need full SQL queries), now I just need a way to preview & arrange prior to timeline, plus know which ones I have already used.

In your case, I suspect metadata tagging (in file) would be too slow. The danger in the database approach is, of course, obsolescence of the specific software you are using.

@JohnnyRoy

It seems like FCPX has some great features that may be worthwhile emulating. I think this was one of the main reasons JohnnyRoy moved from Vegas to FCPX - Would like to hear his comments / experiences too.

@Kinvermark Media Management is a fundamental core concept in Final Cut Pro X and is not an optional component. As you might imagine, it is well integrated at several levels.

In FCPX, media management starts with ingestion. The window to import video from your camera card has a button to "Create Camera Card Archive". I don't know about you but it's rare that I shoot something and come right back and edit it. Clearly for long-form you do lots of shooting before you do any editing. FCPX understands this and manages all of card cards as packages that you can mount later and import video from them. I have an external hard drive of just camera card archives and when I'm ready to edit a project, I mount it and pull from the archive just as if it were real camera cards. All of the metadata is, of course, preserved. I haven't had to manually copy files onto my hard drive in years. I know Vegas Pro has several tools to import from camera cards but it doesn't manage the card images themselves like FCPX can so in FCPX media management starts BEFORE you import any media into a project.

The next level of media management is the Library concept. Before you even start to edit, FCPX is already thinking about organizing your assets so that you always know where everything is. Libraries contain Events which contain Projects. Events are "real" wall-clock events i.e., birthday, wedding, first day a school, first day of shooting, scene 1 act 1, episode 23, whatever is an event for your style of shooting. Unlike Vegas Pro which doesn’t even have the concept of a project folder, FCP X seamlessly takes care of all of that for me. For example: I have a Library for my Boris TV tutorials by year. Each episode maps to an Event in the Library. Each event has a project for the demos, a project for the episode itself, etc. and all of my media is contained within the Library (this is optional but I like having FCPX manage this for me). Media can be shared across projects. I can drag and drop the whole library from my MacBook Pro onto an external drive, transfer it to my 12-Core Mac Pro and I have everything I need. No muss, no fuss, no missing files. ACID Pro had this concept of having a project folder but Vegas never quite caught on. Libraries take it a step further with a self contained physical unit that you can copy across hard drives. Also, if I choose to add media to my project from outside of the Library, there is a Consolidate option that allows me to copy any external media into the Library so that when I archive it, I know all of the files needed to work on my project again are there. I know you can save a project in Vegas Pro and copy the media but it's blindly makes copies. If you run it twice, it copies the files twice and the project gets twice as big. FCPX is smart enough to just copy the file once. Also having a shared media pool across several projects is really nice. Vegas Pro can't do this. This is an extremely important point. If I edit my video in Vegas Pro as a series of nested projects, those projects cannot share a common media pool. This is big disadvantage of nested project.

At the media/clip level, FCPX has the notion of Compound Clips. I've seen Vegas Pro editors ask for this capability again and again. Most videographers record audio independent of video because the microphone on your camera isn't close enough to the subject to get good sounds. The next thing you need to do is sync that video and audio. You can buy 3rd party plug-ins to do this with Vegas Pro but FCPX has this built in. But that's not the cool part. The cool part is that you can save the video with synced audio as a Compound Clip in the media pool. This now behaves as a single piece of media, moving and cutting together. As I said, I've seen Vegas Pro editors ask how to do this without re-rendering, but in Vegas Pro, the best you can do is open another instance, save the two clips as a project and then import the nested project. Compound Clips are much easier to use than nested Vegas projects. It is just so much easier to open a compound clip in a new storyline and edit them rather then launching the tool all over again as in Vegas and getting confused about which instance is doing what. I can also modify clips and put them back in my media pool. So if an audio clip is too loud. I can “Open in Timeline”, adjust it’s volume non-destructively, close the timeline, and now any time I drop that media in my project, it’s the correct volume. Sort of like Media FX in Vegas but I didn’t have to think about whether I wanted to add a Media FX, Track FX, or Event FX. I just edited it before I used it and then when using it in the project it keeps my edits. It just feels more natural. It’s all about workflow.

Finally there is the kind of media management that you are talking about which is skimming through hours and hours of footage setting in and out points and tagging the shots that you want to use. FCPX actually has a rating system for this built in. In addition to tagging a sub clip with any name I want to refer to it as, I can also add built-in tags like Favorite and Rejected. Then later I can ask it to Hide Reject Clips (or keep that setting enabled as I'm tagging) and rejected clips disappear from the media pool so that I don't have to even see them. FCPX also has the concept of Roles to manage media. It has built-in roles like Title, Video, Dialog, Music, Effects etc that can be used for things like selection but you can make your own. It's very useful to be able to select all of the titles, or all of the music for whatever reason just by selecting it's role.

So Tagging and Roles are really fundamental concepts in FCP X. In a way it’s like the Sony Media Manager built right in. The power of tagging is that you can tag the same media with two different tags as apposed to using folders where a piece of media can only be in one folder (without making a copy of course). I don’t have to make any folders or bins I just tag my media and they get categorized accordingly, so tags become my folders. There are also smart tags. I can create a tag that queries the attributes of the media and all of the media with those attributes immediately shows up under that tag (I think Media Manager has this). Then I can render based on tags or roles so if I just want to render the dialog without the music, or if I want to render stems, as long as my clips are tagged that way I can do it. You can’t do that in Vegas Pro without careful track manipulation and muting. This tagging concept extends to tags on your Mac. What I do is tag my media in macOS Finder (similar to Windows file explorer). Then when I import into FCPX, I tell it to use the tags and the same tags are used in FCPX. I noticed Vegas Pro added tagging in one of the the later release but I never really played with it (Vegas Pro 12.0 is the last version I really used day to day). On the Mac the file tagging in the OS and in FCP X are the same. It's a seamless user experience.

As far as storyboard editing and rough cutting goes, FCPX has no tracks. It has a main storyline with secondary storylines and connected clips which are used to tell your story. The main storyline is called the "magnetic timeline" because you can literally drag and drop clips to new locations and the clips at those existing locations will "magnetically" shuffle out of the way to make room for the new clip without creating any gaps. This makes it extremely easy to move ideas around quickly. Whats more is that the connected clips and secondary storylines move with the main clip that they are connected to! So entire ideas made from multiple overlapping clips can be moved around the timeline extremely easily with a single click at any time. The entire editing experience is like storyboard editing from start to finish. You have no idea how powerful a concept this is and how much time this saves until you actually use it. (I will never used track-based editor again)

I point these things out not to say that FCPX is better than Vegas Pro but in the spirit in which the question was asked and that is, "What could MAGIX be doing to improve it's media management and storyboarding to compete with other NLEs"

~jr