Splice Now

Grant has posted some great suggestions for a new title tool on his blog “Avid Tips.” He’s hoping you all will weigh in with your ideas, either here or on his site, and then he hopes to collect all the material from both blogs (see my previous post) and present it to his friends at Avid. I think that’s a great idea, so I hope you will add your comments here or on Avid Tips and let us know what you’d like to see.

Meanwhile, I’ll add a few additional suggestions. Though I think the title tool needs to be scraped and replaced, there are some things that Avid could do short-term that would help, too.

For example:

1. Improve the way a title’s bounding box resizes. No matter what you do, the size of the box that contains a title adjusts every time you change the font or font size — but, like an old Detroit seatbelt, the box can get tighter, but it can never get loser. When you switch to a font with narrower letters, the box gets smaller. If you then switch back to the original font, it doesn’t get bigger again, the line breaks change. Even undo doesn’t get around this bug.
2. Put render files for changed titles where I want them. Every time I change a title, a new master clip is created — and it automatically goes into the same bin as the sequence that contained the original title. That’s not where I want them. Please let me specify a bin for these things.
3. Work on the typography. I have a lot of fonts installed. They look fine in every application — except in the MC, where kerning is so uneven that it’s almost comical. No matter what font I pick I can’t make a good-looking title.

And finally, make it easier to create a series of similar titles. Let’s say I’ve made a title card I like. I now want to make 10 or 12 more with the same font, size, drop shadow, alignment, length and fade length. The easiest way to do that is to copy the title, put it into the source monitor, cut it in again, and modify the text. Sounds easy, right? Well, here are the steps:

• Mark in and out on the existing title. Select the appropriate track. Hit command-option-c (copy to source monitor).
• Mark in on the record monitor and edit the old title to a new position.
• Park over the title, go into effects mode, then select the little “modify” button on the effects palette.
• The title tool opens, change your text, resize the bounding box, as needed (#1, above).
• Close the title tool. The precompute is saved (in the wrong place — #2, above).
• So much for the first title of 10.
• Now make another. Woops — the title I carefully placed in the source monitor is now gone, replaced by the full master clip of the modified title. So — start over at the top of the list.

All this to copy one title and change its text.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

I did some more work cutting together home movies on Media Composer software over the weekend. And I discovered that the “stop delay” is even worse than I thought. With standard def 14:1 media (PAL) the problem is relatively subtle (picture stops precisely, audio continues to play for two frames). But with Firewire-acquired DV the delay is much longer — four or five frames, picture and sound. It’s just downright impossible to cut accurately this way. You have to noodle every cut and there’s no such thing as working reflexively and feeling a cut point. Simple trims take twice as long as they should (the delay seems to be worse in trim mode).

Maybe this is because my master clips are an hour long. I don’t know. But I do know that this ought to be fixed pronto.

Technorati Tags: avid