FCPX Grill podcast – Ep. 71 – featuring Philip Hodgetts: The King of Metadata

Episode 71 of Chris Fenwick’s FCPX Grill podcast features an interview with Philip Hodgetts of Intelligent Assistance, an LA-based software company who make software for assistant editors and editors who have to do assistant editors’ tasks.

After listening to this episode about logging, I thought it was well worth logging:

[5:20] Video literacy vs. traditional forms of literacy. Even if post production isn’t your primary focus, you make need to make videos. Apple selling a million copies of Final Cut Pro X in a world where there are only 25,500 professional video and film editors in the USA.

[7:41] PH: People stay with software and workflows that aren’t state of the art because they are proven and because they are preferred workflows of somebody that they trust.

[9:18] Philip came over to LA from Australia for four weeks in 2001 and returned in 2003.

[10:33] PH: Don’t you think Final Cut Pro X reminds you of Media 100?

[11:45] CF: What is the significance of the change from QuickTime to AV Foundation?

[18:33] PH: AV Foundation only supports QuickTime movies with H.264 and ProRes Codecs – no third-party codecs.

[24:00] PH: All our applications are focussed on metadata

[24:43] PH: The six kinds of metadata: Source, Added, Derived, Inferred, Visible and Transform

[28:38] CF: People are logging much less as they shoot than before

[29:15] PH: Marquis Broadcast Final Cut Pro X customer survey: only 2-3% of respondants do on-location logging

[31:05] PH: Lumberjack System helps you log on location by tapping check boxes on and off. The Lumber Yard application takes this logging information to generate a Final Cut Pro X library to organise footage by applying keywords, creating folders and marking favourites and also to create string-outs based on keywords – including lower thirds showing metadata-based interviewee names.

[34:17] PH: We use a very simple title, but you can select all the titles in the Timeline Index and drag a title of your choice to change the design of the lower thirds in one go.

[35:28] PH: Now you can log already captured footage using the simpler to use Lumberjack system

[38:16] PH: Most logging tools don’t record time ranges, they store markers with fixed 2 second ranges before and after the marker.

[41:15] CF: A listener asked why we go on about all these things to make the assistant editors’ lives easier: “I don’t care, I’m an editor”

[42:45] PH: My whole focus is to take the drudge work away from editors and get the computer to do that

[44:00] PH: In the future editors will work remotely – the work will go to the lowest-price territory: Montana and Mumbai

[45:35] CF: Working from home, do you miss the cameraderie of working with other people?

[47:48] PH: Lumberjack features also support making videos at conferences – multiple iOS users can log a live event at the same time

[52:25] PH: I’ve stopped demoing Syn-N-Link after seeing how much better Sam Mestman and Michael Garber demo it

[53:25] PH on the genesis of Xto7

[55:30] CF: What is the difference between Intelligent Assistance and Lumberjack System?

[58:38] CF: I’m going to appear at the Final Cut Virtual User Group on Thursday August 14th