[Erik Pontius]

hold down the ctrl key (or mac equivalent) while moving the current time indicator in the timeline to scrub through with audio.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Don’t forget that Andrew Kramer and Aharon have DVD’s available.
Their tutorials teach you the practical uses of AE and have a lot of good tips for workflow as well…more of a hands on approach.

https://store.creativecow.net/p/52/serious_effects__compositing

https://store.creativecow.net/p/51/after_effects_the_next_level

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

There are several things that I can see in my own workplace that can cause a stagnate or unimaginative in-house production crew.
1) lack of funds for training, equipment, software. Often times in-house crews get shorted in the overall budget and get stuck with aging equipment, older versions of software (or total lack thereof) and other tools. Outside post houses tend to keep up with current and new software and hardware offering in order to remain competitive.
2) video deliverables tend to come up last in the planning. I’m not sure I could count the number of times a client has come to me in a urgent panic a day or so before a company event wanting a complex video cut. The conversation usually starts with “we’ve been planning this event for months, and we were in a meeting yesterday and thought…”wow wouldn’t it be great to have some video playing at the event”… and oh yeah the event is tomorrow”. So the lack of an adequate runway for a project really limits the creativity. Outside post houses will either turn down the job or charge an incredible sum of money to accommodate. Video needs to be included in the conversation at the beginning of the process…not at the end.
3) lack of a “tangible” cost to clients. In house production (at least in the company I work for) is for the most part free. With the exception of booking a crew for a production outside of town and the travel expenses, the production services are free. This is generally why companies start in house production…it’s cheap. However, it is a two edge sword. The lack of a “cost” to the clients tends to lead to abuse. I’ve had quite a few edit session blown off by clients because they were busy, forgot about it, etc… Heck, it’s free, why care. Or you have clients that are stuck in continual revision…often times in corporate environments, your client does not have final, final approval…spending days on a edit only to have it finally shown to the exec who has a completely different idea which leads to another round of revisions. In outside post houses where editing is charge by the hour, you generally have clients who have their act together prior to a session. Skip a session? Still have to pay. Need changes to an edit because you didn’t communicate properly with your boss…sure, but it will cost you.
This kind of abuse can really demoralize an in house production staff.

my $.02

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

MXF media is stored in the “Avid MediaFiles\MXF\1” folder and so on.
also, you can force Avid to rebuild the indexes by deleting the msmFMID.pmr and msmMMOB.mdb from the MXF and OMFI folders. This will cause Avid to re-inventory the files and build a new database… Which will often bring your files back online.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You might try the Adobe Audition forum… Soundbooth is sort of a derivative of it. There are Soundbooth posts in there now…

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

There is a nifty utility for the PC called “GSpot” that can help you to identify what codec a file was encoded with.

https://www.headbands.com/gspot/

Even when encoded in Avid’s quicktime codecs, it will still take Avid time to “import” the video since it is essentially converting or re-wrapping the quicktime MOV to Avid’s OMF file format to edit.
Also remember that the Avid codecs usually have strict requirements in terms of frame size.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

You might check out EEFX.com. They are made of a kind of looped fabric, with a stretchy nylon backing with a foam core. It’s worked great for me so far.
https://www.eefx.com/index.html

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

Has you tried turning off Aspect Ratio correction?

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

An alternative method, would be to write out the name using the pen tool to create masks on a layer. Then use the “Stroke” effect and click the option to do all masks sequentially.

Erik

[Erik Pontius]

If you are working with straight HDV footage, there will be a big performance hit since HDV uses MPEG2 compression and it is more taxing on the system to decode it properly.
You might try converting your HDV footage to a lossless codec like Animation or something similar. The files will be very large, but you will find that it will be easier to work with in AE.

Erik