Splice Now

I’m sure this will be obvious to some of you, but I’ve found that many people don’t use Avid’s powerful ability to colorize clips in the timeline. It’s not always intuitive, but once set up, this can be very helpful in finding things visually.

You can colorize clips in no less than four ways:

1. The timeline can show you all offline material in red. This can be very helpful if you want to do a quick check before making a digital cut.
2. You can change the color of an individual clip anywhere in the timeline. Useful to tag something so you can easily find it again.
3. You can have the MC show you every instance of a particular source clip in a specific color. This offers a quick answer to “Where did I use this shot?” or “How many times did I use this shot?”
4. You can have the MC distinguish clips based on their resolution or whether they are standard def or high def.

Each feature is invoked in a slightly different way — and therein lies the confusion.

1. To invoke “offline” clip coloring, simply select that option in the timeline popup menu.

Now, every offline clip will be displayed in red.

2. To colorize a specific shot — Avid calls this “local” color — several steps are needed. First, make sure that local color is turned on by selecting that option in the timeline popup.

Then select the clip you’re interested in using segment mode, and change it’s color via the Edit menu:

The shot you selected via segment mode will change color.

3. To colorize every instance of a particular source clip, first turn that feature on in the timeline by selecting Clip Color > Source. Then go to the bin that contains the clip and activate the “color” bin column.

Finally, put your cursor into the “color” bin column. A popup menu will appear and you can select a color for that source clip. Every time you use that shot in a sequence it’ll be shown in the color you choose.

4. To have the timeline colorize SD and HD clips, select that option from the timeline popup. For more about resolution coloring (using Avid’s “MultiRez” feature) see your manual.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

With every Avid I’ve ever used, problems grow as your project, bins and sequences become larger and more complex. Avid has never done a good job testing in this kind of environment.

My brand new Adrenaline system worked like a charm for the first month or so. That was a welcome change from the past. But now that I’m working with 20-minute reels and large bins I’m seeing new issues. For example:

• EDL manager won’t load a bin until you quit from MC. If you don’t quit MC first, you crash. Yes, you read that right. It’s a known bug — but it somehow doesn’t affect everybody. And it seems that nobody knows what causes it or how to deal with it except to quit MC when you want to make a list.
• Project funkiness. My assistant and I are sharing a project over Unity. The other day the assistant’s system started crashing during saves. Any saves — but only from our main project. Two days of attempted fixes later we narrowed down the problem to a gremlin — something to do with the name of the assistant’s machine. The solution was to create a new project. Not difficult, but it sure took a lot of juju to figure it out.
• Unable to copy multiple bins to Unity. Yes, you read that right, too. It turns out that with Mac clients, you can’t copy more than about fifty or sixty bins at a time from the client workstation to the server. If you try to do more you’ll run into a Mac “-36” error, and the copy will stop before it completes. Avid says that this is a known bug and the way around it is to copy your material to a closed folder. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m a bit skeptical. Bottom line, if you want to restore from a local backup of your project, be prepared to copy it in batches of fifty bins at a time. Doing that and not missing anything can take some real concentration.
• Can’t make a list from FilmScribe with any templates except HTML. The solution is a new set of templates that Avid says they’ll distribute with the next point release (after 2.7.3). Your supplier should be able to get this — but there has apparently been no announcement of its availability.
• Slow performance with large bins. Once your bins get bigger than about twelve or fifteen megabytes performance deteriorates. The system is slow to move icons around, slow to load sequences into monitors. It’s a subtle thing — a matter of feel — and probably more noticeable when you’re in frame view. But it can be very annoying, nonetheless.

These aren’t catastrophic problems, and we’ve found the workarounds. But they sure put a kink into our lives over the last couple of weeks.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Here are a couple of keyboard shortcuts that I’ve grown very fond of recently:

Return to Previous Trim

As my sequences get more complicated, I set up more complex roller combinations in order to trim them. I’ll trim something, drop out of trim mode to check a cut in context and often want to return to the previous trim and make an adjustment. We’ve been asking for “return to previous trim” for a decade or more, and Avid has finally added it in recent versions of Adrenaline. It’s invoked by holding down the option key and hitting the trim mode button. I like it so much that I’ve added it to my keyboard. Doing so is a two step process. First drag the Trim Mode button from the Other tab in the Command Palette to your keyboard settings. Then drag the “Add Option Key” button on top of the trim mode button. This creates a trim mode button with a little dot on it. When you hit it, you’re hitting option-trim.

Turn Waveforms On and Off

When making a first cut I now leave waveforms on all the time. It’s just too useful to have them visible and with a fast G5 or Intel Mac they display quickly. But with longer sequences it’s another story — it just takes too long for waveforms to update. So I’ve come to use a keyboard shortcut to turn them on and off. That makes it trivially simple to leave them on most of the time but quickly get them out of the way when they’re slowing things down. To do this, select “Menu to Button Reassignment” in the command palette, and click on the key you want to dedicate to this function. Then click on the timeline popup menu (the timeline “hamburger”) and select Audio Data > Sample Plot. The letters “SP” will appear on your chosen key. Just hit that key to turn waveforms on or off.

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Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video