Michael Hancock
Forum Replies Created
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Did you download Media Composer 7 and install it (after you uninstall 6.5)?
The dongle update just blesses your dongle to run version 7 – it doesn’t actually install it.
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Michael Hancock
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[Kim Bo] “And why do you think it would be better for me using Premiere?”
I can’t speak for Shane, but I imagine he’s saying that because Premiere handles DSLR footage incredibly well so you’d be saving yourself the trouble of transcoding. You just import the footage and start editing. I haven’t subtitled in Premiere, but I believe it supports importing .stl files, too.
For pure editing, I don’t think anything beats Avid. But sometimes it’s not the best option, depending on the type of footage you have, the deadline you might be under, or if it’s a graphics intense piece or VFX heavy piece that will rely heavily on After Effects. And PremiereCC is much, much better to edit with than previous versions of Premiere.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
[Dennis Radeke] “Up/Down arrow when in the trim mode.”
Sweet. Thanks. I’d still like to see the option to consolidate the two actions, so I can just hit (for example) Shift+S and it goes to the next edit on the selected track and enters trim mode at the same time. Seems minor, but the keystrokes add up throughout the day.
[Dennis Radeke] “”T” key will enter you into trim mode. Always encourage users to enter the keyboard shortcuts and type a word like ‘trim’ to look for available shortcuts”
I have this mapped to Shift+T, but that’s not my complaint. My issue is that once you’re in trim mode, toggling tracks selections on and off is ignored by trim mode. It doesn’t select the nearest edit point on newly activated tracks for trimming. Example: Put media on V1 and V2 with cut points on top of each other. Activate just V1 and enter trim mode. It selects the edit on V1. Now toggle V2 on – nothing happens. It should select the edit on V2 since I’m in trim mode and have activated another track. Since it doesn’t, I have to use the mouse to select the edit point, which is cumbersome. And if I have V1 activated, enter trim mode, then deactivate V1 (thereby having no tracks active) it should dump out of trim mode and remove the trim selection on the clips.
[Dennis Radeke] “Honesty is the best policy – not sure what you mean by this one so will assume that we don’t have it.”
My mistake on this one – you guys do have this option, kind of. It’s “Select Nearest Edit as Trim In” and “Select Nearest Edit as Trim Out”. It seems to default to yellow trim, which is good (I can’t find a way to activate in directly to red trim with the keyboard). However, there’s no shortcut option for “Select Nearest Edit as Roll Trim”. If you use “Select nearest edit as Trim In” first, then want to roll trim you have to toggle through all the trim modes (or use the mouse). Lots of extra keystrokes.
[Dennis Radeke] ” If you go to preferences>trim and check the top box, I find the trimming modes to handle and switch the way you expect. My opinion but when I show most people they agree.”
I’ll check this out. Thanks for pointing it out.
Premiere has come a long, long way in its trimming capabilities and it’s getting really close. But these are the small but important things that keep me from putting it on the same level as Avid. Looking forward to seeing how you guys continue to advance it.
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Michael Hancock
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Just dove into Premiere Pro CC again to play with their trim mode a bit more before I typed this up, to make sure I was remembering everything correctly. Here’s why I prefer Avid’s trim mode to Premiere (and I may be wrong about how Premiere handles some of this – still getting really familiar with it).
1. Go to next edit/previous edit and enter trim mode in one keystroke. Avid has this function, I can’t find it in Premiere. This is incredibly helpful when I’m stringing out a rough edit and want to start cleaning stuff up, or when I’m making J and L cuts. I can use the keyboard to activate the tracks I want, then use the keyboard to move up and down the timeline to select an edit point and activate trim mode in one keystroke to start tightening things up.
2. Activate trim mode, activate track with keyboard. In Avid, if I have V1 and A1 activated in the track panel and enter trim mode it will activate trim on V1 and A2. I can use the keyboard to activate track A2 and it will automatically add the trim to the nearest edit on that track (which is usually the edit I want). I tested this in Premiere and it doesn’t honor new track activations with the keyboard. I edit with the keyboard as much as possible so I really miss this feature when using Premiere.
3. Select Trim A/B/AB via direct keystroke. In Avid I can map “Trim A Side”, “Trim B Side”, “Trim AB Sides” to the keyboard, so I enter trim mode and immediately choose what I want to do. I can’t figure out how to do this in Premiere, directly. I can cycle the different trim modes, but I can’t go directly to one via one keystroke. I hope I’m wrong on this one. I’d rather hit one keystroke than cycle 5 times just to trim B side of an edit.
4. This one is subjective and may not make sense, but I find selecting trim points in Avid to be much easier and more solid than in Premiere when using a mouse. I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but in Premiere it feels like I have to click more than once to select a trim point if I’m not exactly in the right spot, whereas in Avid I can click generally close to the trim point and it immediately selects it. This makes setting up asymmetrical trims or multiple edit point trims much faster to set up in Avid.
Those are the top four things that I notice between Avid and Premiere when it comes to trimming, and for me it comes down to keyboard commands to quickly select what I want and responsiveness of the interface. Avid beats Premiere in these instances.
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Michael Hancock
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Changed my email as recommended. Thanks for the update and reactivating the account.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
In addition, if you do a particularly complicated trim (say asymmetrical trimming on multiple layers) and you go back to editing but need to make some further adjustments, you can ALT+TrimMode and it will remember your most recent trim setup. This alone can save a ton of time when you’re fine tuning a complicated edit.
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Michael Hancock
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Another option is to go to your Composer–>Edit settings and uncheck “Auto-Create new tracks”.
This will prevent Avid from automatically creating A3 and A4 when you load a source clip with 4 audio tracks and edit them into your sequence (without having to deactivate A3 and A4).
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Michael Hancock
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It really pays to know more than one NLE these days. For long form work, work with transcriptions, or when we know we’ll be spending a lot of time refining an edit with a client over our shoulders we go with Avid.
For fast turnaround edits with weird footage or lots of different frame rates, resolutions and codecs we typically go with Premiere. Or if it’s a graphic intensive piece we’ll cut in Premiere and send it to our motion graphics guy to copy/paste the timeline into AE.
Both are great programs when used with the right type of project.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
[Brad Coulter] “1. Is this just due to my machine being underpowered?”
Possibly. Other things to consider first.
[Brad Coulter] “2. Is there something I could do to the footage files prior to linking that would help?”
The files are .h264, which Avid doesn’t deal with very well. Your best bet is to AMA the files into Avid then transcode them to DNxHD. You can also import them, but that’s much, much slower than transcoding after AMA. And it doesn’t gain you anything.Couple of things to consider – where are these files stored? If they’re on your internal hard drive, that is likely the issue. You’ll need an external hard drive, as fast as you can afford, for smooth playback. We use a lot of GTech drive, but Lacie, Caldigit, etc… all make great external drives for editing.
Also, when you transcode to DNxHD, check what bitrate you’re transcoding to. The higher the number, the faster your drive will need to be and more taxing it will be on your system.
You may want to consider an offline/online workflow. AMA the clips into Avid, transcode to the lowest DNxHD available (do not delete the original AMA links – just put them in another bin), edit, then relink back to the original AMA files.
I haven’t used the t3i, but does it have timecode it embeds in the clips? If it doesn’t, you may want to consider getting QTChange from https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/42/qtchange This program will add timecode to the .h264 files so you can relink with confidence in Avid. You’d run the QT files through the program prior to AMA’ing them into Avid.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
Match frame the clip (this loads it in the source monitor). Then you want “Find in bin”. You can map both “Matchframe” and “Find in Bin” to your keyboard. In my case, I hit F2 then Shift+F.
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Michael Hancock
Editor