Animation is one of the standard Quicktime codecs and should work on any machine that has Quicktime installed. Ensure that you have a correct and supported version of Quicktime installed. Verify that the file actually plays in the Quicktime Player (perhaps it's corrupt). If necessary try uninstalling and reinstalling Quicktime. If all else fails

They were showing it in a fully working state on Windows at NAB (in fact I think their only demo mahcine for Baselight on Avid was a Windows system). According to developer Martin Tlaskal who was running the demo it is solid, they just have to do a bunch of the more mundane stuff around building proper installers etc... If I recall correctly he said

They've written their own interface layer with the Artist Control (as the AAX plugin architecture doesn't allow the host to share the controller) - from my brief play at NAB it seemed pretty good. I haven't actually used the software though as the Windows version isn't available yet, but they were demoing it at NAB. Overall it looks

I believe the next version of Premiere Pro (CS7 I guess) will have greatly improved MXF support. I'm unclear exactly when that will be available however.

Avid's biggest strength has, arguably, been it's media management. That continues to be the case I think. While FCP X is less likely to lose media than it used to be, it's still somewhat fragile. Similarly Premiere, even the new version, is weak on media mangement. While Avid lost a little strength in that area with AMA, they have put a

The questions I'd ask are: - Do I need a Mac Pro? Newer iMacs and even Minis are pretty decent. - Do I need an Apple at all? HP and Dell have very good workstations available. DIY PC build is very easy. I'm not a big Apple fan really, but I certainly wouldn't buy a "current" Mac Pro. They are way underpowered by current standards

If it's not going to go through a broadcast QC process then you can certainly be a little more forgiving in your montoring. However you should still aim to work within a 601/709 colour space in Symphony and grade accordingly - then on export either use the RGB option (where 16-235 levels will be mapped to 0-255) or export 601 levels and apply the

From talking to Avid people at NAB the information I got on this was basically that they interviewed a LOT of editors and found the vast majority who were using any >HD video were doing so in an HD finish. So when it came to devoting programming resources to features for the 7.0 release it made a lot more sense to work on getting a good workflow

It's been a while (12-18 months) since I paid any attention to festival submissions, but when I was looking most seemed to have some form of digital file support. Most were ProRes, some DNxHD and a few with various other options. I would (and did) make a master DNxHD Quicktime out of Avid which can serve as your "Mezzanine Master" - you

I'm not totally clear about what you're doing but in general there are two parts to any clip in Avid... One is the Master Clip - the entry in a bin with the little clip icon. The other is the Media File, which actually exists in the Avid MediaFiles directory. If you delete the Master Clip from a bin it will still link up in sequences and any