David Braswell
Forum Replies Created
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What flavor and version Avid are you working with? MC gives you fluidmorph which is usually pretty smooth. OTOH, if your shot was “jittery” before the fastmo, speeding it won’t improve that.
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Xpress Pro
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Terminology isn’t always set in stone, but a layback in my neck of the woods is when you resync the final, sweetened audio to picture. It’s pretty common if you’ve had extensive sound design in a project.
BTW, nice catch Kenton!
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1-Place the bin in frame mode.
2-Select the clip you want to adjust.
3-Use JKL to find the frame you want to represent the clip.
Note: There may be a setting that has to be switched to allow you to playback from the bin… I don’t think so, but if this doesn’t work go through the settings.
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[Steve Johnson] “An image sequence first must be automatically transcoded into some codec Media Composer likes or thinks is appropriate for my project. This takes forever on my Quad core”
Not sure why a Quad is so slow, but yes, Avid transforms video/graphics to it’s OMF or MXF format. It adds metadata and a long alphanumeric name that allow it to associate the media with the right project. Whatever format Avid accepts, when it imports/transcodes, those are the eventual 2 formats it puts into the media folders.
[Steve Johnson] “I would like to apply multiple effects to a clip, but any given clip in the timeline has only one icon for effects”
Multiple effects in Avid are stacked using a procedure called “nesting”. Hold the ALT key as you drag the second and subsequent effects onto your video clip. Each subsequent effect pushes the previous one lower in the “stack”. Select your overwrite tool and double click the clip to expand the clip and see/modify all your effects. You can also use the “step in/step out” keys which look like down and up (respectively) arrows in the quick menu. Experience and experimentation will dictate when to use each method. Note: you cannot nest audio effects. You’re allowed one realtime and one rendered effect before you have to “bounce” the mixdown to another track. Boo Avid!
[Steve Johnson] “it doesn’t appear that Avid allows for a nesting of sequences.”
You can only open one sequence at a time. But you can drag a sequence into the source window and overwrite/insert it your open timeline. Be very observant of which tracks you’ve targeted and where they are going, especially when dealing with sequences having differing amounts of audio and video tracks.
[Steve Johnson] “Last, in a very basic project, inevitably I will need to zoom and/or pan footage.”
The simplest way to do this is to apply the 3D Warp effect found in the Blend category IIRC. It offers the basic transforms found in the motion menu of Premiere.
Comparison and contrast may allow you to get up to speed a bit quicker in the Avid. But as a Premiere user myself, I think you’ve just exhausted the usefulness of that method. Further gains may be accelerated by forgetting the old ways. Any way you slice it, the Avid is a strange beast. But once you become Avid-centric, you’ll hopefully discover a stable editor that allows you to concentrate on actual editing.
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Have you tried adjusting the sharpness or detail settings? DV is pretty on this cam, but my experience is it likes a bit more light than BG indicates in his manual. Also, with 1/3″ chips and small lens, it ultimately just looks like DV, pretty or not. That said, it does do a great job for the size.
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This sounds like an issue I’ve read about on Avid’s online forums. You might do a search there. I think it was hardware (video card in particular) related. Also, listing your particular hardware specs, and what version MC/Xpress you’re using may better enable others to help you.
Happy cutting 🙂
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The short answer is Avid discontinued the product (Avid FreeDV) and pulled support for it. You can probably scare a copy up through a search, but you’ll also need the unlock code for it.
Truthfully, it wasn’t necessarily the best introduction to Avid. It worked on my computer but was flaky on a few other boxes of classmates I knew. Your introduction should be to the interface, not Avid’s hardware finickiness.
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Assuming you and the recipient actually have the bandwidth to send/receive the files, I would assemble the clips you want to send and use the consolidate feature to gather them into a folder (other than your media drive folder). Send the Avid project file along with the folder of consolidated clips. The editor on the other end will copy the consolidated clips to his/her media drive. Then, import the appropriate bins from the project file that you send.
I wouldn’t worry about the Avid’s lengthy alphanumeric names for clips. It’s how it keeps track of things and normally does a good job of it.
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Use “matchframe” to locate the clip and put it in the source window.