Segment Mode in a Complex Timeline

Posted March 16, 2008 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, User Interface

The Media Composer has always done a better job when first-cutting than with re-editing. There are good historical reasons for this: most longform editors can’t or won’t do beta testing over the nine-month-or-more timeframe of a typical feature film, and Avid beta on a single product never lasts that long anyway. The result is that I find rearranging and inserting material into a multi-track and heavily overlapped timeline pretty cumbersome.

When recutting, my best friends are asymmetrical trim and sync locks. Segment mode is essential, too, but it’s frustrating — with a complext timeline it tends to require too many steps. To demonstrate this I’ll use a highly simplified example with just two clips, as follows.

Picture 1 - Orig

The goal is to interchange the blue and yellow clips. Interchanging picture-only is simple. Just grab a picture clip with yellow segment mode, hold down the command key for snap-to-heads, and drag. This is the result:

Picture 3-Drag Pix And Track

But I want to move picture along with sync sound, and both clips are overlapped at both ends. Here’s what happens if I drag picture and sound. Picture does the right thing, but sound gets broken up, with a hunk of the yellow clip’s audio floating free.

Picture 2-Drag Pix Only

To fix up this timeline, I have to rejoin the two yellow audio clips and I have to make room to do that. Not straightforward at all.

Instead, I wanted picture and sound to move together and intact. Like this:

Picture 8-What I Wanted

It takes way too many steps to get the timeline into this condition, where clips haven’t been broken up and can be re-edited easily.

As a partial solution I’d accept the ability to insert black into an overlapped timeline, like this:

Picture 9-Insert Black Into Overlapped Tl

In Media Composer, there’s no easy way to do that, either. FCP allows you select all clips to the right of the cursor. You can then drag them over and open up space. But that’s an incomplete solution to the problem posed here — you still have to move the clips, and that takes several more steps. What I really want is the ability to directly move only the clips I’m interested in — without cutting anything up. Neither MC or FCP make that easy.

(For more on this subject, see this post: Segment Mode in a Complex Timeline, Part 2.)

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“Legacy” Bugs

Posted March 11, 2008 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

One of the most maddening things about the Media Composer is that certain bugs never seem to get fixed. Regularly complained about, they’ve been in the software for so long they’re like old friends — or maybe enemies that never die. Avid could do a lot of good by dealing with some of these problems, and the bang-for-buck (editor satisfaction vs. engineering man hours) would probably be very high.

Here’s my list of favorites:

Slow Response When Opening or Creating a Bin
I’ve already mentioned this, but it bears repeating. Every time you open a bin or make a new bin the software runs a little routine that re-acquires every clip frame — from disk — in every open bin — even ones that are completely blocked behind other windows. This takes T I M E. And when you just want to quickly open a bin and check for something, this can drive you nuts. The software appears to be running the same routine that’s invoked every time you come back in from the Finder. It makes sense in that case because the MC needs to make sure no media has changed. But just to open a bin? Not necessary.

Source Timeline Glitches
When a clip is newly loaded into the source monitor and you hit “source timeline,” the timeline doesn’t center around the cursor. So you don’t know where you are. And the zoom factor always seems wrong. And then there’s the bug where you see the timeline for a completely different sequence until you cause a timeline redraw.

Rollers Jump to Next Cut
If you trim one element of an overlap cut to nothing, the roller will often disconcertingly jump to a nearby cut, screwing up your rhythm and forcing you to reset the trim.

Can’t Drag a Stereo Pair to the Next Track
Dragging stereo pairs vertically is perversely restricted. You can only move up or down two tracks at a time. I understand the logic for this circa 1993, but in 2008 does anybody need this?

Fades Don’t Work Properly Unless Cut Against Black
Fades are really dissolves to black. Cut a fade out of one clip against a fade in of another and try to trim the resulting transition. You can’t. Put a fade out on picture and sound at the end of your sequence using the “tail fade” button and you won’t be able to lengthen the end shot. (For more about fades see this post.)

Locators in Black
Never add a locator in black. If you do, you’ll corrupt that segment. (One symptom is that every time you move a segment adjacent to that black, you’ll create new, unnecessary, add-edits within it.)

Can’t Add Black at the End of a Sequence
How long do we have to work around this? It’s been there for 20 years.

Client Monitor Freezes in Trim Mode
If you’ve got rollers on both sides of a cut, and you’ve got dual image play turned on in trim settings (a great feature that FCP doesn’t have), your director is going to see a frozen frame while you look at a nicely moving image. This is an Adrenaline-only thing, but it’s been with us way too long.

That’s my short list. I’m sure you’ve got your own. Please add them in the comments.

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Fixing Segment Mode

Posted March 8, 2008 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, User Interface

Avid added segment mode to the Media Composer long before Final Cut was conceived, and even then, it was apparent then that editing in the timeline was an essential feature in any non-linear editing application. Working from the DS playbook, Final Cut made segment mode its primary editing mode and arguably made the application more intuitive to newbies who grew up with the desktop publishing metaphor — rearranging moving video by dragging little rectangles around on the screen.

I’ve never been a believer in the primacy of that metaphor. I think that the best editorial decisions are made by manipulating the video itself. That’s where the Media Composer excels, and for me, anything else is a shortcut that makes it harder to produce fluid editorial decisions. But there are still plenty of situations where dragging things in the timeline is the best way to quickly arrange a bunch of clips, and in this, Final Cut seems to have the edge.

The question for Avid is how to enhance its segment mode to better compete with FCP’s — without destroying the MC’s slickness and precision.

For me, it comes down to a handful of relatively simple fixes:

1. Don’t make clicking in a time track turn off segment mode. Unlike in the MC, in Xpress Pro stays on until you explicitly turn it off. When I first tried it, I thought this was a disadvantage. So I ended up mapping the red and yellow segment mode buttons to the keyboard. And boy did I like having them there. Now I find that having segment mode switch off every time I drag the cursor pretty frustrating. Allowing segment mode to stay on as long as you want it to would be the best and most flexible compromise with FCP’s “on all the time” approach.

2. Add a feature that lets me select “everything to the right.” This is a big win for FCP because it makes it easy to open up space in the middle of a complex, overlapped timeline. It would be trivially simple to add to the MC — it doesn’t even need its own button. You’d just select a clip while holding down a modifier key, and everything to the right would be highlighted. Do the same thing to each track and then drag to the right to open up space, as needed. I’d kill to have this seemingly small change.

3. In red segment mode, make it possible to select two non-adjacent clips in the same track and move them together without selecting all the clips in between.

4. Make it possible to select and move two audio clips (ie. a stereo pair) up or down one track at a time.

5. Offer a simple way to clone a clip and place it in another track. Great for trying musical alternates, or copying sound effects.

There are a few other minor issues, but for the most part, that’s it. Avid has just about everything else — cut and paste works fine, the four-headed display when dragging a segment is better than FCP’s. Dragging while snapping to the beginning — or the ending — of nearby clips works better, too.

But maybe I’m missing something. So I’ll put this to those of you who are proficient in both programs: What else is missing from Avid’s segment mode?

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New Tutorials

Posted February 28, 2008 by Steve
Categories: Audio, Avid, Avid Technical Tips

Harry Miller, who runs the tech blog for the American Cinema Editors, has posted some very useful, detailed and slickly-produced video tutorials on the Media Composer. Check them out here. Two are up so far, one covers Audio Suite plugins, and the other, the audio mixer.

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Using the Stabilize Effect

Posted February 17, 2008 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Technical Tips, With Video

Late model Media Composers include Avid’s tracking engine, a potentially powerful addition to your visual effects arsenal. The tracker is included in several effects, the simplest of which is stabilize. If you’ve got a shot that’s too rocky to include in a scene, the stabilize effect might just make it usable again. It’s realtime and it’s easy to set up — once you understand how to do it.

Rather than explain the use of this tool with images and text, I’ve posted a little 3-minute video that will introduce you to it. If you can’t see the screen clearly enough in the small version here, check it out on Vimeo.

I’m thinking about doing more of these. Let me know how this works for you and whether it’s useful.

In more advanced applications, the tracker can be used inside the 3D Warp effect to connect one shot, typically a matte, to the motion of another. Avid has a very nice video tutorial that will show you how to do this. It’s in the free part of their Alex education site, near the bottom of this page.

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Comments: 22 Comments

Adrenaline Continues to Improve

Posted February 12, 2008 by Steve
Categories: Avid

On my new show, I’ve got 3 Ghz, eight-core Mac Pros running Media Composer 2.7.7 over Unity — and I have to say that Avid continues to kill bugs and make the system more usable. These machines are the fastest and most responsive Adrenalines I’ve ever used. Blip-audio scrubbing in source/record mode is much faster than in ABVB or Meridien and frankly, it’s almost too fast. And playing and stopping are much more responsive than they used to be. Waveforms draw quickly, and when I’m first-cutting, I leave them on all the time.

The system can still crash, but it’s quite rare (once in seven days, so far), and restarting is quick. Of course, I don’t have much media yet, it’s just standard def 14:1, and our project is still pretty small. A lot of problems tend to reveal themselves with longer timelines and more media.

A couple of bugs stand out, only because they seem so obvious. First, there’s still a barely perceptible one-frame jump when you press stop (only in Adrenaline systems — you don’t see it with software only). Also, when you open a bin, all clip frames in all open bins refresh. This was not true in ABVB or Meridien and if you’ve got a lot of bins open in frame view, it can feel maddening slow. Also, and equally irritating, when frame view clips get moved from one bin to another, the system wipes out any arrangement you have and aligns them to a grid.

But despite these issues, the big headline is how responsive and stable the system is. Avid has made a lot of progress in the last year or so and they deserve to be congratulated.

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