Oh well. It was a long shot. Curious, but what type of file are you making that exhibits this behavior? Jef

This is a long shot idea, but try putting a dissolve (from nothing) at the beginning of the sound sections, even 1 or 2 frames. Jef

I have not looked at the new version of Topaz but the first one I did demo had some severe issues that would have made it not practical for broadcast work. Specifically when you uprezed footage, the edges of the image did not totally fill the raster. Created sort of a blanking error issue. Yes, you could blow the resulting image up again, but that is

First question: Was the project 59.94p or 59.94i? Second question: By 29.97 I am guessing you mean 29.97p, not 29.97i (which really is the same thing as 59.94i). The answers to these questions are critical to any solution. If 59.94p, try switching the project to 29.97p (my best guess of what you want). Delete any renders. Re render and output. How does

One other thought. If you mean that you are looking for a program to add elements to the scene to make it more "interesting", yes that can be done. But depending on the amount of footage and a whole lot of details about the footage and your expected results are, it could be frighteningly expensive. Now if you are just wanting to do something

I took a quick look at the still. Assuming it is a fair representation of the rest of the footage, all that I would recomend is to work with a skilled colorist with good tools. They would probably do a bit of noise reduction and sharpening. Probably a bit of windowing to highlight certain sections of the scene. The biggest issue I see is that there

[quote user="Sims Carter"] I'll do most of the heavy lifting on the home PC. I just wanted to replace my old Macbook (using it for other things) plus the occational ability to assemble some footage on location. Probably not going to go with a PC laptop. What's the current situation of Avid and Mac? Are there issues? [/quote] Besides

You say you have a PC at home. Well, with the current situation of Avid and Mac, I would suggest you seriously look at a PC laptop. It could save you a lot of headaches. And I say this as a long time Mac user. Jef

In the online help doc search for "Reformatting the Media to fit the Project Frame Size" Jef

Bruno is correct. FrameFlex is the way to go. Unfortunately it is horribly unintuitive. Not in front of a system now, but you should at least read about FrameFlex in the documentation. Jef