Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
-
Click on the keyframe you want to copy from so it turns pink, press Control-C (or Command-C), click on the keyframe you want to copy to, press Control-V (or Command-V). It’s simple Windows or Mac copy & paste.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If you use Avid long enough, sooner or later you will find that your beloved system will no longer have the guts or firepower to run the latest update from Avid. On XpressPro, you are on your own to spring for the new hardware. In the professional-level systems, the upgrade comes with an entriely new PC and some boards, such as when Symphony went to version 3.
Good luck with your Avid.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I suggest you contact your friendly neighborhood Avid dealer. They should be willing to get the info from the tech support people at Avid if their own technicians don’t know how to make this work for you.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If you want Spectrmatte, you need to upgrade to at least software-only Media Composer.
You can get Ultimatte as an AVX plug-in for Avid editors, but IMO it is a pain to use. I believe that Boris also has some advanced keying capability, but I do not use thier software.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
We don’t have the XDCAM deck, but I saw an Avid demo of XDCAM a few months ago, and they had everything hooked-up over Ethernet. You import the low-rez proxies over your network, do the rough cut, and then the portions of the hi-res transport streams used in the cut import almost instantaneously.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Two possible sources of Capture and/or Digital Cut problems are anti-virus software and internet firewalls. I’ve seen it intermittently halt both processes on Avid systems that use them. I recommend that Avids not be connected to the internet unless required for installing an Avid update.
I agree with Jon Zanone that you should give the Mojo another try, as it provides the CPU power to make many effects into real-time effects. But remember that Mojo must connect to a PCI bus segment that is not shared with any other storage controller being used for local or shared storage. Certified PCs (workstations) have 3 PCI bus segments, and you connect the Mojo and storage to different PCI bus segments, which might require installing a second board with Firewire ports. Normal home/office PCs have only 1 PCI bus segment.
I don’t like to beat people up about non-certified systems, but the fact remains that all NLE editing software is highly complex. It expects certain hardware resources to exist in the computer at a certain level of performance. Otherwise, as they say, “Your mileage may vary.” You might luck-out and have everything work fine, and you might end up with nothing.
I run XpressProHD on a certified system, and I don’t remember having even the slightest hiccup. So the software can work as advertised.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
mpe,
Thank you for posting the referrence to the article on 24P.com. This is indeed interesting information, as we installed a new Avid Symphony Nitris only a few months ago, and that system absolutely does not support Varicam metadata in 720/23.976P projects. The Avid dealer put us in contact with Avid technical people in Tewksbury who swore that this capability would exist only in DS Nitris and in software-only Media Composer. We came very close to not acquiring the Symphony Nitris system because of this.
Their solution was that we should spend another $5,000 for a copy of Media Composer to capture Varicam media for the Nitris. I think Avid was a bit upset at my solution to this problem. We run Varicam footage through the Final Cut Pro system in the next room to do the frame rate conversion and then edit on the Nitris.
Hopefully, Avid will include this capability in Symphony Nitris 1.7.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Caption data in line 21 does not survive MPEG-2 encoding (although I have seen it carry over on rare occasions). You need to export a caption file for DVD authoring from the software that created the closed caption data on the master. Then import that file into DVDSP, and your caption data will be there in the final authored output.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The correct way to do these projects is to run the camera in 24-frame mode, which still records 720/59.94P but flags the frames necessary for 24-frame playback in metadata. Then Avid DS or Final Cut Pro will throw away the unneeded frames during capture to a 23.98 sequence. (Avid Nitris, XpressProHD and Adrenaline do not have this capability.)
If the camera was not run in 24P mode, then you can convert your finished video to 23.98P in an HD standards converter, but it is a nasty conversion that will most likely produce some motion judder due to the loss of temporal resolution.
If you need help with this at some point, I do this type of conversion and prep work for motion picture film recording.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The ability to display subtitles is required by the DVD spec. Any player that had the DVD logo “should” work coorectly to display subtitles. On the other hand, playing a DVD using a software player on PC or Mac may introduce issues.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City