Splice Now

It used to be that if you imported a sound file into Media Composer via drag and drop from the desktop, you got a clip with the same name as the file — but the name was truncated to 27 characters. Most of the time that didn’t matter. But with sound effects it could cause problems because sound effects libraries often have long, descriptive filenames.

Unlike a filename, there isn’t any intrinsic reason for a clipname to be shortened, so the MC was recently changed to take those filenames and turn them into clipnames intact.

And therein lies a tale.

Early last Friday I imported such a clip, and then blithely worked all day in the same bin without problems.

Monday morning I booted up to discover that the bin wouldn’t open. The error message included this text:

Exception: DOMAIN_COPYOUT_FAILED
Exception: STRM_BUF_SMALL, buflen: 256

The attic only took me backwards a few hours — none of those bins would open either. I had a backup from Thursday which worked — but that meant losing a whole day’s work. Unacceptable.

Some internet research and a few frantic calls to friends turned up the idea that the bin might open in a PC system — and, indeed, our rental house was able to open it in a Nitris. We then began the laborious process of trying to figure out which sequence within the bin was the problem. Many hours of trial and error, passing bins back and forth over the net, produced an unambiguous result — it was that sound effects clip.

Avid tech support thought the problem might be with the clipname and suggested that I keep all clipnames to 27 characters. I was skeptical since I’ve had dozens and dozens of clips with names longer than that on every show I’ve ever done. Nevertheless, I did another hour or so of experimentation and learned the following:

Now that the MC doesn’t truncate your clipnames on import, you can indeed screw yourself up pretty badly using names the MC doesn’t like. There are three conditions:

1. Files that won’t import. In this case the MC produces a generic error message telling you that the file couldn’t be imported. Just renaming the file that you’re trying to import, using a short name with pure alphanumeric characters (no punctuation), will cure this one, but you have to know the secret.
2. Files that cause the MC to hang on import. These have clipnames with characters that don’t produce an error message — they just hang the machine.
3. Files with clipnames that are too long. Here’s the gotcha that we faced this week. If your source file’s name is longer than 216 characters then the MC will import it just fine. And you will be able to use it without problems. But once you close any bin that contains that file, you won’t be able to open it again — on a Mac.

The good news is that I’ve reported all this to Tewksbury and a fix is in the works. The bad news is that it represents the kind of problem Avid faces when improving the MC. The system has grown so complex that even a simple change like this can produce unexpected side effects — and in this case, pretty disastrous ones.

Meanwhile, if you import files via drag and drop, double check the filenames before you bring them in. No punctuation except a single period between the name and file type, and make sure the filename is less than 216 characters long.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

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