[Jimmy See]

Well this is all very interesting. I’m just starting out with AVID as is perhaps plain to see and also getting used to tapes rather than clip based media. I’m very curious what I actually saw when I was shown the procedure for ingesting footage in the other suite because something along the lines of what I was describing seemed to be happening and when I asked the guy showing me how it worked, he said he’d always wondered and didn’t know. It was HDCAM too, not HDV or anything of the sort. When I next have access to that suite I’ll have to try tape ingesting again to see what was really going on.

In an case I was aware one could do a single large master clip of the entire tape and then subclip it, but instinctively that didn’t seem like the best way to handle things. Anyway it’s become necessary to do things that way anyway because logging in and out points and batch capturing was way too time consuming. Thank you all for your help. It is simply another of a BIG list of things to get used to with AVID and with tapes. This is a whole different world and so weird and foreign when you’ve only experienced another.

[Jimmy See]

Okay, well the camera stops make a lot more sense to me as a way of how clipping could be done, certainly what I thought was happening didn’t really make sense. Anyway though I don’t really understand what seemed to be going on with clips that apparently spanned several camera stops, it doesn’t matter because camera stops would be perfectly sufficient as a marker of separate clips.

Can I get AVID to stop capturing at a camera stop and allow me to log each camera stop as a separate master clip, restarting the record at each button on after a clip is logged?

[Jimmy See]

Oh thankyou, thankyou.

Avid’s nice to edit with but this side of things is far from the simplicity I’m used to coming from Final Cut. I will try your methodologies tomorrow. I have a couple of questions though,

Is there any efficient way to determine whether or not material in the Avid Media Files folder is HD or SD? The only way I can think of at the moment is to watch each mxf file in an application capable of playing them back and getting information about the file from playback to determine the resolution and somehow marking the file within explorer or writing it down in order to keep a track and get a list of the HD files vs the SD. This seems absurdly labour intensive and I’m hoping there’s a better way. Something I’ve already considered is consolidating a sequence and deleting the original files thus leaving only the HD there but I don’t fancy trying this and then having it go wrong and my transcodes being deleted. Especially as I’m still a little green on transcoding with Avid to begin with so rebuilding will be difficult and time consuming.

My other question is, the methodology sounds like it will fix this specific problem I’m having and while labour intensive, it shouldn’t be too bad because at this stage in the project there just isn’t that much tapeless media in the first place. But I definitely don’t want to be doing this all the time. Once I’ve tried your suggestions and got my test sequence relinked, how can I avoid being in this situation again? What should I do to keep the transcodes separate from each other so that Avid doesn’t get all confused again and keep linking to the SD files, necessitating the long list of troubleshooting I’ll need to go through to fix again? Do I need to keep HD transcodes on a different target drive? That seems very wasteful and there are only so many drives to go around.

Thanks so much.

[Jimmy See]

Ah, so you don’t know how or why Final Cut won’t respect the user’s decisions regarding speed either? That’s a shame, yesI am glad I got through it too. It seems to me that even now the speed changes are not friendly with Color though they’re supposed to be. On another project I worked on, graded in Color, there were multiple shots only 3-6 frames in length sped up significantly and these seemed to confuse Color to no end.

As far as Da Vinci is concerned, I’ve never used the software but the grader told me that it was actually a recent upgrade which broke its ability to deal with speed changes which implies that it handled them fine before. Very odd, surprised they’d release an update that does something like that really.

I hope that one golden day, grading software will play nicely with editing software or better still, the tools available within edit software will be of a standard high enough to compete with the standalone packages.

[Jimmy See]

Hi Neil, and thank you for the detailed explanation with screenshots. Unfortunately, I’m attempting to copy the speed attributes of one timeline’s clips to another rather than individually changing the speed of the clips, which means there is no checkbox for rippling the sequence as seen above.

Perhaps if I explain the reason for this though you might be able to help me and it won’t be necessary to work this way. I could just look at the value in the speed field of the motion tab in a clips properties, and enter that exact same value in to the clip on the timeline who’s speed I wish to change however I don’t do this because whenever I do, in any final cut project I’ve ever worked on, the speed I type is not the speed I get and sometimes it’s even different enough that the clip duration is not the same. For some reason, Final Cut seems to interpret my desired speed value to an approximation of variable accuracy but never exactly what I ask for. There seems to be no way that I’ve ever seen of correcting this behaviour and it wreaks havoc on a timeline that has been cut specifically and precisely with speed changes in mind because the differing speed values between timelines means that at best the clip looks wrong because the speed is not the same, but it’s close enough that the duration is unaffected, or the approximation that Final Cut comes up with is so different to what I type that the clip is now an actual different number of frames in length, which is a massive disaster.

As it happens and in the mean time I’ve worked around the issue by just living with the problem I described above. The difference was minimal and the approximations very close, the shots themselves were of the frame a few seconds after the subject has exited frame and I simply wanted to extend these shots to linger for slightly longer after the subject leaves before cutting to the next shot, because the content of the clips is therefore basically an image background with no action and no camera movement, the effect of the imprecise changes in speed duraiton isn’t really a big deal, but in future I mightn’t be so lucky.

[Jimmy See]

I’m using them only in the final stages after my offline edit.

I am working with transcoded ProRes proxy files for the offline. For the online I generate quicktime reference files in RedcineX, they reference the original .r3d media, it is these mov files that I conform my final cut sequence to for the online. It is my understanding that Final Cut Pro 7 cannot use .r3d format media, the reference files allow the original red media to be used without storage consuming transcodes or rewrapped duplicates.

[Jimmy See]

Ah okay, I feared that. So copy the RED quicktime reference files and conform them to 25fps using cinema tools and then relink to those conformed files rather than the original 50fps shots? Is that right?

[Jimmy See]

That’s awesome!!

Thanks so much man. Strangely enough most of the fields where you can enter data are searchable through this method yet some of them, specifically log note and description aren’t in the drop down list of fields to be searched. However if yo search ‘all fields’ it seems to search through everything including log and note and description and also I can just put my description data in one of the comment fields which are searchable so no biggy.

You’ve been a big help, appreciate it.