[Erik Pontius]

Yeah…don’t ever trust Avid’s preview monitors, it’s going to be doing de-interlacing and other things. Really need to have a good video outs to a calibrated studio monitor.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Here’s a couple of tips. I use Avid daily on a professional level, build most of my graphics and such in AE.

You can use your current settings dv/d1 720×480.
Export out of AE using the Quicktime Animation codec at full quality. The other advantage of the Animation codec in addition to being a lossless codec, is that it can also carry an alpha channel.
Change your render settings to generate fields. Choose lower fields first. You’ll find that your text will look crisper by generating fields rather than none.

Import into Avid, Choose “601/709 non-square”. Since you’ve created the graphic in an RGB space, choose the option for RGB. Choose lower fields first. If you have an alpha channel, set it to invert alpha..if not choose ignore.

You’ll have much better results.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Yes. One of the nice things about the Avid software is you can install the software on multiple systems, your license to run the software is the dongle. These purchase upgrades will usually have a dongle updater which will update the dongle to allow the software to run. The downloads are pretty huge, make sure you’ve got a nice broadband connection.
You’ll need to check your system specs against what is required for the software, which can be found here:
https://www.avid.com/products/xpresspro/specs.asp

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

5.7 isn’t a free upgrade. In your case it will put you back $50 for the download.

https://www.avidstore.com/us/index.cfm?page=templates/product_grp_index&categoryid=69

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Don’t forget that Photoshop also has a color profile for SMPTE-C as well as the “NTSC Colors” filter.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You’ll need to convert them…if possible.
Flv are Flash video files. You’ll have to look around to find a utility that might be able to convert these to AVI or Quicktime.
RMVB is a RealMedia video file…notoriously hard to convert.
WMV is a windows media file, should be easy to find a utility to convert it at least to Avi then you can convert to Mov.

If at all possible I would see if you can get these files in better formats and as high a resolution as you can. If you are able to get these converted, the quality is going to suffer.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I wasn’t aware that you could export an QT ref of HDV footage from Avid. Did you transcode your sequence to Avid’s DNxHD 145 codec?

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

From my experience, local network news are going to want 4×3, you might be better off doing a center cut 4×3 to tape. The majority of local news is still analog 4×3 and some are broadcasting DTV but still 4×3. I think there are only a few big markets that are HDTV.
You might contact the station to find out for sure…if it’s anamorphic they may not un-squeeze it by mistake or not have the ability to do so…letterbox might be a safer bet if they will accept it.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

The encoding for Zune. The screen shots of the PRX all show 23.976. I just re-read it and noticed that the text you had 24p…

In any event, it looked fine…I don’t have a Zune so it was just an exercise in setting up the encode.

I ended up creating the sequence in AE at 24p and exporting it out using the Huffyuv codec to a AVI to use with media encoder.
I created a multi-channel wav with Adobe Audition and an AC3 file with an old Mac of mine with A pack (I think that’s what its called).
I did a couple of your examples with the AVI and multi-channel wav. Which turned out fine…though the WMcmd script example took forever.
I also encoded the uncompressed AVI to MPEG2, built a DVD using the MPEG2 and Ac3 file in encore. Played it back up converted to 1080p via my BD player…looked fantastic.
Guess I was bored last week.

I’d like to see more examples of when to use various settings in the WM Powertoy… You do a good job of explaining the function, it’s just more difficult for me to determine when to use it and what to set it at depending on the source material. Such as when to use Adaptive deadzone and overlap and when not to.
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge…

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Ok… that’s standard def widescreen PAL using square pixels. However, on import you’ll want to choose the 601/709 non-square pixel import option…which I think you discovered.

You HDV comps should be 1920×1080 square pixels.
16×9 Widescreen PAL SD 1024×576 square pixels.
4×3 PAL SD 768×576 square pixels.

Erik