[Sean Marks]

I worked on a documentary with a similar issue. All I can offer is what I did:

1. Bring them in exactly as you wish them to look in the final project. Don’t assume your AE artist will know what has to be pillarboxed, stretched, etc. It’s a lot of work, but you will save yourself headaches later on.

2. Keep color spaces consistent. On my show, we worked with a lot of photos from the 80’s and 90’s. In the offline, they looked fine, but in the online we found that they were in CMYK. It gave them a sickly greenish tint in hi-res. If you can, bring them all into photoshop and export in RGB (I may be talking out of my ass here – I didn’t have to do that part).

3. Are you working on a Unity? If so, when you link via Pan and Zoom, keep all the photos on the desktop in a generic folder (i.e., Episode 1 Photos). Link to that. When you bring them into the online, copy that folder onto the desktop. They should all re-link. If you link them from a Unity, keep in mind that sometimes those drive letters change. If that happens, you’re stuck re-linking everything (Avid was looking for them on Drive H, for example, but now Drive H is Drive R). The C drive, however, is always the C drive.

Hope that helps a little.

[Sean Marks]

I wish it were so. I work rather methodically to ensure no mistakes are made. In reality television, I’m finding that the producers just want it fast. Whenever someone starts off their sentence with “I just don’t understand why….”, what follows is bound to annoy you.

Thanks for your reply. Does Avid DVD take advantage of all cores?

[Sean Marks]

Hi Daniel,

I’m running on –

Windows XP
Intel Xenon, 3.40 GHZ
3GB RAM

The media is SD, 3:1. Typically 8 tracks of video, 16 audio. I realize that under the circumstances, Avid DVD is actually doing a good job. But, you know how it is. Producer wants me to see if anything can “do better”.

[Sean Marks]

I gave this a shot just before reading this…worked like a charm. Thanks.