-
I’m sure you’ve heard this before! Please don’t get me wrong…
Hello everyone
I hope what I’m about to say doesn’t become the cause of an attack from the fans of Avid… 🙂 Just kidding… OK! My question is this: I have been a Premiere Pro user for a long time now and during the last months I started to do some serious experimenting with Avid Xpress Pro on a software based PC (in comparison to my P4 3.06 GHz PC that works with PPro and is equipped with a Matrox RT.x 100 video card).
I have to say my first impression of Avid Xpress Pro was great: a new interface that, once you get used to, the basic tasks such as cuts, transitions, static titles etc are done very easily thanks to the fast menu. Also, great workflow with the A and V buttons in the timeline that you can turn off and on according to what you want to do.
And here begins another story! I also found that other basic tasks are giving me a headache. At first, it seems I can’t move a clip any way I want to. I can?t just move the clip in any direction, I first have to move the cursor to the appropriate position. Also, what happens when I want to import other videos or images (I’m talking about plain avi or jpg files)? Panic! Rendering, rendering, rendering… Even for a simple dissolve! And if I want to use a motion title… God help!I don?t mean to sound rude but it seems as if I am either missing something here or avid is not what it is said to be. I understand it is used by a great number of professionals but I fail to see why. PPro with the help of a hardware card such as a Matrox RT.x 100 or RT.x 2 can do almost anything and, correct me if I’m wrong, an Avid PC solution with a Mojo (even SDI) doesn?t even do half. Am I wrong? I REALLY want to switch to Avid but I’m afraid wy workflow, having spent just some thousands of bucks more, would really be much much slower… 🙂 What’s your opinion.
Thank you very much in advance
Themis
-
4 Replies
-
It seems to me that you are doing something completely wrong. Why don’t you try to give detailed examples of your problems and let us help you work them our. It should not take you more thatn about 1/2 of a second to render a dissolve. Motion titles are no problem either, give me some more info.
-
“it seems I can’t move a clip any way I want to. I can?t just move the clip in any direction, I first have to move the cursor to the appropriate position”
You might have “default snap to edit” turned on, You can turn it off, then use CTRL to apply it when needed.
Another thing that I think is valuable info when coming from FCP or Premiere (I’m a former Prem 5.0-6.5 user myself) is: Don’t THINK like Premiere, learn how Avid thinks, and your experience with it will be much smoother. The more you try to make it work like Premiere, the harder the transition will be.
But as stated above, let us know specifics and maybe we can help determine what it is you’re doing or how to do it better.
Kenton VanNatten
Avid Editor (for hire) -
Hello again
Sorry it took me so long to reply but I have been working like crazy. You are right about the fact that I shouldn’t try to make Avid work like Premiere. Apart from that, isn’t it true that rendering takes place in case of every different format that I import into Avid (e.g. avi, jpg, tga or mpeg files?) Also, what happens when creating masks or importing transparent objects for keying? How do all these work? For sure thethousands of editors who use Avid must know better but it seems I?m missing something here… Maybe it is just because I?m only a newbie 🙂
By the way, is there any site or pdf with avid basics or avid learning in general?
Thanks for your response and advices
Themis
-
[quote]”isn’t it true that rendering takes place in case of every different format that I import into Avid (e.g. avi, jpg, tga or mpeg files?) Also, what happens when creating masks or importing transparent objects for keying? How do all these work?”[/quote]
Not necessarily rendering per se, what happens whenever you import anything is that Avid creates a .omf file that corresponds to the media you are importing. So, when you have a jpg and import it, Avid creates it’s omf media file and a master clip. This allows you to keep the jpg safely as it is in original form and the Avid uses it’s own omf file wrapper.
The same holds true when capturing, omf media files get created, it’s just a little more “subtle” I guess you could say.
Avid works by having a Master Clip (in your Bin) and a Media File(s) that corresponds to the Master Clip. The advantage here is that you can completely lose all the Media Files and as long as you have the Master Clips you can recover the missing Media by doing a simple Batch Capture or Batch Import.
And as far as creating masks/alphas for keying, you just create them (ie in Photoshop) and import them with the correct Import settings.
Here is a great document (it’s a little out of date, but much of it is still very relevant) Read through this and it may explain a lot.
Kenton VanNatten
Avid Editor (for hire)
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up