Dylan Reeve
Forum Replies Created
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[Kevin Monahan] “Try for one day to edit with only keyboard shortcuts in FCP. You’ll find that eventually, you can edit even faster than Avid. Again, I’m a former Avid editor.”
I’m dubious, I’m pretty quick in Avid, but also I’m actually not doing any cutting in FCP, only online finishing, the demands are fairly different.
[Kevin Monahan] “Because you might have a clip on V2 that you didn’t want to be slipped. I think the functionality could be moved to Auto Select, but that would be a feature request.”
Fair enough. It’s not a major issue I guess, I don’t have to do this often, but still feels a little cumbersome when I do. I still think Avid largely.
I’ve nearly got my sequence back in order now, but I’m losing my mind a little bit. Now I just need to find out if I can reconform my slightly retimed sequence in Color… Here’s hoping!
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[Kevin Monahan] “X to mark clip
Opt + A to select in to out
S = Slip Tool
[ or ] to trim”That’s a slightly improved way of doing it, I think – at least I don’t have to touch the mouse 🙂
[Kevin Monahan] “FCP is not Avid. You know that bro. It’s never going to be “just like Avid”. Thank God. This coming from a former Avid editor.”
I am certainly aware of that by now… But sometimes for things like this I wonder why the approach in FCP isn’t a little less involved – this seems like a great example… Why does the clip have to be selected, the slip can only ever apply to a single clip (as far as I can tell anyway). So why not, when in slip mode, could the changes be applied to whatever clip is under the playhead? It would certainly be more streamlined in a process like this where I need to make small slips to many clips, and it’s doesn’t seem like it would cause any undue problems.
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[Gabe Cotto] “PC’s have a well known problem with memory leakage, which can cause your machine to freeze, or starting having seizures if your run multiple programs at once, i.e. Avid, After Effects, or Photo Shop.”
There is no such overall problem with Windows or “PC’s” – some applications have memory leaks, but there’s certainly nothing endemic in the operating system. I very often run Avid and Photoshop together, and After Effects too at times, and very rarely have stability or memory issues (although with some large HD projects there just isn’t enough memory for AE which can be very demanding).
[Gabe Cotto] “PC’s are more prone to virus’s, files becoming corrupted at random, and hardware failure in general”
That is perhaps true, but it’s really not hard to avoid. I’ve not had a virus or trojan on any of my computers for at least 5 or 6 years.
[Gabe Cotto] “Random media files in projects unlinking from their clips. Avid support was UNABLE to diagnose the problem. This is not a chronic problem, but this has happened on two different machines more then once.”
In more than 6 years of using Avid constantly and literally thousands of hours of footage, I’ve never seen anything like that. Even if there were an error like that, Avid robust media management would make it very easy to recover from something like this.
[Gabe Cotto] “While working in projects Avid will loose connection with its Dongle and shut-down. Upon reopening the project everything is fine. But its still a time killer.”
Another very weird and definitely atypical error. I’ve used more that 30 different Avid edit suites and never had any dongle errors (aside from when there wasn’t actually a dongle present).
[Gabe Cotto] “(on PC with 4gb of RAM)If you are rendering a project in AE, or have Photoshop open for an extended period of time, plan on Avid not being able to allocate enough memory to continue to buffer video for playback.”
AE is a massive memory hog, that’s true on Windows and OS X. With a large comp rendering in AE I can barely operate FCP.
[Gabe Cotto] “Avid MC does not allow you to change project formats, or inter-mix SD, HD, 16×9, or 4×4 video in a timeline. Why is this a problem? Try explaining to client why you have to charge them more money so you can have a FCP editor do something they thought you could do.”
You might have to enlighten us a little more on this one, because Avid can definitely mix all those things. I’ve finished HD projects that include 16:9 and 4:3 standard def footage. I’ve had 4:3 and 16:9 standard definition projects that use HD footage. The only limitation is frame-rate. And while FCP can mix framerates, there seem to be a lot of caveats in doing so (the results can be pretty poor in some cases).
[Gabe Cotto] “Shared media: Simply put unless you have enough money to buy Unity ($40,000+), good look being able to move projects around or allow them to be accessible to more then on editor at a time. Without Unity its a long time consuming process.”
There are a number of other options for shared media with Avid (EditShare and MetaLAN string to mind).
In practice we’ve had very good success with replicated media where media is consolidated to different suites. In one case the ingest process was to capture 1:1 footage on one suite and then make transcode 15:1 versions of that footage onto removable drives. The low-res media was copied to a number of edit suites. All that needed to be shared between the suites was the sequences. It was surprisingly simple really and pretty time-efficient.
[Gabe Cotto] “But if you really want complete creative control of your projects stick with FCP.”
The ‘creative’ angle is one I hear a lot, but I don’t really get it. There’s very little I can do in FCP that I can’t do in Avid really. The real creative aspect of video post is in the actual editing, and really in that case there’s not practical difference in terms of what can be achieved.
For the offline/online workflow, or for multiple versioned projects I think Avid’s media management alone makes it a better choice.
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Kenton’s approach is indeed the best.
The guys at your work have put you a bit wrong really. Deleting a project will do nothing to the media (aside from remove your direct access to it as there’s no longer bins, but it can be found in Media Tool still).
The only problem with Kenton’s approach (or, in fact, actually renaming a project) is that the clips will still be associated with the old project in the Media Tool. But this, in practice, is unlikely to be a problem. If you really want to, it is possible to ‘Consolidate’ all your clips into a new project (it will essentially copy them and change their project association).
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My experiments with nesting still leave me confused, but it now seems to work like this…
If I open a Sequence into the view and mark In/Out points then edit or drag into the sequence, it now is a copy of that sequence, nested within the target sequence (so changes made to the original within the Browser have no effect). Also changes in duration of the nested sequence (accessed by double-clicking in timeline) don’t ripple the ‘host’ timeline.
However if I just drag from the Browser into the sequence, then it maintains a relationship with the original, and any change in duration seems to ripple the timeline.
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Using a DV camera to act as a capture/transcode device probably isn’t too bad – it’s certianly not going to be the weak point in the chain.
Most important thing is probably going to be getting a good tape deck to play them in. Something like a Fostex 4-Track would be good as they built them with really good tape heads in them and a pretty tight mechanism.
Another option would be something like a M-Audio USB/Audio converter (similar products are available from many other companies too, I think Edirol/Roland have a few options) – this will allow you to capture audio at higher sample/bitrates (96kbs/24bit for example) which would be handy if you want to try and sweeten or restore them a little.
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I dunno, that’s been a favourite video of mine for a long time.
Everyone has their own prejudices and ideas, but the advice I’ve seen in this thread has generally seemed pretty reasonable.
Avid has weaknesses for sure, but certainly the types of errors he’s been talking about are things I see more in FCP forums than Avid ones. I think Avid is more powerful as a editing workhorse, while perhaps FCP has a stronger creative bent?
Avid certainly has been designed a lot more rigidly, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage (although once you get past the initial learning curve that swings much more toward the advantage side I think).
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The cables are just hook-ups really. A Composite signal requires only one connection for the signal, a Y/C or S-Video requires either 2 connections (with BNC/RCA connectors) or only one (with S-Video connectors) and a Component signal requires three connections.
BNC and RCA connectors are just two different connectors for exactly the same signals, they are interchangeable and adaptable.
In the case of BNC (from Kona) to RCA (Composite DVD input) you only need a single RCA-BNC cable to carry the video signal.
With a slightly more specialised cable (and possibly a couple of adapter connectors) you can also take the signal from two of the BNCs on the Kona (when the output mode is set correctly) into the S-Video input on the DVD recorder, if it has one. There should be details about that option on the AJA site I believe.
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Amazing, something from my backward Avid way of doing things that carries over 🙂
I’ve just watch 20-something short films, and twenty the night before, and twenty (including mine) tomorrow… My brain is mush now.
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My approach (one I’ve borrowed from my Avid way of thinking) is to make a default title and then put it in the timeline and edit it. So I set it up, then drag it into a bin.
Seems to work.