AVID 3.0-REAL WORLD EDIT-DAY 2
Second day on the Avid and all I can say is that editing on this is a bit frustrating. I have gotten very used to FCP and the ability to drag clips all over the place, and move everything on the timeline down to make room to add footage. I know that the new update adds this functionality, and I will install it on my own machine, but getting it installed on the work machines might not be possible. Up to the Post Super and they tend to be very wary of updates. In the meantime, I am trying to remember how I did this with Avid's amazing TRIM capabilities, but wasn't having much luck. Felt like I was fumbling along. I hope to get into the swing of things soon.
My main task today was to flesh out the rough cut and add music...and that brought another level of frustration. In FCP when you open an audio file in the Viewer you can see the waveforms. You can see where the music swells and dips, and where the beats hit. This is VERY useful. In an Avid, you see black. So editing music is a bit tougher, and takes a bit longer.
So far things have been rocky...and I hope that can be attributed to me needing to relearn my Avid skills. Because while the media management rocks, mixing codecs in real time and faster reaction time on the timeline is nice, the basic editing feels rough. This is a great tool, but it feels...heavy. It does so much, but using it can be difficult...while editing on FCP (for me) is fast and fun. But then I know Avid people who get on FCP and complain just as hard that editing on FCP is like slogging thru mud. So I just need to get into my Avid game.
Cool thing is that I have upgraded the home system to 3.0.5 and brought the segment home that I am editing and it opens just fine. Did a few changes to the cut, so I'll bring the changes in a bin to work and see if it opens and connects. But that is where Avid does excel...you can take projects back and forth in a variety of version without too much trouble. And all you need to do is take the bin (which is a separate file...Avid breaks the project into smaller files...each bin is a separate entity) to another system and open it. Good tool, very powerful. I just need to be able to have fun with it now.
4 comments:
Regarding the audio waveforms in the source monitor, all you have to do is click "Toggle Source/Record in Timeline." Your clip will then take the place of your current sequence in the timeline window (indicated by a green playhead rather than a blue one). You can then change any of your timeline settings depending on how you want to view the clip - fatter tracks and either energy plot or sample plot are probably what you're looking for most. You can even zoom way in to make sure you hit the first beat of a waveform. This function is also tremendously useful for cutting portions of other sequences into your current sequence. Hope that helps.
-Tim
"View From the Cutting Room Floor"
Oooo...that's a good tip! Nice nice nice.
Only issue I have now is that the drawing of all the audio waveforms on the audio in my master sequence takes a while. Still...better than floundering in the dark.
Thanks Tim.
I've noticed that most of the difficulty of people going from Avid->FCP is that they assume FCP can't do what they want. Once they look for a way to do it, you just do it.
In Avid on the other hand, the difficulty is figuring out the way that Avid wants you to do specific actions.
But personally, Media Composer feels like an app from the 90's. It's fast at what it's good at, but you can't just 'do things' as you get used to in FCP.
And as far as media management. FCP is far more hands on, doesn't really do media management for you, while Avid doesn't let you do any media management yourself.
The Quicktime Architecture allows you to alter and change the files themselves and swap them, without final cut being the wiser, which is incredibly useful in certain circustances. (like fixing dead pixels).
Hey Shane I equate the slow draw of the waveform in the timeline to what happens on the FCP viewer if you load a song and then hit shift+z to fit it all, it takes some time to redraw. I usually zoom in the timeline in Avid when I am looking at the source side before I turn the waveform on. It's a tough one as I love the FCP waveform in the Viewer and I love being able to see the Source timeline in full. Both are great. Why can't we have an app with both !?!? Arggggg!
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