Avid Color Settings

[Joshua Menco]

Michael,

I need your expertise once more:)

I’ve started working for a television production company. Saturday is my first day there.
I’m going to be receiving clips from several people (mostly laymen) and will have to import them in Avid and edit with them.

In other words, some clips may be 0-255, some 16-235 but I won’t know which are what.
What is a good workflow in your opinion to keep the colors correct for all the clips? I’d rather not import the clips and then go over them one by one to see if all the colors have come through correctly.

[Michael Phillips]

For each card or drive of media that comes in, I would recommend AMA linking to it. Then select one of the clips and go to source settings and go to one a frame where there is black or very dark. Look at the histogram – is it at 0 or 16? (or higher?). Form the source setting s you can apply the proper image color space.
Also, AMA transcode at least twice as fast as an import.

If you just want to deal with it all in color correction later, import/AMA link at Rec.709 or full range for everything.

Michael