Bruno Mansi

Also a long time Avid editor, I think Media Composer is hard to beat as a long-form tool. Years of muscle memory are going to be a factor in making me faster and more productive using Avid software above any other. When projects start to grow in size (in terms of the number of bins and amount of media), MC still performs well on modest hardware, assuming you work with DNX media. When it comes down to working in collaboration with other editors and large amounts of shared media, there's nothing to touch Avid. That's why companies like Input Media (here in the UK) have stayed with Avid and recently updated their post production department with new HP Z840 workstations, DNxIO hardware and Nexus storage. Having tried editing on Resolve, I can see that it's a perfectly good tool but I don't see it having any advantage over Avid. People talk about the benefits of not having to round-trip when you want to grade on Resolve, but most of us have been used to round-tripping for years with audio, and I don't experience many problems sending AAFs to colourists. In fact if the colourist is using Baselight there's a really nice renderless workflow available with Avid. As far as Premiere (and the rest of the Adobe suite) is concerned, I think it's a great tool for short-form work, especially when it involves a lot of Photoshopping or VFX, but I've had problems with long-form edits really bogging down Premiere.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're staying within a 16x9 project, but having a pillarbox effect applied over all your clips to achieve the square ratio. You then want to be able to re-position your images within this area. I still think you can achieve this using Frameflex . In the source settings (under the Frameflex tab), check that your raster dimensions and image ratios are correct for your material, then change the Frame Aspect Ratio to 'custom' and set it to 1:1. You should see the result in the bottom preview window (make sure the 'Reformat' setting at the bottom says 'Centre, Keep Size'). You can now use the Frameflex controls or cursor box (in the upper preview window) to re-position the image, then click OK to apply. If the clips are already on your timeline, you won't see the changes until you refresh the sequence (Clip-Refresh Sequence-All)

Hi Thomas, not quite sure what you're asking, but since version 8.4, you've been able to create projects with custom frame sizes. I would have thought the best way to achieve what you need is to create a project with 1:1 dimensions, link to your footage and then use Source Settings/Frameflex to move/scale your media as desired. As far as Avid's grid is concerned, you can go to Settings and adjust the grid's settings to add things like tick marks and points to give you a finer graticule to work with.

Just because Resolve cannot read your particular files doesn't make it 'picky'. In fact, a lot of professionals use DR as their 'go to' piece of software for ingesting/transcoding material prior to editing, as it's able to see files that other software often cannot handle. I don't have any experience with Shadowplay, but any decent screen recording software should be written in such a way as to have as small a footprint as possible whilst recording, so that it doesn't impact too much on the performance of what you're trying to record. Of course, you can't perform miracles on limited hardware and you'll normally see this as reduced frame-rate, or stuttering of the recorded game-play. What the software should definitely not do, is corrupt the recorded file as it wraps it into the video container. If Shadowplay is doing this, then I suggest you stop using it. There's plenty of other screen recording software out there that will produce files that Resolve will happily see, and prevent you having to upload/download to Youtube - which seems to be a very tortuous route which will definitely harm your footage. Looking at your hardware, you only have 4Gb RAM installed, which is barely adequate to run Windows 10, let alone Unity 5 and screen recording software as well! I'm guessing your hard drive must be thrashing around like crazy, having to use it's Swapdisk to load code in-and-out. I would really look into adding more memory, as this is one of the cheapest ways of improving a system with this amount of RAM.

Is this with the 2016 model? I've heard that general black level performance has been improved with the 2017 models. I'm hoping to get a 55" B7 by the end of this year - mainly for domestic viewing, so any tips about the best settings for this model would be appreciated.

When you say timeline resolution, do you mean the current display resolution? So, if I have some sort of proxy resolution enabled (or optimised media), then that's the resolution that gets sent to Fusion?

How about.... One More Red Nightmare - King Crimson 16 Shades Of Blue - Tori Amos Orange Crush - R.E.M. A Whiter Shade Of Pale - Procol Harum Black Is Black - Los Bravos ... and for the film noir purists.... Postman Pat and his Black and White Cat - Postman Pat

I've had a play with this on 12.5 and it seems to work as advertised. The only thing I found is that once you've created your Fusion comp on the Resolve timeline, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to match back to the original clip. The best way around this seemed to be to duplicate the clip to a layer above and send this copy over to Fusion. Since you're a Nuke user, I seem to remember a discussion over at Lift Gamma Gain, where someone was creating a script to enable Nuke to effectively replace Fusion when creating a 'Fusion comp' inside Resolve.

Although there's no display LUT option in AE there is a 'Simulate Output' setting, which is tied in to the whole colour management workflow that Adobe recommend when working in AE. I never got my head completely around all of this, and how it interacts with the OpenColorIO plugin, but I suggest you take a look at the Adobe article and video as linked below. https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/color-management.html#enable_or_disable_display_color_management http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-by-video/after-effects-color-manage/

Hi Tom, I'm guessing that's what you need. It should be an installer that puts the OpenCOlorIO AEX plugin into the appropriate folder. I was asked to help test it out a while ago for someone who was going to use it in their ACES workflow. In the end, they decided not to go ACES, so I never got around to trying it out. I have a copy of the manual which I'll attach here. Hopefully it will give you all the info you need to install and test the plugin. OpenColorIO AE Manual.pdf

Blackmagic have released 14.01, but looking at the list of fixes, I don't see a mention of this particular error message.

There's an OpenColorIO plugin for AE you might want to take a look at, especially if you're considering some sort of colour workflow for your project. Go to... http://opencolorio.org/ The good news is it's free!

Assuming you have the Avid codec pack installed (which will have been done if you've installed Media Composer) then there should be no problem. I've had Premiere read both MXF OP1A and OP-Atom files without any issues. I believe the latest versions of Premiere might not even need the Avid Codec pack installed as these are Quicktime based, and many software manufacturers have been removing the dependence on QT, and providing native support for the codecs.

Good to hear, although the 'Editions' are still in beta for the time being. Been looking to try out the Avid version for over a year now. Hopefully the beta phase will be relatively short!

Does this announcement mean that Filmlight are finally going to roll out version 5, post IBC? I can fully appreciate that they want to iron out the majority of the bugs before releasing the new versions, but I remember going to their offices this time last year for the demo of v5. Compare this to Blackmagic, who seem to bring out new revisions to Resolve almost on a weekly basis.

Sorry, I misread the first sentence! First of all, the only type of MXF file that can exist within the numbered Avid Mediafiles folder is the OP-Atom variant. If you've rendered out OP1a from Premiere then dumping them into the Avid Mediafiles location won't work. One way of testing this out is to create a new Avid bin in your project, then use Windows Explorer/Finder to go to the location of your Avid Mediafiles. Find the database file (the one with the .mdb extension) and drag-and-drop it into the bin you just created. This should cause the bin to fill with all the master clips within your mediafiles folder. If you can see and play the clips you exported from Premiere, then all is fine. If you don't see them, it might mean they're not the right MXF variant. It's possible that the database didn't re-build when you added the media (which it should automatically do when you start Avid), but you can force a rebuild by deleting the two database files (.mdb & .pmr) and restarting Avid. If you do have genuine OP Atom files, then it might simply be the case that you need to re-link these files to your offline media by using Avid's re-link command. There are lots of options to be found in the re-link dialogue box, and it can be a bit of a hit-and-miss affair as to which options work. There's a number of tutorials you can Google that'll explain what the various options do. If you decide these files aren't OP Atom, you'll need to link to the files. You can do this from the same re-link menu, making sure to only relink to linked(AMA) media.

If the file path to the media is different on the workstation with Premiere, then it won't automatically link - unless Adobe introduce some sort of auto file search when it encounters offline media. This may be a long process if you have a lot of storage, as the software has no idea where to look and could spend a long time searching. However, if you have one of the newer versions of Premiere, it should have popped up a 'Link Media' dialogue box once you loaded your AAF, so that you can tell it where to find your media. In any case, it should be an easy task to do this manually. I suggest you look at this help page from Adobe... https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/relinking-media.html

Never seen the highlight button do that to a timeline! Sounds like a bug. Are you working on v14 by any chance?

I'm not quite sure what problem you're describing. Did all the clips appear in the media pool when you originally brought in the AAF? Are these clips still there, but your sequence has now become unlinked to these clips?

Don't know if you're on a Mac or PC, but there's an issue with drivers and the Quadro 4000 card. It's being discussed on the Avid forums now. Go to.... http://community.avid.com/forums/t/181402.aspx

Hi Nicolas. If you're thinking of buying OLED, FSI have a comparison video that explains the differences between models.

Not sure which range you're talking about (AM, BM, CM, DM) but the 240s were LCD and 250s OLED

I'm not absolutely sure on this, but as far as I'm aware, whatever you've set Resolve or your monitor to display, the Windows OS and graphics drivers are working in sRGB colour space. You really need to feed your monitor from a Blackmagic playback card such as the Decklink range. I'm tempted to ask why you're wanting to view in DCI P3. If it's to grade for cinema projection you should be aware of the possible pitfalls in relying on your Dreamcolor monitor. There's been discussions on this topic in the past, so I'll just direct you to one of these... http://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?threads/dci-p3-workflow-video-card-req.5144/

I think they are available to purchase in the UK. If you look at this review... http://www.trustedreviews.com/panasonic-ez1002-review At the bottom you should see that Currys PC World are selling it for £5999. The model number varies depending where you buy it. Most other places it will be called the ez1000. The '2' is added to the UK model because of the inbuilt Freeview tuner.

Not many people using Edius. In fact I've never met anyone who's cut on it or had an AAF from an Edius system. There's some stuff on the internet about this topic. For example... http://www-en.ediusworld.com/docs/Application_Notes/professional/edius/GVB-1-0030B-EN-AN_EDIUS_DaVinci.pdf or