[Job Ter burg]

To the bottom left of your Timeline, there’s a “Toggle Timeline” button, that will toggle between displaying the Timeline for the content of the Record Monitor and the content of the Source Monitor. If you toggle it to Source Monitor, you can then see the waveforms in the timeline (if you choose to have them displayed).

[Job Ter burg]

You could try to use MediaSift and/or MDV. They won’t play the media, but they will show the media’s project association, so you will know which media belongs to which project.
Other than that, MC Soft is a great player for OMF/MXF files 😉

[Job Ter burg]

One more thought: if you have a spare computer, dowload and install the trial version of MC 3.5 on that, it will allow you to work with it for 14 days. With that you could do the source burnin for the export.

[Job Ter burg]

AFAIK that does not exist.

[Job Ter burg]

But there is the Full Screen Playback feature on software systems. It requires that you use one of your screens as a fullscreen monitor. A lot of modern TV’s have DVI/HDMI inputs, so you could use a Full HD TV for that if you like. And there’s Matrox MXO, at least: so I heard.

[Job Ter burg]

If you close the Avid application, and insert the DVD into your computer, does the DVD show up on the computer? Can you access it? If not, and the previous DVD’s were read, the DVD is likely faulty. Ask them to supply another copy (they should have the originals on an internal hard drive). If the DVD shows up on the desktop, but the Avid cannot “see” the files, try copying the files to a local hard drive first, then try to import them from there. If this fails as well, double check to see if the files can be plaed back by a mediaplayer like QuickTime Player. If that fails, the files are likely corrupt.

All of this is often connected to the way that they back up their recordings to disk. Their are multiple ways, and occasionally, a DVD burn might fail.

And yes, he likely supplied you with both a (2-track) mix he made, as well as a bunch of ISO tracks (unmixed separate recording of each microphone). It depends on your preferred workflow how you need to go about that.

[Job Ter burg]

There are scalers and scalers. And then their are scalers.
See a Quantel iQ upscale an SD picture to HD and you will be amazed. See an LCD TV scale an HD signal to 1366xwhatever and you will be appalled. There’s the Teranex type of hardware converters, as well as the small AJA boxes.
Then their are software scaling techniques, all of which differ in approach and result. Just recently, in 3.5, Avid changed their 2D scaling algorithm. Besides that, their 3D effects have a HQ mode, which uses yet another type of software scaling. If you use Boris UpRez, that can offer you another 5 or so upscaling types. Or other 3rd party solutions.
So if you are talking about converting aspect ratio on footage, you will be dealing with scalers, either scaling horizontally, vertically, or a mix of the two. The result is heavily depending on the quality of the scaler that is being used.

[Job Ter burg]

The quality of the scaler/ARC that is being used is the key part.

[Job Ter burg]

https://www.belle-nuit.com/macmediasift/index.html

[Job Ter burg]

From what I’ve heard, SR-decks are notorious for handling inserts very poorly. I know lots of companies don’t do inserts on SR tapes, they only do full length relays to tape.