Looking at the Avid and Final Cut Pro trim tools.
By S Simmons. Filed in Avid editing, Final Cut Pro |
In this installment of Avid &(vs.) FCP we take a look at the trim tools.
First, give the article read at this link.
Then come back and leave a comment below!
Sunday, January 7th 2007 at 5:58 pm
But if FCP implemented these features wouldn’t they be seen as “copying” the features from Avid? Maybe that’s why they haven’t.
Monday, January 8th 2007 at 2:15 pm
I would say it’s a matter of making the trim tool work first and worry about copying second. FCP is many steps behind in that the trim tool just doesn’t work very well. I think if they would just develop a whole new paradigm for trimming then that would be better than what FCP currently does.
Thursday, January 25th 2007 at 3:52 am
Although I have never used it myself, Lightworks had some intriguing features that I wish Avid or Apple would copy. E.g., one button press would select all the trim points used in the last trim operation — trivial to implement and extremely useful.
How many times have you exited trim mode in the Avid, just to realise that you need to make a small adjustment to your trim? With a few tracks on your timeline, this quickly becomes tedious. To add insult to injury, anything but the most trivial trim usually involves lots of awkward shift-clicking.
My impression is that trimming was much more central to the Lightworks philosophy, and that (at least in FCP) this has been sacrificed for a more “modern”, mouse-driven, drag-and-drop philosophy. Not a good trade-off, in my opinion.
Thursday, January 25th 2007 at 5:01 pm
I remember the old Lightworks machines… I’ve only loaded footage and never really editing on the thing. But many who used it swore by it!
Sunday, January 28th 2007 at 2:19 am
What an EXCELLENT post.
It’s so disappointing to edit on FCP and use the trim tool. I like the software a lot but for me it’s a deal breaker.
What’s interesting is, I rarely see or hear this discussed.
Trimming and media management are the only two things that keep me editing on Avid and not FCP.
J
Sunday, April 29th 2007 at 11:10 pm
I’ve come to the conclusion that FCP is one of the best marketed pieces of software ever. Right now it’s so cool! But is it as fast and accurate as Avid when you need it? After learning FCP and working on it, I’m always blown away when I work on Avid again. It just makes so many things so much faster and easier. But right now its not the cool kid on the block and its ship seems to be sinking. It would be a sad day if it were to disappear.
Wednesday, May 9th 2007 at 8:39 am
Great post – Having edited on Avid for the last 6 years, and having been freelance for 3, I’m being forced into learning Final Cut due to several Production Companies moving over to Final Cut… And boy, what a frustrating experience. When it comes to an all round package (audio, effects, etc. etc.) Final Cut is on top. But when it comes to simplicity, ease of use, and quick effective offlining Avid is king. And to come to this realisation is depressing. I use the trim tool constantly in Avid to refine edits, and, more importantly, to change complex timelines that have music and voice over all over the shop. I have refined my working methods to include the trim tool, and love asymmetic trimming. To find the Final Cut trim so cumbersome, and without any meaningful asymmetric capability really slows me down. I can work very fast in Avid, but already I can see myself becoming very lethargic when working in Final Cut. It bugs me.
Wednesday, July 4th 2007 at 3:20 pm
Hello
Looks good! Very useful, good stuff. Good resources here. Thanks much!
G’night
Thursday, August 9th 2007 at 12:23 am
Hi, I’m new in Avid express pro , like in FCP , how do you reduce Video track opacity in timeline
mean by mixing 2 to 3 videos , to produce a sequence with multiple images (backgroung from video trck )from different video tracks , Has you know the top video track in timeline is more dominant unless you lower its opacity , in order to see others , you have to lower its opacity down to 50% – 30% .
Thank you
Kib
Saturday, September 1st 2007 at 5:15 pm
Kib,
To super impose one image over another in Xpress Pro you drop an effect from the effect pallet onto your top or second video track. Use the Superimpose effect from I think the first set of effects. Then open the effect editor window where you can adjust the opacity level. You can key frame it’s level so that you can start from 0 and ramp it up over time to any level including full 100%. Experiment with it for different effects.
Hope this works out for you.
Tuesday, February 12th 2008 at 1:09 pm
What version of FCP were you referring to in the trimming article?
Wednesday, February 13th 2008 at 8:06 am
Pam, this was version 5 of FCP but the trim tool really hasn’t changed much except for adding dynamic trimming was back when so it’s for pretty much all versions.
Friday, November 21st 2008 at 3:50 am
Hi. Thanx 4 all the great 411. Really. But what I’d like to know is if there are mappable keys for a/b side trims that you can get into without CLICKING in the canvas or viewer monitors in FCP?
Friday, November 21st 2008 at 6:06 pm
Matt, look for the TOGGLE EDIT TYPE button. I think that’s as close as it gets. Does that work?
Tuesday, March 10th 2009 at 7:39 pm
Scott, one of the great things you can do in Media Composer, that you can’t do in FCP is choose what transition you’re monitoring. So, say you are making a simple “L” cut. You can watch and trim the video and the system will trim the audio to match. Or you can listen to the audio and the system will trim the video to match. You move a “watch point,” which is the blue cursor, to any part of a complex trim and observe what is happening at that point while you trim.
For those who don’t know, you move the watch point with a single click on an *existing* transition. (If you click on a transition that isn’t part of your trim you’ll move the blue bar and also create a roller.)
Also, in response to an early comment here — you can restore previous trim in an Avid. Hold down the option key and select trim mode. Rollers come back, as well as the trim counters.
Tuesday, March 10th 2009 at 7:40 pm
Great set of posts, by the way. I’m working my way through them now.
Wednesday, March 31st 2010 at 1:32 pm
This is a very good thread. I’m fairly new to FCP and have searched high a low for some tips on trimming. Been using Avid for years and before that Lightworks (a real editors tool). For a while I found the linking on FCP absolutely baffling, never really sure what I am going to get when I select a clip. Overall I now prefer FCP for what I’m doing, love the nesting and realtime audio mixing. But complex trimming I find a real challenge. The problem arises when trying to open up a sequence once you’ve got 2 or 3 video layers and say 8 audio. I’ve come to conclusion that you have use the select all to the right tool, move everything out of the way and then fix the problem.
The temptation is always to use the selection tool to drag things, but it really has to be roll, or ripple selection, but why when you increment with this tool using the keyboard do you not see the 2 frame display? You only seem to get this when you drag. The trim window is hard to use when there are multiple selections and either shows the wrong watch point or doesn’t display vision at all. Any tips to get round these shortcomings, as otherwise I think its a fab product? I’ve really tried to keep an open mind and forget about Avid, but really struggling here.
Wednesday, March 31st 2010 at 7:26 pm
JKM, I haven’t found any way to get around the FCP Trim window that works well. Anything other than a double roller trim on 1 video track and it often doesn’t work right. I think it comes from the fact that FCP wants you to click and drag. That’s how it operates. What you’re seeing are some of the same complaints I’ve had with FCP trimming all along. They haven’t changed them yet so who knows if they ever will!
Tuesday, June 29th 2010 at 4:52 am
What a relief to read! The FCP king is “in his altogether” ,as Danny Kaye put it, and the new clothes are not as shiny as Apple’s clever marketing would lead us to believe. Walter Murch has a lot to answer for in lending his name to this system and the rest of us have to deal with the fall-out. FCP is a good system for wedding vids etc and yes you can perform effects slightly more easily than on Avid but the bottom line is the real appeal is that it’s software based (provided you have a Mac) and consequently cheap.
I have 38 years experience in editing, mainly docs, for UK TV. I started on film (Steenbecks, Moviolas & Pic Syncs), in the 80s I trained on tape systems of various sorts (yuch spit!) and in ‘93 heard about and trained on Avid. I was a complete convert from the start. Here was a system with the (admittedly few) advantages of tape cutting ( i.e. the ability to keep your old cuts for ref or re-use) and the simplicity and accuracy of film cutting, plus fx and a whole host of logging and filing possibilities. In the late nineties I also cut a few things on Lightworks and Heavyworks. Yeah it was not a bad system but it would crash 4 times a day and lose all your galleries and the stupid Steenbeck handle gave me an RSI but at least like Avid it was designed around editors and the way they work and think.
When I came to learn FCP I had no qualms, after all when I learned Lightworks I had a Friday afternoon run through with one of the edit assistants, took the manual home for the weekend, went in Monday morning and cut a one hour documentary on the Paddington rail disaster for Channel 5. I reasoned that all these edit systems are designed for editors, along the same lines of logic and therefore would provide the same tools. But not so with FCP. Stupid things like the difficulty in cutting a section from a old seq into the current seq and the apparent inability the hear audio when trimming frame by frame demonstrate that Apple either didn’t do their homework or felt they could get away with it by marketing it as the hip system that works like, say, photoshop with similar general software tools that would appeal to software geeks rather than editors. Perhaps there was a copyright issue, after all Avid was originally a Mac based system, but they lost out because they couldn’t produce a stable platform. Oh the joys of spending the 1st hour of each day repeatedly try to boot up before the Mac would grind into life. Windows XP may have made the interface a little duller but at least it was stable. Anyhow, copyright didn’t stop Lightworks from producing a usable system.
The difficulty we now have is that if we try to point this out to Exec producers as a reason to stick with Avid then we risk appearing Luddite and unwilling to accept change. The basic truth is that editing is about story telling and Avid is a far better story telling tool than FCP.
Anyway back to wrestling with FCP. Happy trails