[Jandle Johnson]

I do corporate video as well and have been (until this last project) using XDCCAM HD for the last year. We recently upgraded from 3.5 to 5.0. I can give you several reasons to upgrade. From a purely editing perspective Media Composer has finally addressed some long-standing annoyances of day to day editing:

The biggest of these is the ability of transitions to travel with segment mode editing. I can drag a clip across the timeline without losing any transitions attached to it.

I can also extend an edit to the in or out of another clip through any transition attached to the second clip. MC used to stop the extend before the transition start or end,forcing you do delete it, do the extend, and then reapply.

The third issue resolved is the abilty to edit from one sequence to another without worrying about “splitting the transition.”

Just these small improvements have been huge time and PIA savers.

I hadn’t thought much about XDCAM vs. tape until I started my current project which includes 100+ tapes in various forms of Beta and mini DV. After using clip based media for a year, going back to tape seemed like a pain as well. Yes it is important to look at media as it comes in but it is a faster process with disc-based media. It becomes a non-linear, instant access search instead of linear, and eliminates some of the timecode hassles that can complicate capturing from tape. My usual process is to link to a disc which populates the clips in a bin. I scroll through the clips I think I want and then choose what to consolidate to the hard drive.
The AMA feature is not perfect and has some annoyances of its own, but they are not as bad as having a batch capture hiccup due to pre-roll problems or timecode breaks.

Once you have been down the disc-based media road you do not want to go back, and the efficency improvements gained by a few seemingly simple fixes (There are others, but these had the biggest impact on how I work) Make the upgrade to 5.0 abolutely worth it and necessary to stay compatible with current post-production world.

[Jandle Johnson]

An alpha channel in an image file contains transparency information to tell the program which part of an image should be opaque, such as a logo, and what should be discarded (or keyed out)so that the video layers below can be seen, such as the green in a greenscreen shot. An alpha channel is based on luminance and if you looked at it by itself it would be a black and white image usually with white areas showing 100% opacity, and black showing transparent areas. Areas of grey would represent varying degrees of opacity. The alpha channel of a logo to be keyed over a background would appear as a white shilouette of the logo shape surrounded by black. If it had a drop shadow that would appear as a fuzzy grey area around the logo shape.

The alpha import settings in the avid are used when you are importing a still or video file that has alpha information created by the application used to generate the image such as a logo from photoshop or an animated logo or greenscreen key from after effects. These settings are telling the avid to 1. look for alpha info, and 2. how to use it. The avid is unusual in that it interprets alpha info the opposite of every other application. It sees black as opaque and white as transparent. Therefore, it is necessary to check the “invert alpha” option when importing anything that is created by another application and/or not rendered using an avid codec. Once imported, the file with your “fill”, ie. a logo, is placed on V2 and the background placed on V1 to complete the composite.

[Jandle Johnson]

This article by Tim Wilson talks about doing just that….
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/hp-skyroom-sharing-is-nice

[Jandle Johnson]

As long as you keep the AMA-sourced sequence you can rebuild. When transcoding the rough cut check the “create new sequence” box. When done transcoding, move the sequence and its associated master clips into a separate bin then apply any effects and color correction you want. If this transcoded media is lost you can transcode the original AMA-sourced sequence again, still creating a new sequence. The offline clips from the first transcode can be relinked to the media files of the second transcode, so all that would need to be done is to re-render the effects if needed.

[Jandle Johnson]

Select all the clips in frame view, hold down the alt/option key, and drag them into the timeline. they will drop in order from top left to bottom right of the frame view.

[Jandle Johnson]

You can also use “export to device-XDCAM” from the output menu to export the timeline directly to the XDCAM disc as a file transfer. The 23gig discs will give you a bitrate choice but the 50gig will only allow 50mb 4:2:2.

[Jandle Johnson]

Just turn on the 16 x 9 monitors in your settings. The reformat effect is for adding a letter box to anamorphic(squeezed)footage for 4×3 output.

The AMA function is good for gaining immediate access to the XDCAM footage. I usually use it to choose my selects and then consolidate what I want onto my hard drive.