[John Pale]

[Ohad Marbach] “1. Importing video with alpha and sound forces me to do double import – one matte, and one video with music,
And only in the timeline I can dress the matte clip with the sound clip. It seems awkward to me.”

Yes. Its awkward, but that’s how it works. They’ve been getting around to changing some of this archaic nonsense in recent versions, but this one still stands for now.

[Ohad Marbach] “2. For some reason some png sequence are not loaded and googling showed that it was because they were created not as rgb but as cmyk and when I tried to convert in Photoshop it worked but the process was complicated and tedious.
But sometimes it does load without conversion. weird.”

Avid doesn’t support CMYK. Its surprising it worked at all.

[Ohad Marbach] “3. The png sequence and almost everything else I have in the timeline does not playback smoothly. Even in “yellow” quality. my computer is not new but Premier handled the same media easily and avid is slow and stuttery even with transcoding. specifically in this issue maybe I need to use a better transcode method? the source is 1980p 25fps mxf and final product should be xdmam 50i xmf and I used 1-1 mxf transcode.”

Avid has a matrix on their site of approved hardware. Yours may not be up to snuff. Avid works differently than Premiere. There is no Mercury Engine where some of the heavy lifting is done by the graphics card. That being said, if you transcoded to 1-1, you actually made the transcoded files uncompressed , which would be very large and hinder performance.

[Ohad Marbach] “4. Link to media not working with mxf videos. Just import. Not critical problem but annoying.”

This should work, but if you didn’t keep the same folder structure from the camera card, you may have problems linking.

[Ohad Marbach] “5. I do not like that all the files are encoded to the MXF / 1 folder because then I have no control over them. I solved with a simple software that defines any folder I choose as a drive. still annoying.
“

This is how it works in Avid. Media Management is rock solid in Avid because the program controls everything about how media is organized. I worked daily with Avid for many years, but for the last three, I have been using Premiere. There really is no comparison in robustness in this area…Avid wins hands down, but I admit its rigid. Its a tradeoff.

[John Pale]

The camera can play back NTSC just fine for monitoring, but it cannot do standards conversion over FireWire, or produce a stable enough signal for digital capture. This is true of most cameras I have encountered.

[John Pale]

Select the tracks you want to adjust and hit “g”.

You can enter a numerical value for gain adjustment

[John Pale]

Apparently one bin is a copy of another. You can’t open both at the same time.

Solution: Create a new empty bin and name it whatever you like. Move the contents of one of these other bins into it.

Note: Avid keeps track of bins by an unseen ID, not file name…so even though those two bins have different names, one is still a duplicate of the other.

[John Pale]

Its good that you are making self contained versions of your videos, but you might want to take it a step further and export them as DNX OP1A, since Apple does not support third party codecs (Like Avid DNX) in Quicktime X and Quicktime 7 will no longer function in future versions of MacOS.

[John Pale]

There isn’t anything quite like what you see in FCPX, but Avid can generate various kinds of lists (pretty much all that are commonly used in motion picture post production) using the List Tool (older Avid versions have an EDL Manager and Film Scribe) Look at the various options and see if there is something that works for you.

[John Pale]

What format and sample rate are the sound files? Do they have timecode? I’ve not seen this issue before.

[John Pale]

“The reason ProRes has taken hold is because of its ubiquitous nature. “

Don’t overlook the fact that it has a cooler name. And simpler. No, I’m not joking. Taking that a step further….I’ve met experienced editors who cannot make heads or tails out of all the options in DNXHD/HR (with bit rate ‘families’ as part of the name). Same with Cineform.

[John Pale]

You say its playing totally different sounds. Could it be that you have sound files that have the same name and its now linking to the wrong ones?

[John Pale]

Depends on the situation. Sometimes all you have to do is change the volume level. Other times, you might want to change where it is in the sound field (panning). You can also play around with EQ filters or compression to change the nature of the sound. Keep in mind, in many TV shows and movies, the sound FX are very exaggerated from how they would sound in real life (you often see this with people assembling weapons or other devices)….so you might be closer than you think.