Splice Here

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

It’s the end of a long day and you’re working on a complex timeline: eight or ten audio tracks, many video tracks. You’ve been patching your source material all day long and the patch panel is scrambled. Now you want to cut something straight across. Maybe you’re assembling two sequences together, maybe you’re integrating part [...] Read More...

It doesn’t happen often, but running out of undos can be pretty frustrating. MC 4.0 makes that a lot less likely by increasing the number of undos from 32 to 100. (And of course it allows you to jump through multiple steps using the Edit menu.) One problem that many people encounter is how easily the [...] Read More...

Media Composer 4 introduces Transition Preservation, Avid’s term for a group of enhancements that improve the handling of dissolves during editing. It’s one of those features that’s so intuitive that it immediately feels like you’ve been using it for years — and then you wonder how you did without it for so long. It’s all [...] Read More...

Avid unveiled Media Composer version 4.0 today (press release). The headline feature is what Avid is calling Mix and Match — the ability to combine different frame rates in the timeline and play them without rendering. The demos I’ve seen are impressive. It’s so simple that there is almost no user interface. You just bring [...] Read More...

Well, it’s finally happened. Apple has released a new version of Final Cut Studio. As has become typical for Apple, the web pages explaining the new features are slick, well thought out and come with concise and well produced explanatory videos. New features are described on this page. My personal favorites in FCP: slick integration with [...] Read More...

Responding to popular demand (thanks, Harry), I’ve put up a page with a complete list of the tech tips I’ve posted, organized by subject. You can always click on the category menu in the right-hand column and select “Avid Technical Tips,” but the tips list should make things easier to find. It’s here: Avid Tech Tips The [...] Read More...

I recently had to re-edit some source material that lived only on a DVD. And I had to do it at home on a software-only Media Composer system. Many friends told me not to attempt this–too many settings, too many ways to screw yourself up. Better to use a good DVD player, using component or [...] Read More...

As some of you know, I’ve commenced work on an update to my venerable “Avid Media Composer Techniques and Tips” book. The original version began life way back in the mid-90s, when I was working closely with the Avid engineers, helping them design an interface and feature set that would work for people like me. [...] Read More...