Bill Stephan
Forum Replies Created
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If you can learn the Xpress Pro interface well, you will have 90% of what you need to operate a Media Composer or Adrenaline. Those systems give you intraframe editing (painting/masking/garbage matting), and 3D Warp (high-end DVE, similar to the a Grass Valley Krystal unit), plus more real-time effects and the ability to play more streams in real time. You can learn these as you become more proficient on the high-end systems.
Nitris, on the other hand, is a totally different animal with a steep learning curve. Avid has attempted to make it more Media Composer-like.
For the type of work you are doing, I see no compelling reason to switch programs unless you are longing for a position in the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild.
As Charlie pointed out, I think the current generation of Avid products works much better on PC.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If the yellow light on the drives stay lit all the time, then that is a problem. If it happens to all your drives, then the common elements are the SCSI board in the computer and the SCSI cable. Maybe the board is loose or not entirely seated in the slot, or possibly it got zapped by static electricity. Both can happen when moving electronic devices such as computers.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I haven’t used Mac O/S 8 in a long time, but there should be an “About this Mac” entry in the Apple menu, which will show you the system configuration.
If your hard drives are all working when connected one-at-a-time to the computer, then your SCSI card and drives are good. At what point does everything stop working? Maybe you have a bad SCSI cable. Look for bent pins on the connectors.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Marie,
There is no wrong order to connecting SCSI drives. On the back of each, you will find a switch with a number. That is the SCSI address. Make sure each drive is set to a different number, and do not use address 7 — that belongs to the SCSI controller in the computer. If two drives have the same address number, that will cause a problem.
If the above does not resolve your problem, maybe a drive was damaged during moving. Connect them one at a time, and restart the PC each time until you find the offending drive.
I hope this helps.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The bigger problem is that your dongal was updated for version 5 when you upgraded and will not work on version 4.x. I believe Avid tech support has a way to downgrade the dongal. You should ask them also about the Mojo firmware.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
The USB drive/USB interface is too slow for uncompressed media. You need U320 SCSI drives for such work if you want the system to work reliably.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Fernando,
Thanks for the info. My Symphony is v. 2.1 running on NT, which doesn’t understand DVD anything. But I’m curious about why my G5 wouldn’t mount the DVD-RAM disc. My customer just needed to have the files copied onto a CD, as their Symphony wouldn’t read from the DVD-RAM disc either.
Maybe the DVD-RAM was a dud — it happens.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
If you look in the Photoshop forum on the Cow, someone just recently asked about how to embed the layer effects so that other applications will see them. Jayse Hansen provides a procedure to do this, which you might find helpful.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Replicators cannot change an authoring project in any way, even to do something such as enabling regions or copy protection. They will bounce the project back to you, telling you to check the appropriate setting in your authoring software and rewrite the DLTs.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Drop frame time codes do somtimes cause problems in certain authoring apps. I agree with Borjis that you should try encoding non-drop frame.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City