Importing images into Media Composer

[Michael Hancock]

That’s how Avid works.

To use the full frame size, drop a clip into your timeline (doesn’t matter what the clip is). Then go to your Effects Palette and apply the Pan and Zoom effect, under the Image category. Go into effect mode and click the little grey button on the top of your Effect editor. This will open a dialog box where you select the full size jpeg. You can now zoom in and out on the photo, and move it on the X and Y axis. Sadly, you can’t rotate it.

If you need to rotate your pics go into Boris FX (ships with Media Composer, called Avid FX, unless you have the Academic version which doesn’t come with third party plugins). Or buy the StageTools plugin, which is great for this sort of thing.

Michael

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I’ll be working late.

[Eric Nicastro]

I did all of that but my images still look strange, almost like they’re pixelated. They’re not terrible quality but just something doesn’t look right, for one thing the lines are jaggy. I’m working with uncompressed tifs with image resolutions of 5300×3300 with 300dpi and 24 bit depth. I have my video quality setting to full quality 10-bit.

I worked with one in Avid FX to see how they would look and they came out looking great. But I’d rather work with them on the timeline because I have audio cues I need to hit. And when I imported the picture into Avid FX, it imported in at its native size.

I don’t need to rotate, just zoom in and out on the pictures and move left and right.

[Michael Hancock]

You’re using the Pan and Zoom effect? Check the render quality in your Effects Editor. It defaults to realtime, which is great because it previews in realtime, but it sucks in the quality department. Set it to Avid High Quality and take a break while it renders. It should look as good, or better, than AvidFX does.

Also, how much are you zooming in? Go in too much and it will start to pixelate regardless. You can only zoom in so much before you see each individual pixel in all their glory.

Michael

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I’ll be working late.

[Grinner Hester]

You’ll wanna use After Effects for this. Pan and Scan is just kind of a band aid for those of us who have yelled about full sized graphic imports for years. It’s limiting and it’s quite aliased just like their DVE. I don’t use it at all.
After Effects is still every Avid editors best freind.

[Eric Nicastro]

I changed my render settings and it looks perfect now. But why does Avid have to be so difficult when working with still pictures? Final Cut Pro and Premiere are just drag and drop and move and resize. This pan and scan is such a pain in the ass.

[Grinner Hester]

It’s just a difference in current thinking vs old school thinking. Again, pan and scan was an after thought band aid that they have adhered to rather than re-write old code. It’s obviously beyond them to write a usable DVE as it’s not changed since ’95 when they introduced the 3D DVE in Media Composer version 5.
To me, it’d be easier for them to work out a deal with adobe that simply makes AE Avid’s DVE within the app itself.

but that would be forward thinking.

[Elizabeth Cook]

Have you ever used Moving Pictures? It requires a TIFF. After Effects is probably the best way to do it – but if it’s a simple movement – like a slow push in – Moving Pictures is a great plug in for AVID. Also – I am wondering if 300dpi is overkill. You can import the picture at 72 dpi and it actually may help. Remember you’ll be viewing it at 72 dpi on a monitor anyway.

Good luck!
elizabeth

[Herbid Mulyo]

I am using Boris FX 2 Input.

[Peter Farnsworth]

sort of on the subject, i made a video in AE of some photos and then exported it using the DV settings but it came out looking like junk. what settings do you use to export the sequence of photos in order to import it back into avid?

[Grinner Hester]

Uncompressed quicktime using the old meridien codec is best for me. It’s clean, can fast import, and is alpha friendly.