Bruno Mansi

When I'm teaching Avid to my students, I start with a short presentation about how most features and long-form drama is edited on Avid. The question I'm often asked is why? My answer is that it's not necessarily to do with the editing itself, but the handling of metadata and the media management. The workflows with Avid are long-established and work reliably.

Interesting watch. They made it clear how carrying the additional metadata across to editorial is so important and mentioned ALE files, so I guess the normal route is to use these ALE files with Avid Media Composer. I'm wondering how they would get this extra metadata across with an editing app like Premiere Pro?

It's not always easy to judge a shot from a grabbed still, but it doesn't look particularly underexposed to me. It looks as if the dungerees he's wearing might be a bit black crushed, but I quite like the look of the rest of the shot. The cyanish backboard seems to complement his flesh tones nicely, and I'm not sure what you mean about it being too stylised. I'm guessing he's wanting some parrticular style for his video, and it's difficult to advise without knowing what look he's going for. The lens flair is probably the one thing I'd want to remove from this shot. This shouldn't be too much of a problem (especially if it's a locked-off shot) since there's plenty of background you can use to paint it out. If you become a Lowepost premium member there are many tutorials and case studies available that will help you understand the creative approach that many top colourists use in their daily work.

I'm astounded that a post house in India that's working on a feature, doesn't have one person who speaks English! I've found that in many Indian companies, the proportion of English speakers is quite high, and most Indian people regard learning English as essential if you want to get ahead in business.

I've seen this course and I think it's fine for those who are starting out. It's more of an overall perspective, including interviews with working directors. There's even a lesson where both the colourist and director take their cameras out, shooting video in a park, whilst talking about general issues with dynamic range, clipping etc. It's not so much about the theory of colour, but more about a personal approach to the problems one might experience as a colourist. Although Ollie Kenchington is seen working on Resolve, It's not really a course specifically designed to teach you on how to use the software. If I remember rightly, he even talks to a couple of colourists working in high-end, London (UK) facilities. For the experienced colourist, it might be interesting to see how a fellow colourist approaches a job, and the working relationship with his clients.

It's coming Friday.

This Nahimic service has also been reported on the Adobe forums as causing problems with Premeire Pro. I believe it's supposed to give some sort of surround sound through normal stereo audio channels.

Just posting this on a few forums as it may effect you if you're running previous versions of Premiere etc for compatibility with older projects. Rather than repeating what's been written, here's a link to an article by Daz Wallace. https://dazwallace.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/the-great-adobe-purge-of-19/

These are pretty standard requirements. I think broadcasters know that it can be quite difficult to suppress certain 'spikes' and make allowances for this. The BBC specs (shown below) are very similar to Adstream.

Did you talk to him in person? I didn't see any mention of this in any of the demos or press releases.

I've been wondering for a while if Avid would be retiring the Symphony option, and incorporating it into the whole Ultimate/Enterprise versions. But looking at the 'What's new for MC 2019', I read the following... "With the Symphony option (included in most licensing options) you can now create SMPTE Standard 2067-21 IMF packages..." So their philosophy still seems to be to have additional features (the advanced colour correction and IMF packaging) as a distinct option. It makes you wonder if there's more to come on the Symphony front ... i.e. DCP creation?

Were they putting anti-halation backing layers in nitrate film of the 1920's? Tried researching this on the internet, but haven't found any info about when these backing layers were introduced. Interesting other info I discovered whilst searching - is that there's a type of halation called Light Piping, especially with polyester-based film. According to Kodak information, it 'can transmit or pipe light that strikes the edge of the film and result in fog'. I guess this probably looks like edge fog but must be very image-dependent.

No, never been to NAB. Living in the UK means it's a fairly expensive trip, unless a company is prepared to foot the bill! IBC in Amsterdam (September) is much easier and cheaper to get to.

Workarounds implies you have some problem with your current method of working. I suspect you mean workflows. I think it would be useful if you were to be more specific about what sort of software for editing/sound mixing/grading you're most likely to be working with. For example, round-tripping between Avid MC and Baselight will be different than (say) FCP and Resolve. As a starter, you might want to take a look at Kevin McAuliffe's tutorials on 'Conforming in Davinci Resolve' in the Courses section

Not really sure what point you're making here. As far as I can see from the demo, you need to select the desired trim mode from the left of the keyboard, which then puts the knob into trim mode and it will adjust the clip in whatever type of trim you select. You will then need to escape from this mode to go back to the normal wheel functions. When I edit in Avid Media Composer, my left hand selects the shortcut for the trim mode, and then I trim with either the mouse pointer, the JKL keys, or by hitting the frame forward/backward buttons. When I'm finished I hit escape to return to normal editing functions. In both cases, it's one button to enter the relevant trim mode and one button to escape. It's just the way you actually move the trim roller(s) that's different. I agree that the knob is probably nicer to use than a mouse or the JKL keys, but I doubt it's any faster. If I really need the facility of using a jog wheel to control my trims, I could go and buy one of Avid's Artist transport controllers cheaper than the price of the Resolve Keyboard. I just don't see what's so special about this keyboard that warrants it's price. It may be a new feature as far as editing in Resolve is concerned, but Avid has had this functionality in it's panels for years.

Not sure about this as Adobe have countered with the new Adobe Rush. As well as being available on Mac & PC, Rush also works with IOS and (soon) Android. Both Rush and Resolve's Cut tab seem to be aimed at the YouTube content creators or the fast turnaround world of news etc. I suspect it's really not going to revolutionise the practises of those of us in the long-form editing world. Most of us who work in this genre of editing have built up our own workflows to achieve the efficiency required during the early stages of an edit. Once I have my basic assembly or rough cut, I don't see how 'Cut' or Rush will help me. From my own perspective, using Avid's script tool and Scriptsync has been the biggest single advantage that I've encountered when editing drama, but many editor's are completely unaware or unwilling to give Avid scripting a try. Partly this is because it takes time to prepare, but as well as being a huge time-saver, it's a great way to become familiar with the footage. It just highlights how seasoned editors are generally happy to stick with time-honoured practises and feel no need to 're-invent the wheel'. As far as my opinion on the new edit keyboard is concerned, I'm still sitting on the fence. During the Blackmagic presentation, Grant seemed to suggest the keyboard opened up the revolutionary ability to use two hands - the left hand using all the shortcut keys, whilst the right hand navigates around the timeline with the jog/shuttle knob. Leaving aside the fact that this keyboard may not work for left-handers, does he not know that this is exactly what most professional editors do anyway with the normal keyboard and mouse? The only thing that this keyboard improves is the navigation with a proper shuttle/jog knob. The keyboard is very expensive for what it is - a heavy duty keyboard with a jog knob. For about the same price you can buy a grading panel! I know a good slice of the price must be going on the electronic clutch control, which if it's anything like the feel of the knobs on the old Sony linear edit controllers, would be really nice to have. I would be happy to pay less than half the price for a jog knob like this, but not a thousand dollars!

This is coming hot on the heels of the announcement of Resolve 16 being ' a revolution in editing'. Even Adobe has announced new features in the latest version of Premiere Pro designed to appeal to editors. Feels as if there's a definite power struggle building on the horizon for editing dominance.

Given that NAB is only a few days away, I would wait. Blackmagic usually announce new products at this event. I assume the 10% offer doesn't expire before NAB?

Yikes! With this many nodes it's time for an ultra,ultra wide monitor!

These sites all try to sell you the... "how hard can it be?" ...line! 🙄

Yea, I got that from the original post. What I was asking is, if all these coatings create colour shifts, how they deal with this on lens coatings. I also get somewhat distracted by actors who are obviously wearing a pair of glasses with plain glass as lenses!

Is this a problem for all glasses with anti-glare coatings? It's only that lenses have anti-glare coatings, and I would have expected them not to alter the spectral response - or do they have an extra element in the lens to correct for this?

Even with SSDs, you may well find you don't get the maximum speeds you expect from USB 3. There are a number of flavours of USB 3, for example 3.0, 3.1 and 3.1 Gen 2 - all these can effect your transfer rates depending on the drive technology and the compatibility of the interface. As an example I have a HP Zbook studio laptop, which has USB 3 and Thunderbolt 3. When I connect a Samsung SSD T5 (which has a type C connector) to the USB3 port, I'm getting around 450MB/sec read/write. When I connect the same drive to the thunderbolt 3 port I get around 550MB/sec, which is about the limit of the published drive's speed. As a comparison, the internal drive, (which is a M.2 NVMe SSD) is testing 1,600MB/sec write and 3,100MB/sec read. So NVMe is definitely the way to go. I do have a spare M.2 socket inside my laptop, so this is an upgrade I may consider in the future.

Hi Mazze Thanks for the explanation - concise and to-the-point as always! I suspect you're right about Windows update, which is why I've installed O&O Shutup10 which prevents any updating without my specific permission. Best Bruno

Hi all I'v just installed the Scratch 9 trial under windows 10 on a laptop with a Nvidia graphics chip. On starting Scratch it's saying it can't find any OpenCL drivers, and says I should reinstall the graphics drivers. If I click through this message it seems to work normally. I haven't done much at the moment - just brought in a couple of clips into the construct and played with some colour settings. Do I really need OpenCL drivers? I thought most software would work either with OpenGL/CUDA or OpenCL (in Mac based setups).