GeniusDV

If you are an Avid Media Composer user, and you’re like me, you’ve been hestitant to upgrade to Windows Vista. After all, Windows XP Professional has been a steady workhorse for Avid Media Composer users. With the Microsoft's Windows 7 coming out soon, it may be worth completely skipping out on upgrading to Windows Vista. That being said, if you are a Media Composer user running Windows XP 32bit, you may need to take the extra step of modifying the boot.ini file for Windows XP . This is because the...

Photoshop is an invaluable tool for video editor, and I've always been a big fan of teaching the Photoshop basics as it applies to video editing. One basic Photoshop skill is the ability to cut out a company logo so it can be placed as a 'bug' or integrated within a video project to help brand a business. You can read up on a Photoshop tutorial for creating a glass bug on how to actually do this. For myself, I like to keep things simple. I've always touted using the file format .png to when saving...

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a tutorial for Avid Media Composer. I thought I’d mix it up a bit and share an extremely valuable tool for creating moving mattes. The ability to create moving mattes is a critical skill when building effects. This tutorial demonstrates how you can use Avid Marquee to create a giant title with a ‘glassy’ appearance that travels through a scene. This exercise is not for the light hearted and requires some basic knowledge of the Media Composer interface. I’ve done...

Most Avid editors are unaware that you can use the Fit to Fill button to make motion effects. If you have a space in your time line that you need to fill or you can set and in to out and simply use the fit to fill button to create your motion effect. There are a few things you need to be aware of when using the fit to fill button. By default it creates the effect using the Duplicated Field rendering which does not produce the cleanest looking motion. You need to change this to Interpolated Fields...

We've been teaching digital video workflows for a long time, and we've gotten good at finding the right hardware to make those workflows run smoothly. Finally, we're proud to share our gear finds outside of our classroom: introducing the Genius Gear Shop . We're starting out small. Today, we're launching with just a couple of the products that our students have liked best. For each product, we're working on an honest, hands-on video review to explain why we think it's worth a look -- and we'll give...

If you'd like to get a taste of the latest version of Media Composer. Avid Technology now offers a free trial of the Media Composer software . The software will run on a PC or MAC. Make sure you review the system requirements to run Media Composer before downloading. Read More...

You can easily create your own customized transition effects using Avid's animatte feature within the Avid Media Composer software. First, create your own custom paint effect using Avid's animatte effect that's found within the effect's palette. This is very cool. It means you can create an unlimited number of customized transitions by using Avid's paint / animatte tool Read More...

A great portable way to show off your video projects is through your very own iPod. We accomplish this by exporting movie files to iTunes first. First choose your sequence in the bin. Enable all tracks for the sequence. Mark the entire sequence in/out then right click expert render in/out. Next, right click on the sequence in the bin and choose Export. Choose Save As: project_name.mov on the Desktop. Now for your Export Setting: Send to QT Movie, then Options. Export As: Quick Time Movie - Use Enabled...

We questioned Mike Willats, a member of the GeniusDV team, about how he deals with the tens of thousands of clips he uses when editing Disney projects here in Orlando, Florida. His answer, not surprisingly was, stay organized! Here is one method he uses: Whether you are using Avid or Final Cut , a large portion of the battle is staying organized. For some, this is second nature but for others it comes with a lot of arm-twisting. No matter what your style as an editor the process by which you get...

There are several amazing title tool packages that allow you to create graphical scenes with complex motion. One of those programs is Avid Technology's Marquee. Avid Marquee ships as a plug-in with the Avid Media Composer software. Marquee allows you to add 3D extrusion parameters to a title, or individual characters. However, it has one major limitation. It cannot import vector based artwork. This means you are not able to add 3D extrusion to graphic elements. The work around is to convert a graphic...

Avid Marquee is an incredible 3D titling program. Here are the steps to create a 3D title that follows a path. Read More...

Avid's DXnHD codec and Apple's ProRes are both riffs on the Cineform theme of high-quality digital intermediate codecs for editing. Both offer more efficient compression than some competitors (especially at larger frame sizes), plus 4:2:2 chroma subsampling (which provides greater color fidelity than DV's 4:1:1 subsampling or MPEG's 4:2:0). But the advantage of one of the other cool features -- support for 10-bit color depth -- has gone largely misunderstood or overlooked. For starters, it's worth...

You can use the Avid FX plug-in to add creative effects to titles that you've created within the standard Avid title tool. Avid FX is a special plug-in that is basically the same as a licensed version of Boris FX . Avid FX can be launched as a stand-alone application, or it can be launched as a plug-in directly from the Avid software. Avid FX ships with any Media Composer software license . Read More...

A quick and easy fix to remove an unwanted artifact or portion of a video image is to track and clone an object using the Avid Media Composer's paint effect. Tracking can be a complex process, but it can also be a simple process for very practical things. This is one quick example that uses a single tracking point. In this example, I want to remove the unwanted logo from this man's shirt. This was done by cloning a similar area of his shirt and then tracking it to perfectly cover up the unwanted...

GeniusDV provides 'online training services' for a variety of video software programs. We use a nice tool called MouseLocator so students can easily see the mouse cursor. Better yet, the utility is free! To install Mouse Locator, download MouseLocator.dmg from 2point5fish.com. Click the Download Alternative Locator Graphics from the installation screen. This will open a web page with various mouse cursors that you can choose from. You can choose to download the gallery package or you can download...