[Erik Pontius]

interesting…now I know what was in that briefcase in Pulp Fiction.

[Erik Pontius]

Avid uses extra frames (handles) before (head) a cut and after (tail) a cut to use in transitions. So if you have two clips that are both say a 30 seconds long. If you drop both of these clips end to end on the timeline and try to drop in a 1 sec (30 frame) dissolve, avid will complain. The way around this it before adding the clip to the timeline, set your out point 15 frames from the end of the first clip and set the in point of the second clip 15 frames into the clip. Add both clips to the timeline and drop in the transition. Avid uses the 15 “extra” frames from the end of one clip and the beginning of the next to create this 1 second (30 frame)transition.
Always keep this in mind when creating animation sequences in other applications (such as Adobe After Effects) making sure to create more material at the beginning and end than you need.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I found the brush metal kind of distracting. You could keep it, but treat it some how, blur it slightly, maybe color it slightly, use a circular ramp to vignette the edges, etc…
I also found that the important information you were trying to convey, the name of the program, was the smallest visual element and as such as easily overlooked…in other words, someone seeing it might think of this as a great button press animation and miss the point of the graphic. Making that information pop towards the end of the animation might help…Maybe start with the button only in the frame, the hand comes in presses the button and bam! the name pops up big and bold… experiment with it.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

What does your folder structure look like now on that new external drive. You should have one OMFI Mediafiles folder. Contained in that folder should be all your media files (there should NOT be another OMFI Mediafiles folder nested in this main OMFI Mediafiles folder). Also if you copied this media into an existing OMFI Mediafiles folder on this new drive (you made a comment about Avid seeing other things on this drive) you will need to delete the avid database files from this folder as well. That way Avid will rebuild the database files to include the new media as well.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

True. Speeds between USB 2 and 1394 are similar. However, I think that the preference for 1394 over USB for video has to do with the underlying architecture of the technology. With 1394 the peripherals (drives, devices, etc…) are intelligent enough to be able to manage and resolve bus conflicts for data transfer without involving many system resources. With USB the system itself is doing much of this resolution, causing a performance hit. So this is important with realtime video capture and playback any stutter with the system can cause problems.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

I’m not sure that there is am easy one. There is a clunky procedure documented in Avid’s knowledgebase that uses the Media Tool, an empty bin and finding media relatives and inverting the selection. Search the Avid knowledge base for “orphan files” for a step by step procedure.

Orphan media is one of my biggest gripes with Avid. I still don’t understand why the media tool does not mark orphan files with some kind of indicator. Opening the media tool and selecting the drives and projects, the last step it seems is “adding orphan media…”…so it apparently knows what’s what.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

In Avid Express, at least, Liquid might work similarly, you right-click in the Program monitor window and choose “16:9 video.” The source and program monitors then unsqueeze the video to widescreen.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You’ll need to make sure that you’ve put the media on the new drive into a folder on that drive called OMFI MediaFiles (Check the old drive where you copied the files from for the proper syntax). Then you might also need to delete the database files from the old drive you copied the files from, look for msmfmid.pmr and msmmmob.mdb and delete them. The next time you start up Avid, it will rebuild the database files and your media should no longer appear offline.
Just a note, USB is not the best to do your editing from…usually preferable to use firewire for external hard drives used for editing.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

So if your system battery (CMOS battery) is weak, dying or dead, the system clock will most likely set back to the 80’s/90’s or whatever the default value is. If this happens apparently the dongle is disabled. You might need to contact Avid support to get a dongle updater.
This is from the Avid knowledgebase article on “The dongle connected to this system has expired.”

When the CPU date on an Avid editing system is turned back beyond a certain point, 1996 and before, the Avid application will disable the dongle. You will then see the following error message when attempting to launch the Avid application: “The dongle connected to this system has expired. Please connect a valid dongle.” Changing the CPU date back to the present time will not fix this problem. The disabled dongle can only be cured by obtaining a dongle updater for the system. Newer dongles should not have this problem.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Also, Windows has a handy tool located in accessories\system tools called “Character Map” just bring up the font you are using, it then displays all the characters in it. From there you can copy any of the characters and paste them into AE. It also displays the alt character code… Very handy for graphic fonts…

Erik