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Trying to switch from PPro to Avid…workspace/monitor issues.
I’m a film student, and for the past five years I’ve used Premiere Pro. I’m trying to make the switch to Avid Media Composer 5, but the little things are killing me. Mainly, monitor issues and workspaces.
I’m using a four monitor setup, but all four monitors are different sizes:
1. 23″ LG LCD at 1920×1080
2. 22″ LG LCD at 1920×1080
3. 19″ Sceptre LCD at 1366×768 mounted portrait on a swing arm
4. 19″ Philips CRT at 1600×1200My workspace on PPro was to use the two LG’s for my main editing, the portrait mounted Sceptre held all of my bins and effects controls, since I could swing it out of the way when not needed, and the Philips wasn’t used (I reserved it for things like internet windows, Word windows I needed while editing, etc.) Premiere has no issues, you move things where you want them, close it, reopen and it’s all there.
Avid, not so much. I’ve heard Avid dislikes different monitor resolutions/sizes, but I can’t do anything about that right now. Since going back to school, no more money for more toys. Everytime I open Avid, it scrolls the workspace across all four monitors, and since the tops and bottoms of all of my monitors are at different points, it forces MC into a long thin window. It takes 5 minutes every time I open the window just to rearrange my workspace.
I’ve searched for hours on here for ways to fix this, but I haven’t found anything. Is there a way to FORCE Avid to ignore everything but the two LG monitors, but without disabling those monitors? I still need them for other workflows, and disabling/re-enabling every time I want to use Avid would be worse than having to rearrange my workspace.
Also, every time I try to move a bin up underneath another bin, or the timeline underneath the source/record monitors, if they’re touching when I let go of the mouse, the one I’m dragging “jumps” down, almost off the screen. I have to drag them so that there’s space between them, which is hurting screen real estate. Any thoughts?
Thanks so much for all of your help. I really hope to be able to make the switch to Avid, it’s just so dang user unfriendly…
Chris
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3 Replies
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Anyone? It may be a driver issue, unfortunately there’s not a driver for my graphics card(s) that I can find which is both Windows 7 (x64) compatible AND Avid MC 5.0 compatible. I updated to the most recent, but that’s probably going in the opposite direction. Also uninstalled the newest Quicktime and installed version 7.6.6, but it didn’t help.
Thought I was going to put my fist through my monitor this morning when I switched from the Source/Record Toolset to Color Correction Toolset, not realizing it was going to mean having to spend another 10 minutes just FINDING the timeline, since Avid shifted it way off into space (had to stretch the Avid window into the third monitor to find it), lost half of my bins and made the timeline three monitors wide, and 1/4″ tall. Workspaces don’t work. Toolsets don’t work. Drivers don’t work. Once you get it set up, it works find, as long as you don’t need to change toolsets/workspaces, move anything, rearrange anything, stretch anything or close/reopen the program.
Avid is supposed to be one of the most advanced editing system in the world. You’d think it would be equipped to deal with the most popular OS in the world (since Windows 7 has officially outpaced Windows XP).
Had hoped to figure this out in time to spend Easter with my little girl, but now I’m hoping to figure it out before she graduates. I’m going to go and head-butt a brick wall.
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Avid qualifies video cards for a reason – they do extensive testing on them to ensure performance and reliability. So, I would think that if you have ouptut issues, well, there’s a reason for that – you’re going off book. Avid has not endorsed it, so any oddness you experience, well, that’s on you, unfortunately.
You may want to check this link out, perhaps the discussion will help, someone has done it AND used mixed resolutions.
https://community.avid.com/forums/p/80464/449201.aspx
Out of curiousity, what Video card(s) are you using to get 4 GUI outputs? Or, are you using 2 cards?
~Michael
.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior applications editor . post workflow consultant
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You sir, are my hero! That did the trick. After moving my monitors with differing resolutions above the other monitors, Avid ignored them. It will take some getting used to, having to bring my mouse “Up” to go to the monitor that is down and to the right of the monitor beside it, but I can deal with that, at least until I can replace my monitors without matching resolutions.
When I built my PC, I built it to run Premiere Pro, and it does that flawlessly. Now that I’m trying to transition to Avid, I realize I need better video cards, but cost is an issue.
My PC is a 64-bit Quad-core processor, 8GB Ram, and dual video cards, an nVidia GeForce GTS 250 for my main processing, and an nVidia GeForce 8600 GTS, pretty much just for the other two monitors. So far the machine has run Avid with no problems, I’ve only dropped frames when watching full res 1080p video, full quality, on 9 overlying tracks, all with keyframes and unrendered effects. And even then, it only dropped 1 or 2 frames. The cards seem to be holding up fine, it’s just this issue, which apparently is more due to the mismatched monitors and resolutions, because now it is completely fixed. Still, new monitors and dual quadro’s will have to make an appearance when next I’m able to afford it.
Thanks again. I really appreciate the help. Now let’s see if I can learn to use this thing! lol
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