[Jon Bagge]

This may be too late for you know, but for next time: (or for anyone else)

If possible try to export the reference shot file from your offline machine in an avid codec. That way avid will do a ‘fast import’ which is massively quicker than the normal one. A fast import will just change the file’s wrapper to MXF and move it into the Avid Mediafiles folder.

You need to tick the 601/709 aspect ratio/colour space in the import options for this to work too.

And you may remember this from your old avid days, but another good way of checking shots that I used to do is to put the reference video in the source monitor, line it up with the sequence in the record monitor, and gang the two together.
Then use >> (fast forward) to quickly jump to every first frame of each shot. (make sure ignore track selectors options is ticked)

Actually I guess this might work on FCP too.. 🙂

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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

Another possibility is AE applying sub-pixel positioning to your footage. This will happen if you place your layer on an odd or decimal position. Can also happen if your layer has odd numbered dimensions.

The result will be very slightly soft. Not really very noticable, but I’ve noticed it when doing straight Avid-AE-Avid keying jobs.

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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

You have an ATI card so this may be different for you, but on nVidia cards there is a setting called something like ‘multi/dual display GPU acceleration’.
This can be set to either ‘single display performance mode’ or ‘multi display performance mode’

If this is set to ‘single’ you will only have hardware acceleration on one monitor which might be what’s causing your problem.

I’m on a PC, so don’t know what this will look like on a Mac, but I would suspect there is something similar.

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Jon Bagge
Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects