Richard Sanchez
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COW Coins
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How full are the drives and do you have a USB 3.0 PCI-E card? If the answer is no, I’m going to say, that’s your problem right there. The onboard USB ports on the Mac Pro are USB 2.0 and those will be a huge bottle for rendering.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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10.8.5 is not qualified for any versions of Avid. While plenty of people work outside of the qualified versions, it’s best practice to use all qualified versions. Check the compatibility matrix to make sure you’re working on qualified versions.
https://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Compatibility/en267087
That said, a 4,1 Mac Pro isn’t terribly old and should still be pretty fast. Like Peter said, how much RAM do you have? I would hope at minimum 8GB. How full are your drives? If they are more than 80% full, you’ll notice performance hits like that.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Sorry, I completely disagree with you on multiple timelines. Having AEed quite a bit on both FCP and Avid, I find a lot of editors duplicate sequences, maybe to try an alt version, but because they have multiple timelines open, confuse versions, work on the wrong version, then I do an export and get in trouble because it’s the wrong version. Even with color coding, it opens up a huge variable for error. You can load your B-roll string into the source monitor, and toggle Source/Record when you need to and it works nicely.
It seems to me that you’re falling into the trap of trying to make Avid work like Final Cut. Don’t do it. It doesn’t work the same way. I did this when I was learning Avid. As soon as I embraced how Avid worked, so many things made more sense to me (Particularly how Avid deals with extended edits, which I so prefer on Avid versus FCP).
I also disagree on changing the interface. Of all things, don’t change the interface (Everybody hated the smart tool with version 5 and the interface change of that). Change under the hood, leave how we work alone. Fortunately they let us turn off the smart tool. I’ll save you the suspense, Avid 6 was a ground level rewrite, so it won’t change for MC8.
At the end of the day, choose the tool that works best for your workflow. Avid is an amazing tool for offline to online, designed originally around film and later applied to television. Corporate video work, and projects that are working online from beginning to end work much better on a program like Premiere or FCP.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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This is a workflow guide I put together for a show I worked on a while back. This was built around the AMA capabilities of Media Composer 5. You probably don’t need to necessarily assign a tape name because now you can relink by source filename, but this is how I used to online shows via AMA. (This workflow was also designed for XDCAM discs, but the principle should be the same)
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Happy to help!
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Select the offline master clips. (If you can’t see them, open the bin with the sequence, and in the Bin’s Hamburger Menu, go to Bin View, and check “Show Reference Clips”) Select all of the offline master clips, right click, select “Batch Import”
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Timecode is necessary for more than syncing, you need it if you’re going to create low res media for offline and then match batch for online, and since Mark ii doesn’t have timecode here’s where it gets really weird. If you import Mark ii footage, it’s starting timecode will always be 01:00:00:00 but if you AMA it, it will come in as 00:00:00:01. Meaning, you would be force to batch import clips for online, but batch import won’t allow you to just upres the portion you used, you’d have to import the entire clip which defeat the purpose. Time of day timecode is also useful if your director says, “I remember we shot it right after lunch.” you’ll have some kind of indication of the time (Of course this is also depending on your camera op setting the time on the camera correctly, which doesn’t always happen with 5D camera ops, but still it’s a useful indicator)
MPEG-2 is a long GOP codec. Without getting overly technical, it’s a compression where frames are based on each other. Instead of each frame existing individually, it tracks the differences between frames. (GOP means, Group of Pictures). Long GOP formats are not meant for editing, and will have to be transcoded.
I haven’t used the FS100, but if it’s tapeless, AMA the clip and then transcode it. With 5D Mark ii, run QTChange first, then AMA and transcode.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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No, MOV alone is not a basis to not need transcoding. MOV is a wrapper, but what matters is the codec. A very common codec that DSLRs shoot is H.264 which will have to be transcoded before you can edit. The Alexa shoots to ProRes444 which technically doesn’t need to be transcoded, but in the case of that camera you probably want to apply a look up table, and ProRes444 will require a lot of bandwidth, so it’s a good idea to transcode.
What camera do you plan to use? Bigger concerns are if you are shooting with Canon 5D Mark ii, that camera doesn’t include timecode on the clips, however QTChange (Available at https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/42/qtchange) will add the camera’s clock information from the THM files, to create timecode that will allow you to properly conform at the end of the project. The 5D mark iii embeds timecode, so you’re good in that respect.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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If they plan to finish 1080p and not 2k or 4k, and if you have enough hard drive space to handle it, and if that hard drive is fast enough (a large RAID via esata, Thunderbolt, or other higher bandwidth connections) then yes it’s certainly possible. If you’re not familiar with Media Composer, I’d download a trial and watch some tutorials pronto, since it doesn’t work like Premiere or Final Cut, and if you try to force it to, you might have problems.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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I’m using MC 6.5.2.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
