[Kevin Brennan]

For this you will likely have to go outside of Media Composer.

But just curious…, the audio and video files with different timecodes … what I would first do is figure out what your TIME OFFESET is. Unless your audio was recorded in a different frame rate..

Once you figure what the offeset is, you can do a little math and figure out what the relative start time is for each recording based on creation date/time in the meta-data of the clips.

If it is in the same or similar enough frame rate, what I would do is take all of my clips and order them by creation date. Then drop them onto a timeline so that the first recording is first and the last recording is last.

Then to the same for the Audio. then combine the two timelines.

Decide which set of media is going to be your MASTER track and lock it.

Then on the ‘other’ set of tracks, select all the clips and move them as one to sync up the first piece. –hopefully you have at least a piece of audio like a clap or something. or maybe someone shouting “action!” that marks the beginning of each recording piece?

As you sync things up from beginning to end, make sure that you constantly save your project, or make versions of your timeline.

Anyway.. regardless.. it’s a lot of work ahead of you.

–It might be easier to just go to Premiere and use something like Plural Eyes and sync up all your audio there, then export an EDL or XML or something with 3 letters like that, and bring it into Media Composer and rebuild a timeline based on that data.

[edit]

also.. there’s this…
https://wikis.utexas.edu/display/comm/AVID+-+Syncing+Video+and+Audio+using+AutoSync

[Kevin Brennan]

Also, have you done an expert render? and you may not be able to “play” the timeline when you look at it FULL… but if you zoom into just a small piece it should play.

I used to work at a local news station, and at the anniversary of a big blizzard, I had to put 8 hours of programming onto a single timeline .. and it wouldn’t play… but.. if I zoomed in to a smaller-chunk, I could get it to play.

(( I know, these are all ‘duh.. yeah’ questions… but got to figure out what tricks you are already using ))

[Kevin Brennan]

Hi Helen.

Is your media all loaded in by import into AvidMedia? or is it AMA linked?

Also… Lots of people rave and love those Lacie drives.

I hate ’em.

In the olden days, you used to have to have HDD’s that were 7200 rpm for your video to play without skipping. Is your Lacie a fast 7200 drive?

Also, what about your timeline view quality (you know.. that little yellow, green, yellow-slash-green oval) –your timeline may have so much media and so many real-time effects that it’s the ability to pre-load all that stuff so that it is at your fingertips is just weighing it completely down

You might want to take an effect like a mask or something and create a very top video layer and just render the entire thing as one giant effect… then.. if you have to make a change, go into that top layer and do an ‘add edit’ on either side of where you need to make the change so that the entire layer doesn’t come unrendere das soon as you make the change.. then just re-render that little bit.

–I used to do that when I had a very long timeline master for 1-hr shows with tons of effect layers and animating fonts and lower thirds.

[Kevin Brennan]

i’m a long-haul AVID-MC editor, but returned to school to do a masters in Animation, and have lost my access to the big-boy MC. After 2 years of dealing almost exclusively in Premiere (because I get free CC account as part of my masters program, and my school doesn’t use MC for it’s animation dept)

I’m starting up a little independent project and the thought of doing it in PrPro was just depressing, so I thought I would try the Free Version of AVID to get my chops back.

I found that if I wanted to bring any footage into it, I had to convert it to quicktime. I couldn’t get anything else to work. I dunno, maybe it’s an RTFM-solution, but I really thought this ‘free’ version would be more limited in it’s commands, and less limited in what file-types it could juggle.

Also, the fact that you can’t take your AVID First project and promote it upwards to Avid Media Composer means that if I were to continue working in Avid FIRST, this project will have to forever live in Avid FIRST.

This also baffles me. One of the strongest things I thought AVID had going for it was the fact you could bring any decade old project back to life in the any current MC project, because the basis of Avid is just Bins and Sequences… and SO MUCH legacy effects and such have survived.

I find it difficult to believe this product is aimed at students.

I think it is aimed at professional editors who want a taste of Avid beyond a 30-day trial…

…but even then, I think it misses the mark.

It seems to me that Avid has created this project for people like me. Someone who knows and loves AVID, but is too cheap to buy a sub or lic. And that they give JUUUUUST enough tools available to do some work… but keep your wrists tied enough to long for the big software.

And it may end up working, as I am seriously now thinking of dropping the $300 on the academic perma-license before my Masters Student Status ends.

personal note:
My current most missed command that is not in Avid FIRST: “Remove Match Frame Edits”
-really? I have to go into trim-mode and hit the delete key?

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