[Michael P]

Short Answer, Yes, your project should work fine from 4.6.

Personally, I still have projects from 4.5 on my system that have moved up from Xpress Pro/Studio 4.5 to 4.6 to 5.0HD to 5.2.3 up to Media Composer Software 2.5 to 2.6.6 and I still have them and are using them as I type this for a compilation of work from the past 3 years.

[Michael P]

Hello,

Just a heads up that MBP’s are STILL not yet certified for use with any Avid software as Avid has yet to officially release a public beta for Universal Binary. However, I happen to have a friend who has connections at Avid, and he told me the beta for Universal Binary ended over a month ago and the final release should be expected for late march (if there are no additional problems between now and then of course).

This is all unofficial information, and I haven’t yet seen it to say it’s true, but this is all I have heard. I hope it is true as I am looking to get a MBP for this summer if I end up getting an internship during my college’s summer break.

[Michael P]

I’ve been using Avid and AMD’s ever since Xpress Pro 4.3.1. I actually would recommend that if you are going to go mojo that you use an Opteron processor setup, because you need a motherboard with multiple pci-bus segments. I actually have never had a problem that I couldn’t overcome or work around. The green line thing has never affected me, and I love being able to have my dual 3ghz opterons instead of buying some intel product.

Technically it should work, but if Avid will work relies a lot more upon your motherboard chipset (I recommend going Nforce4 or Nforce5 chipset with AMD and Avid as I have used Nforce 3 and 4 with it with no problem), your video card (Nvidia is HEAVILY recommended over ATI, a lot of ATI users have been experiencing a problem where they cant see video in their composer window with ATI cards), and the amount of RAM you have in your system.

[Michael P]

I just wanted to chime in and say that I have been using Xpress Pro HD 4.5 all the way through 5.2.7 (I’m on the new CPR release) with Mojo without any major problems on my AMD machine. I think that Avid will basically run on any PC configuration if you take the time to make sure that you identify potential problems ahead of time and purchase accordingly. I personally had MAJOR problems with the Mojo when I first bought it. This was actually related to me using a Sound Blaster 2 as my Firewire card. As soon as I installed it onto my Onboard TI chipset firewire, I can now work it flawlessly. Also, I have a far from specification Nvidia 7800GTX SLi configuration, but guess what, Avid still works and I currently have no problems. There was a good 3 months where I was unable to upgrade my video driver beyond driver 78.12 because the drivers from 80.00 to 83.99 would make there be no video overlay playback. This was simply a case of the “If it ain’t broke, Don’t fix it!” story, but I was able to still edit, I just simply had to use an older driver.

Basically, I am trying to say that AMD should work perfectly with Avid, though there you need to put a lot of thought into your configuration BEFORE you build it and then you also need to mess around with some settings and configure it in a way that makes Avid happy. All I do is follow the Xpress Pro installer readme and it tells me everything I need to configure before hand. After changing all these settings and making sure my system is optimized, I am good to go! Anyways, here are my full specs.

Tyan K8WE w/ u320 SCSI option
2x 2ghz Opterons
2gb PC3200 ECC/REG
2 eVGA Geforce 7800GTX in SLi
Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
Promise TX2000 Raid Controller
Avid Mojo
Mbox (w/ DV Toolkit)

Soon I hope to be upgrading to the 3.0ghz Opterons, but for now, I can efficiently run Xpress Pro HD on this system. Next week the real test is going to come because I will be upgrading my Xpress Pro system to a Media Composer software system. God (and Avid) Willing, I should have one powerful MC machine on my hands.

[Michael P]

If you want to bring your whole timeline into AE, then you will need Automatic Duck. If you only want to work on a small sequence or shot, you can simply export a QT Ref of that mini sequence or shot by creating in and out points and then exporting from the file menu. When you import the QT Ref file into AE, if your source is interlaced you will have to interpret the footage to be lower or upper field first. After that, you can work with the shot/sequence and then Export out of AE as an Avid Compliant OMF file that requires no more extra rendering upon returning to the Avid Editing application.

[Michael P]

if you worked in 1:1 you would want to use 720×486 as that is the Standard, but for DV the Resolution is only 720×480.

[Michael P]

What you may want to do is try using CBR (Constant Bit Rate) instead of VBR (Variable Bit Rate). I am not sure why, but I have had similar problems as you when I tried to encode my DVD Products with Sorenson’s VBR codec, but when I encode in CBR I have no problems. I usually set the CBR to 8500 kb/s for the video stream and the audio I encode in Premiere Pro to utilize the Minnetonka Dolby Digital Surround Sound encoder. Using anywhere from 224 to 320kb/s for audio in sorenson should work though.

That is my experience with Sorenson, Hopefully by using CBR, you will get a lot better result (If you are not using CBR already).