Chris Conlee
Forum Replies Created
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Actually, my advice is to stop trying to make Avid act like Final Cut. They are different animals (although Avid is trying to add functionality to ease the curve for FCP folks). As soon as I quit trying to force Media Composer to act like something else, and started to understand WHY it does things the way it does things, it became second nature. Eventually you’ll have your ah-ha moment, and if you’re like many others, you’ll never look back. I can’t imaging cutting on anything else now, it’s that second nature.
Good luck.
Chris
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I’ve cut several independent features which were recorded on the H4N and sync was never an issue. The preamps are a little noisy, so if you’re dealing with quiet ambiences or whispered dialog, it can sometimes be a bit of an issue.
I just bought a used Fostex FR2Le, and am extremely impressed by it. I have noticed NO noise in the preamps, and the quality of my recordings have been pristine. Very happy with it.
Chris
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[jon smitherton] “Funny, I think the irony is that the film has been edited before…and was perfectly fine.”
Me too. I have no idea why they made this movie again. Irritating.
Chris
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[Dominic Deacon] “The big problem for me is project bloat. I’m working on a feature with it right now and starting to wish I’d gone with AVID. The project file- which is admittedly very large- now takes five minutes to open and it’s slowing down a touch as I go. Still way faster than FCP7 ever was but I’ve gotten used to everything being instant.”
This is something I don’t think non-Avid people realize: in Avid, every single bin is a separate file, wrapped in a folder which IS the project file. Simply stated, it takes very little time to open a project, because you’re just pointing to a folder. Each bin opens quickly as well, as it’s only a subset of the entire project. It’s also this architecture which allows Avid’s extensive project sharing capabilities.
Every editor can have read/write access to the master project (ie, the folder), but only the first editor who opens a bin has read/write access to that bin — everybody else simply has read access. Actually kind of amazing that Avid had this thought out 20 years ago and it has proven so robust that I can still open AVBV projects from the early nineties on a current generation Avid.
I’m consistently frustrated on other NLEs when I have to wait more than a minute to open even the most complex projects.
Chris
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Yes, you can backup the Project files (the whole directory of them). They’re simply the databases which reference your media. You can put them anywhere, really, as long as you remember where.
Chris
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[Mynor de León] “Don´t understand why avid takes so long to put those files in the timeline.”
Avid was originally developed to be absolutely bullet-proof reliable. They knew they were dealing with a lot of old-school film editors who didn’t have a clue about computers, so they designed Media Composer to import every single piece of media and convert it to a reliable and consistent CODEC and put it in a reliable and consistent place on the the harddrive.
That legacy code still exists, and it’s still a valid way of working, because you will NEVER lose a piece of media through user error, because it’ll be right where Avid put it. But it can feel frustrating to wait for the conversion to happen. If you deal with media in Avid native codecs, it can do a “fast import” which is basically a re-wrap and transfer, which basically happens at the speed of a file copy.
Or, the newer Avids allow you to simply link to files using Avid Media Access, or AMA. It’s fast, and it works, but it brings with it all the unpredictability of having files spread all over your hard drives that the other NLEs have. If you’re diligent about file management, you won’t have any problems.
I’m not sure there are any AMA plugins for AVI though. There might be, but I doubt it.
As has been mentioned, Avid is a horse of a different color, and it’ll take a while to get used to it. But if you throw away what you know and adopt the Avid way, you’ll learn to love and appreciate it.
Chris
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I agree. The 24p footage can easily be converted to just about any standard framerate via the optically familiar 3:2 pulldown. A lot of folks call a 24p master the “univeral master” for just that reason.
Chris
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This update was actually posted to the App store on the 6th… 😉
Here’s an earlier thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/26036Chris
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My sense is that MC 6.x broke something with their “open architecture.” Given that there are now multiple reports of sluggish behavior using products from different vendors, I think the problem lies with Avid. MC 5.x was smooth as butter with the Matrox MXO2 Mini. It’s now almost unusable. The new drivers from Matrox (for PC only, so far) supposedly improve the situation, but not much.
Hopefully Avid will figure this out sooner than later, because I can’t afford to buy a Nitris box.
Chris
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Honestly, I think you’ll technically be better off with the HVX. It records in 4:2:2, whereas the AF100 records is 4:2:0, thus making a proper key that much harder to achieve, all else being equal.
Chris