Pack and Go

Posted November 3, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Laptop Editing, Workflow

Anybody try to grab a scene from your desktop Avid, put it on a laptop, and cut it somewhere else? It ain’t all that easy.

Consolidate helps — you find the source bin, select your master clips and consolidate them without relinking. But even though you are moving media to an external drive, consolidate insists on creating new clips that will link to the new media, clips which are placed into your source bin, and which you’re going to immediately delete. What you want is a copy of the media that will link to the original clips. There’s no way to do that except via the Finder. (And despite 20 years of confusion, media filenames still don’t contain clipnames, so that’s going to take some hunting, as well.)

Even if consolidate didn’t create those extra master clips, the task would still be too complicated because there are many non-master clips in a typical scene bin, namely groups and resynched subclips. For these, you have to find the relevant master clips and consolidate them individually.

Then you copy the relevant bins and put them into the project on the laptop. And finally, because the old clips aren’t linked to the new media, you’ve got to relink — which means setting options and often relinking more than once. (Why does every relink produce error messages even when the relink works?)

In general, this is not a task for the faint of heart. Too many steps, too many gotchas. All I want is to select a bunch of clips and sequences, and copy all the source media involved to a drive, along with the bin involved. It would be even easier to select a bin from the project window and have all relevant sources for everything in it copied.

Simplifying the process would make it a lot easier to take work on the road — and it’d also help sell Media Composer software. If this were easy enough and MC-software was reasonably priced, every editor and assistant would have a copy.

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Installation the Old Fashioned Way

Posted October 31, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Consumer Editing, Laptop Editing

Why is Media Composer installation so antiquated? The whole thing feels so 1995 to me that I have to wonder what newbies, who are comparing MC with FCP, will think.

In the old days, MC was installed by a priesthood — technicians whose job it was to get our systems working. Today, MC will increasingly be used and maintained by editors — people who don’t want to read a manual just to get the thing running. If Avid wants to compete in this new world it has to win the hearts and minds of editors at the first exposure, and that’s during installation.

Here are some of the problems:

  • No automatic software update. MC is the only piece of software I use that doesn’t go out on the net and check for new versions. You have to go to the Avid site yourself and hunt around till you find it.
  • Uninstall before installing. Want an update? You’ll have to uninstall the old version first. And worse, you have to find and use a separate application to do it. The least Avid could do is let the installer take care of this.
  • Need to register. Seems like dongle copy protection ought to be enough, but if you want an upgrade you have to register, as well.
  • Lots of extra installers. In addition to Media Composer, the disk includes way too many additional installers. What are they for? Some should be included as options in the main installer, others are just trial versions. How does the newbie sort this out?
  • And then there’s the readme. Sixty four endless pages long. Clearly designed for the priesthood, with 20 pages of known bugs. Yes, I appreciate Avid’s candor, but for a newbie, it’s got to be pretty intimidating.

I could go on, but you get the point. If Avid wants average editors to buy and maintain their own software, they’ve got to start looking at the system through their eyes. And that means simplifying and modernizing the installation process. It should be one-button simple — for the initial installation and for upgrades, too.

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Leopard First Impressions

Posted October 29, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, User Interface

It seems to me that software design can spring from two opposing philosophies. One says, “We know what the machine can do. But we don’t really know much about what you want to do with it. We’ll spend our time making sure you have all the options you want.” The other says, “We know exactly what you want to do. We’re going to make the machine do that. We’ll spend our time figuring how to make it do the right thing intuitively, quickly and easily.”

Which brings me to Leopard. I haven’t tried it, and I won’t be able to until the MC works under it. That’s a shame, because after four major upgrades, Apple has demonstrated that the OS can still be markedly improved, to a new level of interface simplicity and intuitiveness. Leopard makes it easier to find stuff, easier to back up, easier to share files, easier to stay organized. And as nice as Tiger looked, Leopard looks better.

To see what I mean, check out Apple’s Leopard guided tour video. It’s a half hour long, but when you’ve watched it, I think you’ll agree that Apple has found plenty of room for innovation in the supposedly staid world of operating system design. What I find so exciting is that many of the improvements make routine tasks, things we’re completely used to, all of a sudden seem old — because the designers found a simpler, more aesthetic, more visual and more intuitive way to do them.

They accomplished this by first deeply understanding what their customers are trying to do, and then by innovating — creating new and more intuitive ways to do those things.

All this begs the question about what Avid’s been doing low these many years. Way too many of the problems I have with the Media Composer have been around for a decade — not just bugs, but features that didn’t work right from the beginning. Yes, we’ve seen many innovations, but most have involved visual effects and color correction. When it comes to basic usability, we’re still working with Media Composer circa 1997. Luckily for Avid, Final Cut’s basic feature set hasn’t evolved much in the last couple of years (innovations have come in the suite instead) and before that, they were playing catch-up. But if Apple starts innovating the Final Cut interface as much as it has OSX, the MC is going to look awfully tired very quickly.

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Comments: 7 Comments

Turnover Blues

Posted October 19, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Much as I want to love Adrenaline, we’ve had our share of problems in the last couple of weeks, all related to turnover — problems with OMFs, EDLs and cut lists, as follows:

OMFs — If you want to deliver OMF media to sound and any of your media is MXF, you won’t be able to export. MC offers no help — you just bomb — and you’ll have to suss the problem out for yourself, cutting your sequences down and redoing the export until you finally find the errant clip or clips. This is a double gotcha since MC really wants to create MXF media now, and you have to turn off MXF file creation in several hidden places to make sure you don’t get any (see this post for details). In our case, it was a sound effect clip. Check your media drives and look for an “Avid MediaFiles” folder (as opposed to an “OMF MediaFiles” folder). Your MXF files are going to be in there.

EDLs — In MC version 2.7.2 and 2.7.3 you simply can’t make audio EDLs. Yes, you read that right. You’ll crash or see an error message. The solution is to upgrade to version 2.7.5 or 2.7.6. Loading a newer version of EDL Manager won’t work. In our case, after an upgrade to EDL Manager 23.7.5 we were unable to run MC at all and had to revert both MC and EDLM. For your system to work properly MC and EDLM versions must match (that is, the digits after the dot must be identical — MC 2.7.6 goes with EDLM 23.7.6). If you don’t want to upgrade MC (we’re in a critical period and can’t risk it), the workaround is to load a later version of EDLM on a standalone system and make your lists from there.

Film Lists — Unless you’re satisfied with Avid’s Web template you’ll crash when you try to make a list in FilmScribe 23.7.2. The solution is to replace your FilmScribe template folder with a new one from Avid. The problem is that most vendors don’t know about the fix, but I’m told that MC 2.7.6 / FS 23.7.6 includes it.

All in all, this is not much of a testament to Avid’s ability to test their software in a real-world, Hollywood-style environment. Turnover to sound and online/DI is mission-critical for us and when we need to do it, we need to do it now. And it’s not much of a testament to the now-forgotten decision to split off FilmScribe as a separate application. One key rationale was that as a standalone ap, it could be updated more quickly. But if we can only use the version that matches the installed version of MC that rational doesn’t hold up.

The silver lining to all of this is that MC 2.7.6 is supposed to be stable and fast and include a host of bug fixes — including everything mentioned here. I’m hopeful, but only time will tell.

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Why Can’t the MC Make a Simple Fade?

Posted October 15, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

It seems like fades in the Media Composer were designed to work properly only at the beginning and end of a sequence. If you cut a clip next to black and add a fade effect to it, you’ll get a proper fade. But if you make a cut from one shot to another and then add a fade to one of them (creating a cut to black and an immediate fade), you get a strange kind of dissolve.

Yes, I suppose that’s technically appropriate — a fade is a dissolve to or from black. But forcing me to be responsible for the black is unnecessary and confusing. If you apply a fade to a cut the MC wants to see handle for the fade, as if it was a dissolve. No handle — no fade, even though the handle has no relevance to the fade. Worse, if you don’t fade from Avid black the first frame of the fade will be dim but not fully black. This is true whether you’re using dip to/from color or the head fade/tail fade buttons. Film fades are even stranger — they really are dissolves.

The workaround, of course, is to first insert a frame or more of black and then apply your fade, but even that technique is awkward. You’ll initially get an error message saying the black is too short and the fade will begin life centered on the cut, which is never what you want.

This has caused problems on every feature film I’ve ever cut, because reels start and end with academy leaders, not black. A head leader typically has no handle for a dissolve.

You don’t have to do this in an EDL or in online, or on film — in all cases, black is invisibly inserted. Only in the Media Composer do we have to add black in this way.

We’ve been complaining about this for a decade or more. Isn’t it time it gets fixed?

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Comments: 1 Comment

Switching Between MC and iTunes

Posted October 15, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Laptop Editing, Workflow

Why does it take so long to switch between MC and other programs? I’m cutting temp music and using iTunes as the music browser. This is because it’s next to impossible to quickly position and audition music against picture in the MC. That, in itself, is a fundamental problem, but with iTunes, I have an adequate workaround. The problem is that I have to repeatedly switch back and forth from MC to iTunes and unfortunately, every time I do, MC goes through some kind of update. The result is a roughly four-second wait while the system seems frozen. Repeated all day long, that turns out to be maddening, especially when you’re trying to hit play in iTunes and then go to MC and hit play there so that music and picture will be in rough sync. Really hard to do it with that long wait.

You can see the same problem when bins are opened — or closed. There’s a several second wait after the bin appears or disappears, while all clipframes in all other open bins are laboriously reacquired from disk — and the system is frozen. Why? This wasn’t true in Meridien or ABVB.

I just tested this at home and discovered to my surprise that it doesn’t happen on a software-only system with local storage. I can switch between iTunes and MC in a quick keystroke — no waiting. And I can open a bin or close it without seeing any other clipframes update.

What gives? Is this a function of Unity? Or of sharing a project? And if so, is it really necessary, or is it an artifact, a programming mistake that added some kind of “refresh all” command where it isn’t necessary?

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