Michael Hancock
Forum Replies Created
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If you’re just doing a slow zoom in or out, or pan of the photos you should consider this plugin:
Stagetools gives incredible results (MUCH better than Avid’s pan and zoom) and it keeps it all in Avid. If you buy the plugin definitely spring for the rotate option. Moving Picture will zoom and pan but doesn’t recognize alphas–Moving Parts recognizes alphas. Both render pretty fast too.
I use both on a regular basis (I work in news–we do a lot of animated stills) and they’ve saved me a lot of time by not having to wait for AE renders.
Otherwise, if you stick with AE, what you’re doing is pretty much the best workflow that I’ve found. Animate in AE, export a movie or image sequence, import into Avid, cut into timeline.
Mike.
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Check this site out:
It’s a site run by Michael Phillips, and Avid employee (I believe) who posts here often. It has pretty much everything you might want to know about 24P from what I can tell. I would start there and if you can’t find your answers post back here and Mr Phillips will likely answer you directly.
Mike.
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3D warp is great, but you can achieve the same results using PIP. Apply it, promote to 3D, reset the scale to 100% then rotate -90 on the Z axis to set your footage upright. If there is footage on a lower video track of this shot you will see it because you’re turning a rectangle on it’s end and it’s width is now smaller than the frame size, but if you want this particular shot to fill the entire 16×9 frame you’ll need to adjust the scale. Note, it will distort the image though.
Mike.
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I can’t remember exactly where Load Filler is and I’m not in front of the system right now, but I think it’s under Clip. It is called Load Filler, I know that. To map it to your keyboard go to your Settings Tab and double click Keyboard to open it up. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+3 is the shortcut) and select Menu to Button Assignment (I think that’s what it’s called). Now click the key on the onscreen keyboard you want to map Load Filler to (if you want to map it to a Shift+Key just hold shift and click the key you’re mapping), then go to Clip–>Load Filler. You will see a little icon zoom down to the key you mapped it to, and it will likely say LF (for Load Filler). You can do this with any menu command and it is very, very helpful, especially with the Shift+options. For example:
I have Import mapped to Shift+Z, Export to Shift+X, Video Mixdown to Shift+PageUp, Audio Mixdown to Shift+PageDown, Collapse to Shift+End, Expert Render to Shift+F5, MediaTool to Shift+F2, and Hardware to Shift+F3. I use all of these commands everyday so mapping them to my keyboard has saved me a lot of time hunting through the menu after menu.
Coming from Premiere to Avid will likely be a bit of a struggle because the interfaces are so different and the methods of editing are so different. As I’m sure you’ve found out already, Avid can be really strict in how you do things–it isn’t nearly as open of an interface as PPro or FCP. However, once you wrap your head around the Avid way of doing things it gets much faster and much easier. Again, if you have questions about anything don’t hesitate to ask. It’s what the Creative Cow is about.
Glad to be of help! Good luck with the movie and post here if you have trailer we can view online. It’s always fun to see what other forum members are working on.
Mike.
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If you want to load black just load filler. You can map it to your keyboard to to make it faster–use the Menu to Button reassignment like you did with the timeline zoom. I have mine on Shift+F (for filler). It loads 2 minutes of filler in the source monitor–from there you can cut it anywhere.
To copy tracks from A1 to A2–stop copying and pasting. It will get you into trouble and isn’t very useful in Avid. Instead, select what you want to copy by marking an In and Out on the clip, then hit Alt+Ctrl+C to copy it to your source monitor. From there just patch your A1 track to your A2 track and cut it in. Much, much faster. Another option is to just hit C (the default for Copy to Clipboard) on your keyboard then open your Clipboard monitor. Select it, patch your audio track from A1 to A2 and cut it in. You can map your clipboard monitor to your keyboard too using the Menu to Button ReAssignment (mine is at Shift+C). The beauty of the clipboard is that everytime you cut or lift something it goes into the clipboard. Want to take out a shot and move it down the line and onto a higher track? Mark it, lift it, open the clipboard monitor, patch tracks and cut. Can be very useful.
Also, if you’re dealing with Mono audio and you want it coming out of your left and right channels but your system splits A1 to Left and A2 to Right, you can change the default under your Audio settings or Audio Project settings to All Channel Centered (or something similar). Or, open you audio tool and set the pan there to the middle. If you load the audio into your source monitor, select the source monitor, then set the pan it will set the pan to the source clip. Very useful if you always want it center panned because you don’t have to reset it everytime you cut it into the sequence.
Also, Avid isn’t really designed for drag and drop. You should think of using three point editing–set an In, an Out, then an In or Out and cut/splice. Much faster, gives you much more control, and works a lot better in Avid. It sounds like you might be more used to Premiere Pro or FCP–both good NLEs, but much different than Avid.
One more thing–you should definitely take some time to map your keyboard the way you want it. You can map almost anything to any key, as well as Shift+AnyKey. It will make things much, much easier and you’ll edit a lot faster if you do. I have every key that’s able to be mapped set to something I use almost every day, and when you hold Shift I have a lot of those mapped as well. Makes things much easier. If you want to see how different people have their keyboards and monitors set up check out Avid’s new forums here:
https://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/74/ShowForum.aspx
Check out some of these setups–there are really good ideas there. I change my interface frequently and am constantly updating my keyboard to reflect the fastest workflow I can find.
If you run into more problems or have more questions let us know–we’re here to help!
Mike.
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According to the Requirements section of the Xpress Pro 5.6.4 readme:
https://www.avid.com/content/10293/README_XpressPro.pdfAvid Xpress Pro – Macintosh
The minimum requirements for Avid Xpress Pro -
I highly doubt this is an Avid issue. Sounds more like an OS issue if it only happens when you log on and not when anyone else logs on.
Have you tried logging on under a different OS user account and then setting up your Avid profile? If it happens after doing all of this it could be an Avid issue. If it doesn’t it’s something else. Do you have administrator privileges? Explain in detail exactly what’s happening, as in:
1) Log onto the computer using my specific OS username…
2) Start Avid. (When you do this are the other editor’s profiles available or have they disappeared at this point? If they’ve disappeared at this point it’s likely because they haven’t been imported under your OS username.)
3) Make New User. Open Avid Project, digitize footage. Close project.
4) After you close the project have the other editor’s profiles disappeared at this point? If they’re still there, close Avid.
5) Avid is closed. Restart Avid. Are all the profiles still there?
6) Log off. Have another editor log on under their name. Start Avid. Is this when their profiles have disappeared?Give us some more detail on what’s exactly happening and we’ll try to figure out if it’s an OS issue or an Avid issue or a lovely combination therein.
Mike.
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Once the file has been deleted from the projects folder and all media from that project has been deleted it should disappear. Are you sure there isn’t some rogue media from your project still floating around?
Try selecting all drives, one of the projects that is supposed to be gone, then have it show everything–master clips, media files, precomputes. If something pops up delete it. If nothing pops up try a program like MDV or MediaSift (both free), or Media Mover (not free but you can download a fully functioning demo for 30 days). Links to them can be found here:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=45&postid=861257
They should help find any media that Media Tool may be missing. Otherwise, I’m not sure how to get rid of projects from the Media Tool menu. Usually it means there’s some media from them left–now whether Media Tool can find it is another matter, but between Media Tool and one of the other programs above you should be able to find everything.
Best of luck. Let us know if it works.
Mike.
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I assume you mean if you have a vertical set of effects and you render all of them. If you do this you likely will have a loss of quality because you’ll be rendering V1, then rendering V2 which will rerender V1, then V3 will render which will rerender V2 and V1, etc…
From what I understand Avid works top down. If you have 4 tracks with effects you only need to render the top track, provided it completely covers all tracks below it. If it doesn’t you’ll have to render some of the tracks below. Do an expert render and you’ll see. If you have 8 tracks with effects and put a letterbox that covers the entire sequence on V9 you can render V9 only and be done. It will include all other effects below it.
If you select all track and collapse them what you’re essentially doing is adding one effect that covers all effects below it. This means Avid will render only that one effect–a submaster effect–and will include in its calculations all effects below.
I prefer to leave my tracks uncollapsed because it’s a lot easier to make changes. However, if I do collapse, I always duplicate the sequence first so I have a worker sequence and final sequence. Then I can make changes, select all, copy to clipboard, step into my final sequence submaster, overwrite, step out, render and take a break. Sounds like a lot but it’s really only a few keystrokes and I’m done.
Mike.
Oh yeah, render in High Quality if you have time to kill. It will ensure the best quality possible but takes significantly longer.
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Exactly. If you’re sending out single field you’re only getting half the resolution and will have nasty stairstepping all over the place. I bet it looks really bad when there’s fast horizontal action like when the camera pans!
If you’re in NTSC: Duplicate your sequence, do a video mixdown of your duplicate, export the mixdown lower field first, interlaced, then try to burn a disc. Let us know how it goes.
If you’re PAL: Duplicate your sequence, do a video mixdown of your duplicate, export the mixdown upper field first, interlaced, then try to burn a disc. Let us know how it goes.
Mike.