AVID 3.0-REAL WORLD EDIT-DAY 1
DAY 1 was...difficult. After being on Final Cut Pro for 3 years...with a small 2 month Avid break in there..a solid year of FCP since that...cutting on the Avid was, well, a challenge. I kept pressing FCP shortcuts and causing all sorts of things. The big thing I miss is the ability to drag clips on the timeline and arrange things. Especially when I am in the rough cut phase. Adding spaces for timing takes me longer on the Avid. I felt like I was editing in mud.
But that was just because I wasn't used to it. I eventually got back into my Avid habits...at least keyboard wise. I now have to get out of click and drag editing mode and into trim editing mode.
But enough about that...now onto the joys.
LOCATORS - During the first day or so of editing, I scan through the footage and add locator at points of interest. Now, instead of just clicking and adding a locator, a dialog window pops up allowing you to add comments, and change the color right away. Now I also found this a little annoying, as I like to add locators and then move on. But the window is still nice.
SPEED - Sure my fumbling about was slowing me down, but the interface is a LOT faster. Timeline scrubbing, double clicking the footage. Faster and smoother. That was nice.
CLEAN CODEC - Even though the footage was captured 15:1, it was pretty clean. I could read what was on people's shirts. Didn't look like the mud of the AVR days.
One thing I forgot about Avid is that there is no way to really separate the media from project to project on the Finder Level. But again, I am used to FCP. Avid is the king of media management...so there is no need to really separate the media on the finder leve. But, there are times when you need to do that. I have three segments that I need to work on, all on the same firewire drive. We want to keep the media separate, so that we can move things from place to place easier. Now the company has figured out how to do that manually, and it is pretty slick. But I am not going to give away any trade secrets.
Scrolling at high speed seemed to choke more that before. Because this show has a lot of slow motion footage (shot with slow motion cameras) I need to scroll thru quickly to see what is happening, and the system chokes. But I attribute that to the firewire drive.
While I am finding myself back with some of my most favorite tools, this first day was a struggle. It will soon ease, and I'll get back into the Avid swing soon. I hope. To have this powerful editing application available for as cheap as it is, is simply amazing. Now I can have a copy at home and bring media home to edit...since I share a bay with a night editor. This way I can continue being the workaholic I am and edit when inspiration strikes. Or edit when I need to stay home for some reason.
All and all, a decent day.
6 comments:
Avid just released 3.0.5. You should talk to the company about upgrading to it--there's a feature there you'll like...
In FCP you can select all clips to the left or right of the position indicator, right? Avid added that, as well as selecting all clips (of selected tracks) between In and Out points. Should make dragging clips around a little easier.
Michael, I will definately be downloading that for me! But getting a company to do that has always proven difficult. I will mention it to them, and when I figure it out, SHOW it to them...in hopes they see the light.
SWEET!
ANy help menu or white paper that shows you how to use that feature? Or will I find it on the upgrade page?
It's really simple. Open your Keyboard, then the Command Palette (Cmd+3 on a Mac, I believe, Ctrl+3 on a PC). I think it's under Edit of the Command Palette. You have the option to map Position to Right, Position to Left, and In/Out Selection to the keyboard or buttons on your source monitor or timeline.
I've been playing with it--it doesn't work quite as well as FCP, but it's definitely useable. I don't like the In/Out selection--I can't get it to function quite right. A check in the Help files might help.
There are more details in the ReadMe, but that wasn't available in the Avid Knowlege Base last last time I checked (late last night). I can email it to you if you want (it's a PDF, less than 1MB). When I get back to work I'll send it to you (I'm sure I'll find your email here or CreativeCow).
They've actually added a few knew things, some of which might be helpful if you're offlining this show (you can generate reports of your sequence or clips to see what you've used, what effects, etc...).
What do you mean by this comment? Sounds like you are refering something new with Media management.
"We want to keep the media separate, so that we can move things from place to place easier. Now the company has figured out how to do that manually, and it is pretty slick. But I am not going to give away any trade secrets."
The free app MDV (Media Database Viewer - http://fiool.nm.ru/progz/) is pretty good for separating media, by project anyway.
There are a few other ways to get around it as well. Certainly at times I think it would be nice to be able to make directory-based media stores. I believe something like this can be done with the subst command.
Working on Unity now it is quite a lot easier to manage that sort of thing. Some sort of 'virtual Unity' would be cool - an automated interface to create named drives for Avid's use that all actually exist on local drives.
Brad...this is nothing new. Avid has always created one folder on the media drives for all the media. The organization has always been internal in the project...except in the case of UNITY...I think. I will admit that my assisting years ended before I got my hands in a Unity, and as an editor I let the assistants do all the organization.
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