HOLLYN-wood (Norman, that is)

Geek Alert!  Geek Alert!!

Tim Leavitt, over on his blog, View From The Cutting Room Floor (that reminds me of my old series of editor interviews in the Editors Guild Magazine, which we used to call The View From The Cutting Room Ceiling) has a posting about how to create bullet-proof multi-group clips in the Avid.

While it’s really inside baseball, it’s one of an increasing number of really good tutorials on the Avid that people are starting to post.  Soon my students will have answers to all of the questions that I can’t answer — at two in the morning!!

== And, Maybe, Turning Them

It’s really too early to tell, but I’m incredibly encouraged by what I’ve seen from Avid in the last several weeks, as they’ve pre-announced, and announced a lot of things in the weeks leading up to the NAB show, just now finishing up in Las Vegas.

There have been oodles of press coverage in the last week and a half on the latest announcements from Avid, regarding their new hardware and software. See the pieces by Phil Hodgetts and Steve Cohen, as well as this press release from Avid. I have been studiously avoiding chiming in about this, waiting for the people who know much more about this I do, to weigh in first.

But I must say that, after a few years in which Avid has forgotten how to innovate, it seems as if they are finally thinking of the future.

Let me explain a little bit about what I mean by the future.

Sure there was new hardware announced. There are a line of DX processor boxes which don’t connect through the bottleneck we’ve come to know as Firewire. For any editor who has pressed the PLAY or STOP button on the Avid and waited an excruciatingly long two seconds for the machine to respond, this is really great news. In fact, the audience at the April 8th Avid event at Universal Studios in Los Angeles cheered when Matt Feury (who does the awesome Avid filmmaker interview/podcasts) jokingly announced this as a major upgrade. To us, it is.

They also announced huge price cuts and the banishment of the Xpress Pro product line to the great NLE graveyard in the sky. To those of us who felt that Xpress Pro was, simply, Media Composer bowdlerized for profit, this is also great news.

[As an aside, this follows on Avid's earlier announcement of a new website, forums and -- best for me -- a commitment to expand their efforts in educating their users.]

In fact, the greatest news about all of this is not the hardware, but the fact that the new management team seems to be paying attention to its user base again. They’re meeting with us on a regular basis, talking about bug fixes, enhancements and release plans in a way that I haven’t seen in years.

Here’s an example that, in my geeky little way, I’m pretty excited about. FilmScribe is Avid’s ancient tool to create various output lists — EDLs, Film Cut Lists, Optical Pull Lists, etc. It’s always been an amazingly effective, but amazingly clunky, tool.

Now, you can drag and drop a sequence that you’ve created onto any number of template files (in the Mac OS Finder window — and, I presume, on the PC as well). If you drop it onto an EDL template, it will create an EDL for you. If you drop a metadata file onto a template for, let’s say, an XDCAM I assume that it will create an Avid ALE file automatically.

In other words, the Avid is finally becoming modular — in the way that Final Cut is, and has been for a very long time. That means that, as new camera formats keep coming out, Avid will be able to accommodate them much faster. The lengthy wait for P2 and EX-1 card compatibility was excruciatingly difficult for users and certainly hurt Avid — as customers could much more quickly get those cameras to work in FCP.

So, yeah, I love being able to drag stacks of video tracks around on the timeline (who wouldn’t? FCP users have been doing it for years.), but what I really like about Avid’s announcements is that is bodes well for their ability to make really great future announcements.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the announcements that Avid came out with yesterday. It’s the first part of their attempt to right the ship that has been listing to the side, as of late. More announcements are coming, particularly some new hardware. But this press release deals mainly with business practices, and less with tech-y stuff.

Which puts it right up my alley.

Chief among the changes is that they are beginning to simplify their product line. They are completely eliminating Xpress Pro, and dropping the price of Media Composer Soft so that no one will pay more than $2495 for the full-on MC. Students can purchase the Educational Version for the much much lower price of $295 which doesn’t have some of the additional software that comes with the full version, but is an absolute complete version of the Media Composer.

Here’s the amazing thing about this. Not too long ago, when you had to buy breakout boxes and other stuff from Avid, a typical Media Composer cost you $60,000 to get in the door. Now you get that for $2500. And it’s a better version of MC than the Adrenaline. Let’s do the math on that — that’s less than 5% of that old price. If you’re a student, you’re getting MC for about 1/2 of 1% of the original price.

Amazing.

The other things that Avid announced yesterday revolved around the user community. Anyone who’s had the patience to listen to me babble over the last few years knows that I’ve felt that the company has not been doing a good enough job of getting tutorials and documentation out there (tips, tricks, techniques, you know.. the kind of stuff that the Final Cut community puts out in droves). Now, it appears that they’re going to try and fix that. They’ve started a new community web site and are encouraging people to upload training videos. In other conversations I’ve had with them, they tell me that they’re looking into ways of seeding this phenomenon and, folks, if you want to help out please speak up to them, because they seem to be way open to listening.

Yeah, some people want to hear about the new hardware. But, for me, that wouldn’t be “new thinking.” The really “new” part of the announcement, seems to be their commitment to interacting with us — the users.

Let’s hope they keep it up.

The press release is here. The new community site is here.

Harry Miller, over at the A.C.E. blog, has created two fantastic tutorials on using Avid for sound.

One talks about several of the Audio Suite Tools and gives instructions on how to use them and samples. The other talks about how to use the Audio Tools to get a great mix, including live mixing.

Harry is a long time editor who has been working for A.C.E. for a long time and now brings his expertise and smooth voice to teaching others what he knows. These two screencasts are hopefully the beginning of many. The Final Cut community has long been great about posting really great tutorials for the user community. It would be great if users of other NLEs could do the same.

[No, don't look at me.]

Scott Simmons, in his usually informative blog THE EDITBLOG, has an especially useful posting today entitled “Top 10 Avid Media Composer Tips“. He describes each one in valuable detail, along with some really useful screen shots.

For those of you who can’t wait, here are his tips. For the details, you’ll have to go to the blog itself (I wouldn’t want to give it all away Scott!).

1. Colors (both in bins and in the timeline)
2. Colored locators
3. ScriptSync
4. Toggle Source/Record in the Timeline
5. Center Duration
6. Avid Calculator
7. Option + C
8. Media Tool
9. Sync Point Editing
10. Trim Mode

While most Avid editors will know most of these tips, I have to say that I always forget one or two of them. I never remember the Avid Calculator, for instance. And while I have the Center Duration in my User Settings, I never remember Option+C.

Check out the posting, if you edit on Avid. If you don’t, check out the entry on Trim Mode.

In a related posting, Tim Leavitt (owner of the new blog “View From The Cutting Room Floor”, a blog from a working assistant editor) posted a list of a few of his keyboard shortcuts.  Well worth the trip.

Steve Cohen, Avid maven and source of all knowledge, put together a great video tutorial on How to Use The Avid’s Stabilize Effect. It’s a really great tool and the tutorial is short and effective. The link is to Steve’s blip.tv account, but you can also read a description of it on Steve’s blog, Splice Here.

For those of you interested in the sometimes arcane, but usually technical details of how a large budget film sets up the hardware in an editing room, there’s an interesting post on the ACE blog about Dan Lebental’s editing room on Jon Favreau’s IRON MAN. You can link directly to the post at “Iron Man Editing with Dan Lebental.”

Interestingly, they use a combination of Avid and Final Cut. They use the Avids for the heavy lifting — to actually edit the film. There are six full-on Adrenalines (with two more on the way when a second editor is hired) and a seventh software only Media Composer which Dan uses for sound effects work. They used another Adrenaline on set to play out dailies with a 2K projector.

They also use Photoshop to print out scene index cards to put up on a wall in the room.

They intend to use FCP for their picture output for sound because, oddly, they can’t get an accurate output that won’t drift in sync. Their hope (which is still in the experimental phase) is to record out of the Avid directly into FCP, which will preserve the HD quality and maintain sync (though it will result in a timeline with no edits in it; though this won’t be a big issue for them, once they have the OMF issues worked out)

For those you who’d like to get your geek on, check out the piece.