I would say that most editors work on the same project all day at least, if not for weeks at a time.
Sometimes I'm in and out of three or four different projects in a single day, but usually that's opening each only once.
Since I never really know whether I'm going to be in a certain project at the beginning of the day, I'd never open ALL of the projects at the beginning of the day anyway. Personally I have a LOT more patience for four short interruptions to my day that one long one. When I was cutting "Courageous" some of the wait times to get 130 hours of footage with multiple, multiple sequences was horrendous. Plus is was unstable at that size. I've worked on gigantic Avid projects with much more success or not crashing or faster launches at least.
I agree you don't want to be interrupted while you work, but the original poster was talking about BETWEEN projects. Obviously, on FCP, if you've launched all POTENTIAL projects at the beginning of the day, it's very, very fast to move between them. But if you are jumping from one project to another, 20 seconds of pause doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Four minutes is a little annoying.
Avid's also better at protecting you from all of the crap in a project. You can have hundreds of sequences in a project, but if you're smart about it, the older ones I tucked away where they don't make the launch horrendous, but they're still there. In FCP, you're always battling them - or deleting something you may wish you had later. And if you say "Well, there's always TimeMachine..." That is not as quick and easy of a recovery as opening a bin that's sitting there, by a long shot.
In the end, it really does come down to personal preference, but what MY takeaway is from this is that for a question like "Can you open more than one sequence in Avid?" The TRUTH of the answer depends a LOT on the context of the question and the APPLICATION of having more than one sequence open. I originally thought it was because the poster wanted to EDIT between them or SEE them, but it was really to work on them sequentially. There's really no reason to have more than one open in that case. You can even switch between projects without actually having to close one project and open a new one. You can just open the bin that the sequence is in (most of the time) and work for a few minutes or seconds, then go back to another sequence in your current project. I wouldn't really recommend that, but it's possible.
Like with so many people that discuss the differences between Avid and FCP, the problem is really trying to get Avid to WORK LIKE FCP. That's not the way it was designed. Instead what needs to happen is to say "What are you actually trying to DO?" Then figuring out the best way to accomplish that in the tool you're trying to use instead of comparing specific features, like the ability to have multiple sequences open in FCP. That's when you'll get the most efficiency and least frustration from each tool.
Steve Hullfish
contributor: www.provideocoalition.com
author: "The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction"
On Nov 12, 2011, at 12:53 PM, Jeff Cook wrote:
> Steve, I don't think you've mentioned the fundamental difference in project & bin structure between Avid & FCP, which makes your comparison false.
>
> An FCP project is one big file which also contains all bins. An Avid project file is smaller because bins are separate files, which then take time to load as you use them. So would you rather have more delay before you start work, or repeatedly while you're working?
>
> Both have merit, but they can't be measured equally.
>
> --
> Jeff Cook
> jeff@cookstudios.com
> 703-980-1104 (cell)
> CookStudios.com
>
> On Nov 12, 2011, at 1:31 PM, Steve Hullfish <steve4lists@veralith.com> wrote:
>
> > Wow, my math was off: at 6 seconds compared to 3:49, you could open a closed Avid project 38 TIMES for every FCP project.
> >
> > Obviously, I don't have two IDENTICAL projects to run a scientific test with.
> >
> > Avid's INCREDIBLY LAME marketing department should do this. If you have a feature that is quanfitiably better than the competitions by 38 TIMES, that's a marketing hook. Another company that I do consulting for knew the importance of this, but not Avid.
> >
> > So, if you are actually just wanting to switch back and forth between four projects, in the course of a normal 10 hour day, at an hour working on each project before switching to another (on average), then the total "opening time" for FCP is 920 seconds. The total time for Avid is 60 seconds. If you switched less often, like only twice per project, it would be 48 seconds compared to 920 seconds. That would be about a 15 minute savings per day for Avid based on those times.
> >
> > Now, take into account that FCP crashes at lunchtime and you have to relaunch all of the projects again and you'll actually save 30 minutes. :-)
> >
> > Steve Hullfish
> > contributor: www.provideocoalition.com
> > author: "The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction"
> >
> > On Nov 12, 2011, at 10:20 AM, Steve Hullfish wrote:
> >
> >> By "new" projects, I mean opening an "old" or "existing" project again. Avid does that pretty quickly.
> >>
> >> I might even test this here... I have a bunch of promo projects that are about the same size in Avid and FCP.
> >>
> >> So...
> >>
> >> This is still pretty anecdotal... I have a dual quad core Mac running a 12 TB very full RAID (12GB RAM) with FCP and Avid on same system.
> >>
> >> Two projects of about the same size.
> >>
> >> FCP took 3 minutes and 49 seconds to switch between projects.
> >>
> >> Avid opened in 6 SECONDS. And that was actually with a bigger project with more sequences. The Avid project had 12 sequences and the FCP project had 2.
> >>
> >> OBVIOUSLY, YMMV (your results may be different.) But do a test or two and be open to a different way of working
> >>
> >> If you had to open four projects to work on in FCP and it took you 3 minutes each at the beginning of the day to launch them all, that would waste 12 minutes for the initial launch. From then on, you can instantaneously switch back and forth, wasting no time.
> >>
> >> In Avid, let say you worked on four different projects and switched back and forth every 30 minutes for a twelve hour day. (An extreme example) If each of those switches cost you 30 seconds, it would break down to being the same amount of time. If you only worked for 8 hours and only switched back and forth every hour, then Avid would only "cost you" 4 minutes compared to wasting 12 minutes on FCP.
> >>
> >>
> >> Avid also launches faster than FCP, though if you have AMA turned on, searching AMA volumes really slows it down to an even race, especially if you have a lot of drives and drive space. Turning off AMA would help launch speed if you don't need it.
> >>
> >> Steve Hullfish
> >> contributor: www.provideocoalition.com
> >> author: "The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction"
> >>
> >> On Nov 12, 2011, at 9:51 AM, Steve Hullfish wrote:
> >>
> >>> Projects and Sequences are two different things...
> >>>
> >>> However, it is VERY easy to open a bin of sequences from another project into another project (as long as they're the same frame rate.
> >>>
> >>> I too work on multiple projects at the same time, as many as four a day, and I simply close one and open the other. THe thing with Avid is - and I have seen quantitative tests done by a third party - with Avid, new projects open WAY, WAY, WAY faster than new FCP projects. So closing one project and opening another isn't nearly as painful as with FCP. I have edited extensively in FCP and Avid, including feature films and I can tell you this with deep experience on ALL sizes of projects from massive to tiny. I am stunned switching to FCP how long it takes to launch a project. Granted, with REALLY big projects, Avid can take some time to open them too, but you should do a test yourself. I bet Avid opens projects 10 times faster than FCP. I can't remember the benchmark tests I saw about specifics, but they were pretty clearly in favor of Avid for time to open an existing project.
> >>>
> >>> So, to you, you're not really interested in editing between them as you are SWITCHING between projects. I can understand why you like FCP for this. Avid will definitely be a different workflow for you, but you have two solutions: open other project's sequences WITHIN another Avid project and work very quickly between them, or simply switch between projects and the increased speed of the Avid will make it less painful than with FCP (but still not as fast as switching tabs in FCP.)
> >>>
> >>> Steve Hullfish
> >>> contributor: www.provideocoalition.com
> >>> author: "The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction"
> >>>
> >>> On Nov 12, 2011, at 5:24 AM, Richard wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Thanks Steve.
> >>>>
> >>>> As well as copying and pasting between two projects, my daily workflow includes switching between three or more different projects.
> >>>>
> >>>> I prefer the tabbed timeline of FCP where I can instantly switch between multiple projects but I will have a look at MC6 when it is available.
> >>>>
> >>>> Richard
> >>>
> >>> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ------------------------------------
> >>
> >> Search the official Complete Avid-L archives at: http://archives.bengrosser.com/avid/
> >> Yahoo! Groups Links
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------
> >
> > Search the official Complete Avid-L archives at: http://archives.bengrosser.com/avid/
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
>
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