Archive for the ‘Avid Wish List & Bugs’ category

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Fixing Fades

March 6, 2007

Picture 5 As part of my little home movie session Sunday I needed to apply a couple of fades.

In iMovie this is trivial. You simply add a fade to a clip. If it’s a fade out, the effect appears at the end of the clip. If it’s a fade in, it’s applied to the head. That matches my understanding of what a fade is, namely that it’s a segment effect that only applies to a part of a clip. Avid doesn’t have a model for applying segment effects to a portion of a clip. So, early on, fades became transition effects — special dissolves. And therein lies the rub.

Let’s say I’ve put two complete clips into the timeline. I want to fade out the first and fade in the second. I apply the “dip to color” effect. This should work, but it doesn’t, because both clips are used in full. Overlap shouldn’t be necessary, but because I’m really making a special kind of dissolve, the MC insists on it.

The workaround is to manually insert a little black between the clips and then create a pair of fades. But, depending on how you do it and how much black you insert, that’s going to take several steps and hit you with one or more “Insufficient Source” dialogs. Worse, if you go this route, beware of removing the black. If you extract it, you’re liable to have trouble removing your fades.

Bottom line: fifteen years into the digital revolution, creating this completely routine effect is still awkward and buggy and doesn’t match my intuition about the task I’m trying to accomplish.

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Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

Comments: 3 Comments

Importing with Media Composer and iMovie

March 5, 2007

Last night I spent a few hours trying to cut together some videos I made with a couple of still cameras. I’ve come to love these things for informal recording. They’re so small that they’re always with you, and since the size of the memory card is limited, you tend to be more selective and often produce better material.

The videos live in iPhoto, so I decided to try cutting them with iMovie and, since I have it handy, with Media Composer software, as well. The source files were in two sizes: 640×480 and 848×480. Both iMovie and Media Composer insist on converting them during import.

That’s the first frustration — if you uprez to DV, you’ll more than double the size on disk just to get started. I’d much prefer to leave the sources untouched.

The second frustration regards import settings. iMovie did a good, automatic job resizing the videos to DV dimensions. Media Composer worked well, too, but only after lots of experimentation. That’s because the import settings dialog, while very flexible, is damn near incomprehensible. For starters, video settings are perversely labeled “image,” so at first you think you’re in the wrong place. Then you come to the choices themselves:

Import Settings

I have yet to meet anyone who knows what they actually mean. What’s the difference between “Maintain, square” and “Maintain and Resize, square?” How the heck can you maintain and resize at the same time? Everybody I know just tries these things one at a time until they get what they want. A built in preview sure would save time and frustration.

Once you’ve figured out the settings, it’s time to import. And therein lies my third gripe: Avid’s progress bar. This has been with us for so long we barely notice it anymore, but humor me for a second. What is the key piece of information you want this thing to tell you? You want to know how long you’re going to have to wait, right?

In the world of Media Composer that is not readily available. First you have to know to press the T key. Then you must do a timecode subtraction. Oh heck, that’s easy. Let’s see, 23:39 minus 17:05…6:34. No problem!

Import Progress

This is particularly important since both programs can’t import in the background. But wouldn’t that be wonderful? You could actually get something done during an import.

I was actually importing several videos, and iMovie very helpfully told me how long the whole process was going to take. Media Composer, designed in an age where imports were relatively rare, only tells you about the current clip. You learn nothing about how long the whole job might take or even where you are in the list.

Bottom line, iMovie is much more friendly during clip import. Of course, Media Composer wasn’t designed for consumer video and most people aren’t using it that way. But we’re entering a world where everything is going to be file-based, where we’re all going to spend an increasing portion of our time dealing with these things. The process is badly in need of a refresh.

In the end, bringing the files in took so long that I was only able to make a couple of cuts before calling it a night. And here, of course, there was no contest whatsoever. The kind of precise work we do all day long in our editing rooms is simply impossible with iMovie. Heck, you can’t even make an overlap, let alone an audio dissolve.

I’ll be putting this project together over the next couple of weeks and I imagine there will be a few more lessons. If so, I’ll post them here.

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Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 4 Comments

Open Standards

March 1, 2007

I just finished reading an article in the Editors Guild Magazine about the making of “Zodiac.” It’s pretty hard to figure out exactly what they did, but the general outlines are there and they reinforce a lot of what I’ve been saying in recent posts, namely that file-based workflows are coming at us very quickly.

The show was shot with the Viper FilmStream camera and used Final Cut Pro in the editing room. The editors were responsible for archiving and cataloging the original camera source files, for down-converting those files to DVCPRO HD for editing, and, apparently, for conforming the show back to 2K for the DI. They also did some color correction using FinalTouch. In other words, the cutting room took on a lot more responsibility than is traditional. That’s good news for assistants because there was certainly plenty of work for them, but if this workflow takes hold it also means that assistants and editors have a lot of learning to do.

If everything’s going to end up as files, then much of the work on a show will turn on how we handle, store and move these things, and, most important, how they translate from one program to another. And here, I worry about Avid. The company has stuck with closed standards for a long time now. That made sense in the old days when people wanted something that was totally supported and really worked. We still want that today, of course, but more and more, we want to be able to pick the best software for the job and move materials back and forth transparently.

In that environment, Avid’s closed approach looks more and more anachronistic. Avid bins can’t be opened by other programs, Avid visual effects don’t translate into anything except Avid products, Quicktime export and import is slow and confusing, and even Avid sound files can be hard to share with all data intact.

On the other hand, the Media Composer still has many advantages, and Avid tends to understand our work very well. This stuff is still new, and there are plenty of hiccups on both sides of the aisle. But it’s easy to see that the company that gets this right is going to have a big advantage.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Final Cut, Workflow

Comments: 7 Comments

What’s Wrong With the Title Tool?

February 25, 2007

new_title.jpgActually, it’d be much easier to talk about what’s right with it, because the list would be so much shorter: it makes titles that can be supered over picture. Wow. That was an exciting thing a decade ago. Today, we see the same bugs, the same quirks, the same limitations that have been there all along, namely:

  • Titles play in realtime, but they’re not realtime. The title master clip must be rendered.
  • Changing a title always means creating a new render file and these files tend to proliferate and end up all over the place.
  • You can’t matchframe on a title in order to modify it. (The error message says “Precomputes can’t be loaded into monitors.” Of course, that isn’t true — you can load a title into a monitor.)
  • Unlike every other kind of clip, modifying an existing title means modifying only that single instance of it, not the title master clip.
  • Unlike every other kind of clip, modifying the name of a title master clip doesn’t change the name of the title when it’s edited into a sequence.
  • Change the text in a title and you often change the dimensions of the title’s bounding box and cause line breaks to change unpredictably.
  • Typography is a mess. Letter spacing is inconsistent and individual letter pairs often have to be kerned by hand. Type can look crude and rough.
  • Leading can only be changed for an entire title block, not line by line.
  • No lighting effects are possible.
  • It’s hard to precisely control title color.
  • Animation is crude and difficult to control.
  • Soft drop shadows are now possible, but are difficult to control.

And don’t get me started on Marquee, which is, if anything, even worse. Marquee’s typography is much better, but it’s got plenty of quirks of it’s own. For example, you can easily create multiple instances of Marquee, where two copies of the program are running independently — a total no-no in the Mac world. And I challenge anyone reading this, who doesn’t already know the trick, to tell me how to change the leading in a Marquee title. Or modify a Marquis-created title (hint — make your change and then quit Marquee!) Or figure out how to do simple character animation with it, which is supposedly what it’s for.

When are we finally going to get titles that don’t have to be rendered? When are we going to get real title styles, so we can simply change a style and have all the titles that use that style change together? So you could change the font, say, for an entire main title sequence in one step? When are we going to get soft drop shadows that are easy to apply, control and change? When are we going to get easy-to-use character animation?

I suspect that some of the folks in Tewksbury are painfully aware of all this. At one time I had hopes that we might see something new at this year’s NAB, but my intuition is that the challenge of getting the Media Composer onto the Intel-Mac platform has consumed a lot of engineering man-hours.

And so Media Composer users wait. Meanwhile, Final Cut and Motion get more capable, more responsive and more intuitive.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs

Comments: 2 Comments

Easier Searches

February 16, 2007

I make some pretty large bins in the Media Composer and when they become unmanageable, I move my latest version to a new one and keep going from there. The old bin becomes an archive of all the work I’ve done over a particular period of time. That works okay — until I want to find an old version. Then I have some searching to do.

There are two problems with this. The first is an Avid quirk. If you open a bin, and do just about anything, when you close it you’re going to be forced to wait while it saves. If I don’t know where something is, I may have to open many bins. And if I’m not careful, every one of them is going to save before closing.

Those bins are archives, reference materials for things done months earlier, and I don’t want to change them at all. What I want is the ability to close a bin without saving it. That would be safer and a whole lot faster. I have to believe this represents a trivial engineering assignment and I often wonder why it’s never been done. It sure would save me a lot of time.

Looking deeper, this really points to a problem with bins themselves. I just don’t want to be forced to search through a series of bins, one at a time, to find something. It wouldn’t exactly be easy, but it seems like it ought to be possible to create a unified find function that would create and search a master index of all text in all bins. That would save me a lot of time, too.

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Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

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Next Bin

February 2, 2007

Another easy-to-do feature that would make it a lot easier to work on a laptop: a keyboard shortcut that would cycle you through all open bins. On a small screen your windows are inevitably overlapped, and the result is that bins tend to get covered up. It would be great to be able to hit a key and go to the next open bin. It would save a lot of mouse clicks and menu picks.

Many other applications offer this. In Word it’s Command-F6. In Photoshop it’s Control-Tab. And the Finder lets you switch applications with Command-Tab. The MC needs it, too.

Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

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