[Philip Owens]

Super AE Adam Borozan taught me this one:

Export your caption track to an .srt

Throw SRT into https://srt2xml.com/ , get an XML back

Import XML as a text layer

Boom goes the dynamite

[Philip Owens]

I’m very aware that RAID 0 gives me precisely four times as great a risk of total failure, and lord know, like anyone, I’ve lost plenty of drives over the years. Hence the clone preparation. But also, there are multiple offsite copies of the clone ‘shuttle’ with my assistant, director and associate, so I feel pretty secure. If there’s a RAID failure, and my clone plan is working, I should lose no more than an hours work (if I haven’t created any new media, maybe I’d lose no more than the auto-saves, which go to a different drive anyway). I can carry on working on the clone, swap out the RAID drive, re-copy all the media overnight, and I’m off again. It’s a risk worth taking for the performance gain, and the downtime isn’t an issue.

[Philip Owens]

Your second option is genius! Like any good solution, it’s simple. Thanks so much!

[Philip Owens]

To be clear, I’m striping the array, RAID 0, for now anyway.

[Philip Owens]

Yes, you are correct in that you can export an h264 as a MOV, but the audio is uncompressed PCM. Which still makes it impossible to do a one-step export for posting.

EDIT: I’ve finally decided to not send in my old machine for a trade-in, and keep it on Mojave and exclusively for 2019.12.2 Media Composer. Meanwhile, my new system powers through Premiere (five times faster h264 exports than the old system).

[Philip Owens]

Can I refer you to my post on the Avid Media Composer forum? I just bought a maxed out 16″ MBP with Catalina, and while Premiere runs fabulously on it, Avid is a total nightmare. Be warned. I may have to keep my old system around to continue to use Media Composer.

[Philip Owens]

CAUTION: I just spent today wrangling my new MBP. I went for 64GB RAM and the 5600M GPU. With Premiere, it’s fantastic – exporting to h.264 is almost FIVE times faster than my 2015 MBP. But Media Composer is, frankly, a wall-punching hellscape. Cannot export to h.264, meaning your postings need to be double transcoded. And you can’t import almost any of the things you typically need – mp4, m4a, HEVC, and, I read here, animations with embedded alpha.. It’s very seriously concerning me, as I can’t downgrade the OS from Catalina, and even MC 2020.8 is quite frankly, Catalina-unprepared. It is a complete workflow nightmare.

One last thing that’s almost as bad about MC 2020 is that they’e eliminated the old titler, and you have to use the Avid Titler+, which is a Godzilla-like disaster of a piece of software. Utterly unusable. 2019 was the last version to retain the Title Tool, which wasn’t good but was at least perfectly usable. There’s something called the ‘New Blue FX Titler’ which I haven’t tried yet but it all sound like a kludge on top of a kludge.

Looks like I came back to Avid just in time to need to leave it again.

[Philip Owens]

CAUTION: I just spent today wrangling my new MBP. I went for 64GB RAM and the 5600M GPU. With Premiere, it’s fantastic – exporting to h.264 is almost FIVE times faster than my 2015 MBP. But Media Composer is, frankly, a wall-punching hellscape. Cannot export to h.264, meaning your postings need to be double transcoded. And you can’t import almost any of the things you typically need – mp4, m4a, HEVC, and, I read here, animations with embedded alpha.. Deprecating Quicktime looks like something Avid just shrugged their shoulders at. It’s very seriously concerning me, as you can’t downgrade the OS from Catalina on a new system, and even MC 2020.8 is quite frankly, Catalina-unusable. It is a complete nightmare.

[Philip Owens]

Thanks for this – so it seems like it would indeed be helpful.

[Philip Owens]

I almost never use AE, in truth.