This week's student profile features a past Avid Media Composer student, who was recently excited to tell us about one of his latest success stories. Meet Marquis Wilson. Marquis is from Alvarado, Texas, and completed his training with GeniusDV back in 2008. Marquis has a passion for video production in terms of helping individuals and companies market their products and services. He wanted to share one of the greatest tools he learned from taking certified training at GeniusDV. As a producer of... (read more)

With all the buzz about various digital cameras like RED and the latest HDSLRs, it’s easy to forget that most national commercial campaigns, dramatic television shows, feature films and many local and regional spots are still filmed with ACTUAL 16mm and 35mm motion picture film. As an editor, you need to have a good understanding [...] Read More... (read more)

I spoke at a very interesting meeting of the LA Final Cut Pro User Group last night, along with Walter Murch and Shane Ross. Walter talked about moving back to MC after years with FCP and described in fascinating detail the relative merits of each application. Shane went over Avid Media Access, which makes it [...] Read More... (read more)

The term ' interlaced video' may cause chills to the seasoned video editor. There are a variety of ways to 'deinterlace' video, but depending how you go about the process may lead to inferior results. Today, you'll mostly likely encounter an 'interlacing' problem when viewing 'standard defination' mini-dv video on the web, or viewing a QuickTime file playing SD media on a computer screen. I stumbled upon a free program called 'Deinterlacer' by JES Schotsman. So, I ran through a quick test using it... (read more)

This month the Media Composer will take center stage at the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group (lafcpug). I’ll be making a presentation, along with Shane Ross and Walter Murch. I plan to cover some of the new editorial features in Version 4, namely Transition Preservation, and I’ll also do a quick overview of [...] Read More... (read more)

If winter is the time for a bit of R&R in Florida, then it’s time to consider the annual Editors Retreat, now in its fifth year. This is an opportunity to spend a few days with a select group of editors for professional training, an exchange of ideas and just plain fun. The Editors Retreat [...] Read More... (read more)

I explained in the last post how you can hide the Source Monitor, but you can also collapse the Composer window, hiding video entirely and showing only buttons, menus and tracking information. This can expand your screen real estate mightily, making room for a much enlarged timeline with plenty of room to manipulate audio keyframes [...] Read More... (read more)

Manipulating Keyframes in Marquee can sometimes turn into a complex process. Here is a quick tutorial to help simplify the process. If you are new to Marquee, I recommend that you read my Basic Marquee animation tutorial and then come back to this article. I’ve found it’s best to use Marquee’s animation mode to create a basic path, and then manually manipulate individual keyframes later. Just about everything in Marquee is keyframeable. This makes Marquee extremely powerful when it comes to manipulating... (read more)

You probably know that the Composer Window can be resized, but did you know you can completely hide the source monitor? This can be very helpful if you’re short on screen real estate and want to work on a visual effect where you need to make things big — an Animatte, for example. To blow up [...] Read More... (read more)

It started in earnest last year and has no sign of abating. Videographers are clearly in the midst of two revolutions: tapeless recording and the use of the hybrid still/video camera (HDSLR). The tapeless future started with P2 and XDCAM, but these storage devices have been joined by other options, including Compact Flash, SD and [...] Read More... (read more)

It's time to revisit the popular Carbon Copy Cloner program that allows you to create an exact copy of your source machine onto an external hard drive. I recently tested this by backing up my Mac Book Pro running Snow Leopard. It took about 1 1/2 hours to back up 80 Gigs to my portable pocket drive running at 5400 RPM. The latest version also allows you to create incremental backups that can be scheduled. You can even back everything up to a remote Mac on a Network. To create a backup of your entire... (read more)

Media Composer makes it easy to trim asymmetrically (simultaneously trimming some elements to the right and some to the left), but the technique contains a subtle bug. If you make an asymmetrical trim that eliminates a clip by trimming it away, the roller attached to that clip doesn’t know where to go — and it [...] Read More... (read more)

If you thought that there were more than enough tapeless recording devices already on the market by Focus Enhancements, Edirol and Convergent Designs, you would only be partially right. The AJA Ki Pro sparked a lot of enthusiasm at NAB 2009. While it clearly offers cameramen many benefits, it also provides some opportunities for the [...] Read More... (read more)

If you’re using Avid’s new DX hardware (Nitris or Mojo), then you’ve probably been using “Fast Scrub,” perhaps without knowing it. This is a slick new feature that makes the timeline more responsive, by dramatically improving the number of frames displayed as you drag. Fast Scrub offers some of the smoothest timeline performance in the [...] Read More... (read more)

Christian Foerster has started a new Avid screencast of video tips that you can subscribe to via iTunes. There’s only one episode so far, but it’s very nicely done. Check it out. His website is avidscreencast.com. The itunes page is here. Read More... (read more)