Audio is great. Dialogue on tracks 1-4, Music on 5-6. Video all needs to be flattened though.

I loaded up some files on my MacBook Pro (without any other accelerator attached, like the MXO2 mini) and started to edit some pieces. It stuttered here and there, but I put most of the blame on the speed of my computer. I changed the draft quality to “best performance” (all yellow if you read the last blog post) and it seemed to work very well. I think it works better than the H.264 through AMA edit, but more on that another time.

One of the advantages of the way Avid handles Red footage is the ability to change the color data within the application itself. To do this, import your RED clip through AMA. Right click on the file and choose Set  Source Settings. You will be taken to another window that will give you the options to change your color, exposure and all the other RED editable settings. Works well. At least I think so.

How do I fight this boredom? How do I get past the edits staring at me? I do two things.

1) Breakdown the Edit.

In most cases you should able to break the edit down into speakers, topics, deliverables, anything. Put up a few categories and make a task list out of each of them. Let’s say you have 8 different deliverables for the client. Based on that, assume each of them are just one speaker or reel. Make a box you can check for each step you will find yourself along, i.e. selects, assemble, rough, fine, final, color, gfx, etc. Now you can start to see how much work you have (or don’t have) left to do.

2) Set a timer

Because I have a hard time concentrating when it is a boring topic, I use my iPhone timer to give me a limit on that subject. That way I know “it will all be over soon.” This allows me to force myself to focus for that amount of time. If the timer hits and I have found my groove with that section, I set it again for the same amount of time. I move from that task to another if I can’t find my groove in that amount of time.

This may sound a little odd to some people. Everyone has a different method to their madness. This is just one of mine.

Ever since I was a wee lad, and I outgrew my NES for a turbografx 16 (don’t ask) I have been yearning to get back to using that classic rectangular controller. With this project I was finally able to do so.

This project came simultaneously with the cheapskate version of the creative controller. I decided to do both, because they have different results and levels of difficulty. To sum up the premise: in an edit I want to give the reviewer the ability to stop and start playback and scroll through the edit. If they can specifically show me the section / clip / edit that they are referring to, then the conversation will generally go much more smoothly. I call it the “creative controller”

Visit Ross’ blog to read the rest.

Now, I am not going to dive in deep to analyze everything possible, as I was not able to attend NAB and therefore have not tried the software out myself. These are just some thoughts I’ve had over the past couple days.

1) Editing H.264 and ProRes. HDSLR footage, come my way please. I tend to edit 1-2 pieces a week shot on the 7D and this just makes me excited. I can spend more time on the editing and less time on converting the footage to Pro Res before it comes into the system. Good feature for us flat rate payment guys. And then ProRes, really? Great. I’ll take it. I usually use ProRes as something to convert footage that isn’t editing well (H.264) on timelines so I only use it when its HDV or shot on a HDSLR.

2) XDCAM. This is great as a time saver, again. I like the low res proxy editing feature with option to use high quality audio. Good news. I don’t have a super powerful machine at home, but again

3) E-mail me! After a large batch of exports it appears I can get an e-mail on my iPhone when the work is complete. That’s awesome for two reasons; it’s a time punch and the mobile alert factor.

Now of course you could say “What about the AMA features with editing RED?”

Yeah, that’s awesome too. It doesn’t directly effect me yet though, as I usually edit RED stuff on a larger, more complete system anyway. These are the new features that help out the little guys, the one man shops with smaller jobs that pay the bills.

I think that these features give a good shove back to Apple on the competition level of things. Now that Avid is updating for MAC the same time as PC there is no reason you shouldn’t look over to Avid as your new editing solution. They even have a full 30-day trial.

The new version is expected out June 10, but if you buy Media Composer 4 now you get the upgrade to 5 for free.

For a list of the features included in Avid 5, check the list over at Avid.com.

UPDATED APRIL 19, 2010 with correct date of release and correct information about the trail period.

I’m not usually a fan of deafult settings. I can personalize a project or a preference to be easier to use or to speed things up. In this case I want to talk about trying the default items out. I’m a big fan of some of compressor’s default settings. One in particular is the YouTube compression. This was added in Compress

or 3.5 I believe. Just go into compressor, just like you already do, and do a search for youtube in the presets. Select that option and submit away. You get a really nice image up to 720p. It’s an H264 image that is about 3.6 GB per hour. Give that a shot and see how it helps your image.

It is not the most time friendly compression so if you are simply sending a draft of something over, I would still go with the 640×360 one pass with timecode compression setting you can create yourself.

First you need to learn the terms After Effects uses. When you want to export something with a transparent background the correct term is having an alpha matte. If you export something with only an alpha matte, you won’t see any of your artwork or lower thirds.

I’ve made a simple lower third (nothing fancy about it) with this composition for a fun little piece I did with OCFamily.com. As you can see I have the title and then a black background. I will add this to my render queue.

Now you can see my default “Output module” is ProRes. This won’t help me at all when it comes to rendering something with an alpha matte + RGB. We will want to select Lossless, which is an animation codec based output module. Note: There may be another Lossless with Alpha or Lossless + Alpha setting, but I can’t remember if those were ones I made on my own or came with the program.

Lossless will most likely come up automatically unless the settings are changed on your program. Click on Lossless.

Now another screen pops up with an option to change your Video Output settings. You should see an option for Channels with RGB selected. Click on that and make it say RGB + Alpha. To the right it should say “Animation.”

Click ok. Click render. Import that into FCP or Avid (your Avid settings must be correct to catch the alpha matte, but that is another post for another day) and you should be able to lay it over the video to end up with it working correctly.

Here is how it should come out. You will notice that the third is positioned on the other side of the screen because I had switched it to the other side of the screen for a future project.

I had to create my own bin settings in Avid so I decided to make a quick little tutorial on how to modify the different columns and headings in your bin in Avid. I like how you can switch back and forth between bins so easily too. Excuse my non-audio-mixed voice in this. You can also tell where I had to stop for a second and continue. I decided against putting a default cross dissolve over it to patch it up. Thank for reading, as always.