Michael Hancock
Forum Replies Created
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What you’ve likely heard about is Elastic Gasket by Profound Effects. Check them out here:
https://www.profoundeffects.com/products/gasket/
What it attempts to do is take 3rd Party After Effects plugins and port them to your Avid. Note that not all effects will translate. I’ve never used it so I can’t say for sure how well it works, but the idea is that if you’ve paid for the plugins to work in After Effects, you can use Elastic Gasket to use them in Avid as well and avoid having to buy an Avid License of the same plugins. If you read about it you’ll notice that the effects that come bundled with After Effects don’t translate.
It looks like you can download a trial, but if you’re on a Mac you probably won’t find a version that works. It looks like the Mac versions are woefully out of date or simply not supported. If you end up using it, let us know how well it works.
Good luck,
Michael.
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Look under your Clip Settings and make sure Render-On-The-Fly is checked.
Michael.
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If you go with two 500GB drives you can RAID them together and that should give you better performance. Regarding the Avid prefering smaller drives–depends on if you’re working in OMF or MXF media and may depend on whether you’re using Windows or OS X.
OMF files all go into one folder–OMFI MediaFiles. When you get close to 10,000 in windows things start freaking out, and if you have more than 10,000 files windows will start to ignore files. However, if you’re working with MXF media your Avid will start making subfolders as the file count get higher, making the number of files a non-issue. Whether Macs handle these file limitations differently I have no idea. Either way, you’ll probably want to partition your 2 x 500GB drives or 1TB drive into several sections–maybe 250GB partitions.
As to your questions about GRAID or GSATA, I have no idea. I’m not familiar with them.
Michael
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V1: Shot of boy and girl dancing. Add Color Effect or Color Correction and remove the saturation. You now have a black and white image.
V2: Same shot, apply a ChromaKey effect. Select just the Yellow of the girl’s dress. Adjust until just the yellow in the dress is keyed out. Now select to Invert Alpha or Invert Key in the ChromaKey effect. This will leave only the yellow on your black and white background (V1).To do this with the blue will be harder since your sky is also blue. You’ll likely choose the blue of the guy and it will also key the sky, so when you invert the alpha you’ll be left with the blue sky as well. You can always add a PIP effect and crop the top out to try and get rid of the sky, but that may also cut out some of the blue in the guy’s clothes depending on how it was shot.
Good luck. Let us know if you run into problems or have more questions.
Michael.
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Open the bins with all the media you want to take home consolidate the masterclips to your external drive. It will copy the masterclips to your drive and leave the originals on your Unity. If you consolidate a sequence it will copy just the portions you used–consolidate the masterclip and it will copy the entire clip.
Precomputes don’t consolidate, though, so you’ll want to get the originals of anything you import (say a graphic with an alpha) because you’ll need to batch import them.
Michael.
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In your original post you said you were running Windows 2000, which threw me off. Ok, so you’re running XP Pro 32-bit with service pack 2. You’re golden.
Windows XP 32-bit will recognize up to 4GB of RAM, and by default programs recognize 2GB. However, there is a 3GB patch for Avid that is included with all recent installers. You don’t say what version of Avid you’re running, but I believe they started including it at Xpress Pro 5.2.x. It may even install by default–if not, check the readme to see how to install the patch to make Avid see 3GB, leaving 1GB for other Windows operations (if you have 4GB installed). I wouldn’t install over 4GB because windows won’t see it.
Michael.
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Thank you, Kathlyn.
Michael.
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Well, Avid won’t work. It’s not supported for Vista and I haven’t read about anyone getting it to run, especially on a 64-bit operating system.
Honestly, I don’t think a 64-bit system is going to help you right now, considering the apps you listed are still 32-bit (I believe CS3 is still 32-bit, I know Avid is). Even if you could run everything on Vista 64-bit and you installed 16GB of RAM, the programs couldn’t take advantage of it. About the only improvement that I could see would be that you could have all the programs open all the time and there would be enough RAM to go around. But if you’re trying to render in AE, imported/capture into Avid, work in Photoshop, etc all at the same time you’re going to tax your processors (even with two quad-cores, you’ll be pushing it).
I’d upgrade to XP Pro 32-bit. It’s approved for Avid and CS3 and it’s a pretty stable OS. You’ll want Service Pack 2 installed for sure. Otherwise, I’d stay away from Vista, and forget about 64-bit OSes for the time being. Wait until everything is coded as 64-bit apps before you start spending tons of money on RAM. Go with 3 or 4GB RAM for now and spend the rest of your money on fast storage or a nice chair.
My opinion, anyway.
Michael.
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I’m not a lawyer and don’t even play one on TV, but here’s my opinion/experience.
At one agency I worked at we had several clients across the country in the medical field. We did their TV and print advertising. One of the clients decided they wanted to go with another agency and told us to give us their tapes. Well, the owner of the agency told them they could have the tapes for a price. Bring out the lawyers…
In the end, the agency owned the footage and the client was left with nothing. Because it was never specifically spelled out in a contract that they owned the rights to the footage the ownership fell back to the agency that shot it. They were welcome to the finished show on Beta or another format of their choice, but the raw material/tapes and project files–nope. To further muddy the waters, the actor in it had a seperate contract stating that his likeness could only be used when the show was produced by our agency (he was getting well paid to be locked in), so even if we gave them the tapes they couldn’t use large portions of it because of his contract. The client left and went to the other agency with no tapes and no scripts because they didn’t want to pay for the footage. From what I heard about the other agencies pricing, it would have been cheaper to have bought the B Roll from us.
In your case, I’m assuming you own the rights to the footage but, as was already mentioned, the people in the footage have rights too. Your best bet is either to give the footage to the bride and groom and sign over the rights and be done with it, or talk to an lawyer who specializes in this kind of thing.
Good luck!
Michael.
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The school I’ll be teaching at runs Final Cut Exress on iMacs. There are enough seats for every student in the class. Next semester we’re going to start adding Avid seats in the PC labs (or Mac labs, whichever is available).
We spend one class dedicated to learning what the buttons are and how to use each program, and the advanced classes cover how to be an editor. It’s designed so students will know two of the most popular tools in professional post production. Doubles their chances of getting a job once their reel gets their foot in the door.
Michael.