media composers media and format issues

[John Pale]

[Ohad Marbach] “1. Importing video with alpha and sound forces me to do double import – one matte, and one video with music,
And only in the timeline I can dress the matte clip with the sound clip. It seems awkward to me.”

Yes. Its awkward, but that’s how it works. They’ve been getting around to changing some of this archaic nonsense in recent versions, but this one still stands for now.

[Ohad Marbach] “2. For some reason some png sequence are not loaded and googling showed that it was because they were created not as rgb but as cmyk and when I tried to convert in Photoshop it worked but the process was complicated and tedious.
But sometimes it does load without conversion. weird.”

Avid doesn’t support CMYK. Its surprising it worked at all.

[Ohad Marbach] “3. The png sequence and almost everything else I have in the timeline does not playback smoothly. Even in “yellow” quality. my computer is not new but Premier handled the same media easily and avid is slow and stuttery even with transcoding. specifically in this issue maybe I need to use a better transcode method? the source is 1980p 25fps mxf and final product should be xdmam 50i xmf and I used 1-1 mxf transcode.”

Avid has a matrix on their site of approved hardware. Yours may not be up to snuff. Avid works differently than Premiere. There is no Mercury Engine where some of the heavy lifting is done by the graphics card. That being said, if you transcoded to 1-1, you actually made the transcoded files uncompressed , which would be very large and hinder performance.

[Ohad Marbach] “4. Link to media not working with mxf videos. Just import. Not critical problem but annoying.”

This should work, but if you didn’t keep the same folder structure from the camera card, you may have problems linking.

[Ohad Marbach] “5. I do not like that all the files are encoded to the MXF / 1 folder because then I have no control over them. I solved with a simple software that defines any folder I choose as a drive. still annoying.
“

This is how it works in Avid. Media Management is rock solid in Avid because the program controls everything about how media is organized. I worked daily with Avid for many years, but for the last three, I have been using Premiere. There really is no comparison in robustness in this area…Avid wins hands down, but I admit its rigid. Its a tradeoff.