Richard Sanchez
8
Avid Coins
17
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Truthfully, I didn’t find it the most intuitive program to learn from the get go, but once you understand why it works the way it does, it makes more sense. Regardless of whether it’s easy to pick up or not, if you’re serious about getting into editing, you should learn it. If you buy 5.5 at this point, you’ll get a free upgrade to 6, so I say go for it.
There are tons of tutorials here, and the Avid store sells great tutorials on DVD. Pick up one or a few and go with it.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Close out of Avid and copy the MXF file in your Avid Media Files \ MXF \ 1 folder. Then, delete the pmr and mdb files in that folder. Those are your Avid database folders.
When you start Avid back up, it will rebuild the database files, and it will take note of the new MXF file. Open the AVB bin and then relink to it.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Regardless of whether it feels like your going back in time, there’s no doubt about it, jumping between the two systems will usually come with some adjustment.
My recommendation, since you mentioned you don’t want to cut web videos forever, buy it, learn it, accept it. I started my career in Final Cut and when FCPx came out, I immediately started getting my chops back up in Avid. In some cases I agree with you, that things some clunky if Avid, and some things Avid has always done a far better job than FCP. Likewise, in my case I hate FCPx and haven’t devoted a ton of time to learning it. The fact of the matter is, I can hate it all I want but if industry trends start to favor it, then it will be worth learning. As it currently stands, Avid is unavoidable in the post world and very worth learning.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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If you’re on a Unity, and you keep all the AMA clips on one specific workspace, you could open the sequence with the workspace unmounted, and turn your timeline clip color to show offline clips.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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You can’t AMA just the MP4 files. You need the entire card structure. I hope your media manager copied the entire cards over into a folder and named them, as you would tapes. So, if you shot today you’d have a series of folders 110211A01, 110211A02, 110211A03 and such. You select link to AMA volume and select the folder of 110211A01 to access it.
Think of the card structure like an HDCAM tape. The tape has a plastic enclosure. If you crack it open, you have the spools and the magnetic tape itself. That’s what the MP4 files are.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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It’s funny, I feel the same way about editorial control surfaces. I bought on for my Final Cut system, but got so used to j-k-l shuttle control that I rarely used it. What I’ve been thinking would be useful, of late, is an iPad app that essentially would be a large hamburger menu with mapable buttons, much like the mapable buttons on the Artist Control surface.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Within Final Cut? Nothing. Andy’s Region Blur is the closest thing, but it doesn’t have motion tracking built in. Avid’s Blur Tool does and is handy for that. After Effects would be good for it as well, but Final Cut’s built in tools not so much.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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The issue has more to do with your acquisition. The 5D shoots to h.264 which is inherently 8-bit and heavily compressed. That said, when you exported from the AVID to h.264, you introduced another level of compression which will make it worse. The best course of action would be to export it from Avid as a DNxHD file (or same as source). You can then convert that DNxHD Quicktime to Pro Res if you need to further work on it in FCP. It’s a lot of steps in conversion, but you’re keeping the bit rates high which will reduce the amount of digital artifacting.
The fact is, the banding probably was present in the original but just much less noticeable because of the exposure, and also it’s less noticeable on the camera’s viewfinder than it is on a larger monitor. As you color correct the footage, it will become significantly more noticeable. A few tricks to deal with that would be to dither the footage. Add a layer of noise, and bring it’s opacity level way down. If you have after effects, you could also try making a mask shape with noise and tracking the areas of significant banding. It would take time and work, but would keep you from having to drop noise over your whole image.
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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If the issue is lack of Firewire 400 ports, I believe you can buy FW400 to 800 adapter.
https://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-FireWire-400-Adapter-FAD-824/dp/B0000CDJPQ
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Well, yes and no. AMA provides a simple way of bringing the footage into the system, but H.264 is a long GOP format and far from optimal for editing from.
P2 tends to be fairly smooth playing via AMA, but that’s largely because it’s an I Frame codec and good for editing. Most long GOP formats will bog down your system because of the nature of their compression, this includes H.264 and XDCAM EX. RED plays slows because their raster sizes are massive.
Think of AMA more as a universal entry way, but that still doesn’t negate the need to transcode for ease of use by the system. Especially since it will introduce the same media management issues that occur on Final Cut systems, if you start moving folders around once they’ve been mounted as an AMA volume. Whereas, once you transcode the footage, they take on the benefit of Avid’s solid media management. I’ve heard there are some color space issues when transcoding from AMA. Just something to be aware of. https://community.avid.com/forums/p/93584/533230.aspx
Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks