Michael Hancock
Forum Replies Created
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NitrisDX gives you hardware encoding and decoding to DNxHD, and is supposed to give you more realtime performance on playback. At the very least it saves you on transcoding time over the MojoDX.
Also, I was sure the NitrisDX gave you two SDI out so you can run HD and SD simultaneously. The MojoDX only offers one, and it’s HD or SD depending on the project type. Or am I wrong on that?
Either way, they’re still pretty pricey boxes. Look nice though.
Michael
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Duplicate your final, master sequence. Drop it into a new bin. Select it and go to Clip –> Consolidate/Transcode. Select the external drive you want it to go to, choose not to delete the original media (unless you really want to), set your handles if you want them and hit OK.
It will now create new media based only on what was used in your sequence, plus the handles you specified. Copy that bin to your external, which now has all of the footage for the master sequence on it, and send it off.
You may want to check that everything transfered over first though, just to make sure it didn’t miss anything.
Michael
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We haven’t upgraded to the MojoDX or NitrisDX because all of our work is still SD. There’s only one station in our area that accepts HD and none of our clients are requesting it so there’s been no reason to move that way. I’m hoping that Avid will release cheaper monitoring by the time we go to HD, but who knows. Right now MojoDX captures and outputs digital HD and SD. Since we still drop to Beta sometimes we need analogue out, so MojoDX wouldn’t really fix our workflow anyway.
I did upgrade from Xpress Pro to Media Composer 3.0, a while ago. I just backed up all of my projects to an external, did a fresh OS install on a spare hard drive (Vista 64-bit), installed Media Composer 3.0, upgraded my dongle (you’ll have the option to upgrade your dongle or go Software Activation if you upgrade to 3.5), then copied my projects over from the external. Had no problems.
Good luck. Once you start cutting on Media Composer 3.x you’ll wonder how you ever liked cutting with Xpress Pro. Night and Day difference, in my opinion.
Michael
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Yep. I’m using an old Mojo with 3.1.3, and when I played with the trial version of 3.5 it worked without problems.
Michael
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It’s actually really simple, and you’ll keep your project.
1. Back up all your projects. Put them on a flash drive, seperate hard drive, or burn them to a disc. Just make a backup to be safe. Also, consider backing up your user settings, unless you want to rebuild them for Media Composer.
2. Uninstall Xpress Pro. I’d restart the computer afterwards just for good measure.
3. Pull the Xpress Pro dongle out, put in the Media Composer install disc and install it. It will probably tell you to restart the computer after installation. Restart.
4. Pop in your Media Composer dongle. Copy your backed up projects to your Media Composer projects folder. Start Media Composer, open project, edit.
That’s pretty much it.
Michael
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That means that they used an effect that you don’t have installed on your system. If it’s a key effect it could be a Boris effect, or maybe they had Ultimatte.
Can you contact the original editor to see what effects packages they had installed? There aren’t that many for Avid – Sapphire, Boris, Ultimatte, and maybe one or two more.
Michael
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[McKee Smith] “I sent a test file to the facility in the UK. The reported it sped up the import time, but “DNXHD is a highly compressed format and not acceptable for broadcast programming.””
This post house doesn’t know what it’s talking about. DNxHD is a compressed format, but it’s visually lossless. You’re not seeing 220 because you’re in a 25p project – the numbers denote the bitrate. At 59.94i you have more frames/second so it requires a higher bitrate. At 25p 185 is basically the equivalent of 220 (if I’m understanding it right).
I remember reading that the Olympics were cut in DNxHD. Somehow I think if it’s good enough for the Olympics, it’s good enough for this UK post house. Especially if they want to cut down on the import time into their Avids (you have to use an Avid codec for the fast import).
I’d say you should ask them to compare the DNxHD file to the uncompressed file you sent to see if they can actually notice a difference with the naked eye, but I’m betting they’ll say they can just to be right and not have to admit they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Michael.
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It’s not a problem, it’s just the nature of software and what effects are installed and what effects aren’t. If you use Media Composer and you have the Boris CC effects used in your sequence, then you go to a system that doesn’t have Boris installed–it can’t do the effects. They’re missing.
I think there’s about 98 – 99% similarity between Newscutter and Media Composer, so unless you’re using 3rd party effects I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
Michael
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You should be fine. Note that any effects you use in Newscutter that aren’t on the Media Composer won’t show up (if they’re rendered they’ll be there, but as soon as you do something to unrender them they’ll disappear).
Otherwise, you should be fine. Avid systems are typically cross-compatible (Xpress to Media Composer to Newscutter to Symphony).
Michael
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Ideally you can just delete the associated media of your original master clip (don’t delete the master clip), then do a batch import and point it to the new photoshop file. It will import the new file and auto-update it across all sequences.
Is the new file the exact same dimensions as the old one? Only thing different is the color? If so, this should work perfectly. Just choose to batch import, point it to the new file, hit OK and maybe rerender some sequences.
Michael
EDIT: You figured it out while I was typing! Thanks for posting the solution though. Good for future searches.
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