Avid and video destined for the Web

[Shane Ross]

[James LaRuffa] “The clips that they purchased are 320 X 180 and are very high quality.”

Sorry, but I fail to see how anything that is THAT small can be high quality. Those are very small dimensions…who sells footage that is that small? For professional work?

[James LaRuffa] “The end result will be a video of that size.”

OK, that is all well and good, but when editing for the web, you generally don’t edit in the final dimensions that you will be outputting to. You edit at full size…say the size that your camera shoots, and the frame rate it shoots, and then convert to that format when you are done editing. You’ll be hard pressed to find many people, professionals, that edit at that frame size…editing in the small frame sizes that they deliver.

[James LaRuffa] “Is Avid just not made for doing this kind of work?”

Bingo. Avid is a broadcast and feature film editing platform. Designed for editing those formats. 720×486, 720×480 (DV), 1280×720, 1920×1080. Editing with those settings, then compressing to whatever you need when you are done. Premiere or Vegas or some other NLE might be better suited. That is not what Avid MC is designed to do.

[James LaRuffa] “Should I just use the Avid as an off line machine and then manually conform the project in AE somehow?”

I’d skip the Avid for this. Use Premiere. Because your source clips have such an odd frame size.

Shane

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[John Cuevas]

What’s happening is you are stretching the video when you bring it into the avid from 320 x 180 to 720×486 1.2 PAR. That’s where you are losing the quality. Avid is fine to export, if the quality is 100% to start, but you’ve already lost quality, you won’t get it back.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[James Laruffa]

Shane,
The clips are high quality, but just very small. There is no intention to ever make it larger. It is only going to be a small window within a website. The footage looks awesome, it is just small. The client saved money by purchasing clips that were a small size vs. the purchasing the full size clips and having the editor scale it down.

I have Premiere, but have not had a chance to learn it yet. I may just do the whole thing in AE since I need to do some compositing anyway.

It sounds Avid is not the solution for these types of projects.

Thanks for the reply!!!!

Jim

[James Laruffa]

John,
That’s what I thought. It looks bad on my monitor while editing as expected, but looks about 85% as good when I export it back to it’s original size.

Since AE can handle any frame size, there is no loss of quality.

I would think Avid would want to support smaller size video being that so much is now happening on websites, iphones, etc. Maybe everyone is just working with standard size clips..

Thanks!!!
Jim

[Richard Sanchez]

Despite all that’s happening on websites and cellphones, it’s still standard practice to work in standard broadcast resolutions through out post, and compress the final video at the end.

It makes more sense for After Effects to deal with different resolutions, since it’s aimed at com positing and motion graphics where you might composite elements of different resolutions together.

Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[James Laruffa]

Yes, I agree. I have never been in this situation before. I have always had to work with at least SD quality or better to start with.

But, since the low res clips cost 5 times less than the high res clips, and my client bought 7 of them, it may be hard to explain that to them.

With budgets tightening these days, and with small startups wanting to have video for their websites, I can see this happenning more and more.

Thanks,
Jim

[Steve Pankow]

You say it looks bad on your monitor – how did you import the clip into Avid? Maintain and Resize? Since it’s non-standard, try using Maintain Square.

[James Laruffa]

When I do maintain,square, the video comes in as small box which then is carried through the export.

[Steve Pankow]

Yes, but is the image quality preserved? You could export at your project’s native size and then take it into something that could generate a file that’s been cropped to whatever dimension you’re looking for I suppose.

I’ll have to agree with the other posters and say what you’re attempting is kind of non-standard. Avid is a tool designed around the needs of broadcast and film.