Create your own real-time Avid timecode effect

One of the most talked-about features of the new Avid Media Composer 3.0 is its ability to create real-time timecode burn-ins with no rendering necessary. For those of you still dealing with outrageous render times on an ancient Meridien system, I feel your pain. One of my fellow assistants recently introduced me to a nifty way to create a real-time timecode effect that takes a little while to set up but can save you countless hours of time down the road. It is most useful for tracking the running time of a sequence (as opposed to source timecode), since it relies on re-using the same timecode each time. As my example, I will be working in a 30i NTSC project with drop-frame timecode, but the steps can be modified easily based on the needs of your project. Ready? Here we go.

 

Thinking like an editor

I’m a realist. Long ago I abandoned my dream of becoming a writer/director. It was around the time I realized I couldn’t pen a single sentence of meaningful dialogue or instruct an actor with any degree of confidence. Sometimes it’s best to be honest with yourself. But one thing I found myself drawn to in editing was how you could manipulate images and sounds to construct a perceived reality that was almost totally different from the conditions in which the material was recorded.

Any hack can string a bunch of images together; but as anyone with a real filmmaking sense knows, it takes a skilled artist to be able to control the numerous unseen factors that come into play when telling a story through images. Aside from the photographic decisions of camera placement and frame size that the editor takes into account, there are certain elements - emotion, tone, rhythm, pacing - that are more intangible and flexible when it comes to storytelling.

 

Improving Avid’s Capture Tool

I’ve recently been working part-time uprezzing an hour-long series for Animal Planet, which involves a ton of batch digitizing. When you’re staring at a computer screen for hours on end, waiting for the Capture Tool to do its thing, it’s very easy to get annoyed at little deficiencies in the software that would make my job easier and maybe even save a lot of time. I have no idea if the Capture Tool is undergoing any changes in the new version of MC, but here is my list of gripes that seem like they could be fixed without too much effort.

1. For the love of God, please allow me to abort the capture at any stage of the process, rather than just when it’s in the middle of digitizing a clip. Whenever the deck keeps searching and searching for a timecode I know it won’t find, I have to switch the deck into Local mode to confuse the Avid into asking for the next tape. Nothing else seems to work.

 

Organization is key! (Part 3)

This post is part 3 of a series. For part 1, click here, or for part 2, click here.

Here are some more organizational tips to improve your assistant editing workflow.

7. Color code your clips and sequences.

Select the items you want colored in your bin, and choose “Set Clip Color” from the “Edit” menu. In general, avoid red (save it for indicating offline clips), but you can assign virtually any color to your clips and sequences (there are more options available than just the primary colors by selecting “Pick…”). There’s a lot of room for creativity here. You can use different colors for source clips, acquired footage, clips that need aspect ratio formatting, sound effects, music, sequences to output, or however else you see fit. If you select “Source” under “Clip Color” in the Timeline hamburger menu, the clips will show their colors within your sequence.

 

Organization is key! (Part 2)

This post is part 2 of a series. For part 1, click here.

Here are some more organizational tips to improve your assistant editing workflow.

4. Store all imported files in a folder on your desktop.

Usually all of the graphics and logos I’m given are on their own CD, and the stack piles up pretty quickly. When it comes time to re-import everything at full resolution for your uprez, you’ve got to hunt through all of the CD’s to find each file. If you copy all of the files to a folder on your desktop first and import them from there, not only will they all be in one convenient place; Media Composer should remember their location and automatically re-link from the Batch Import main window. How convenient! Putting everything in one folder will also help you avoid the mistake of accidentally naming two files the same thing, leading to confusion down the line. If you’re conforming the show on a different system, you can easily burn a CD or DVD of the files in your desktop folder to take with you.

 

Thoughts on the changing media landscape

Industry news has recently been dominated by various issues that point to the fact that the media we consume and the manner in which we consume it is in a transitional period. As entertainment professionals recover from the writers’ strike and brace for another possible work stoppage (SAG/AMPTP talks recently broke down), much of the speculation surrounds the future of online content distribution - with copyright issues, residuals, and effective advertising methods still major unknowns at this point.

Mark Cuban posted on the topic on his blog last Sunday, quoting from Craig Moffett’s report “And Now for the News…The Emperor Has No Clothes.” In it, Moffett suggests that there is no realistic way television can migrate to the Internet without losing most of its revenue. Viewers tolerate fewer commercials when watching video on their computer than they would on their TV set, cutting revenues by as much as 88%. Also, since most popular Internet videos gain popularity through viral distribution and have no lead-ins, the number of viewers who will tune in is wildly unpredictable.

 

Organization is key! (Part 1)

Whenever non-industry people used to ask me what it meant to be an assistant editor, I would fumble to come up with a succinct answer that they could understand. Over time I boiled it down to the following description: “Anything that goes into or comes out of the Avid is my responsibility: digitizing footage; importing graphics; making tapes, DVD’s, and EDL’s; etc. I am also responsible for helping the editor locate or organize any of the material already in the Avid to make his or her job easier.”

Fundamental to all of these tasks is one underlying responsibility: organization. The better organized you are as an assistant editor, the better you will be at your job, and the more you will be appreciated by your editor(s) and bosses. If you’re like me, and you’re borderline obsessive-compulsive about how you organize things in your everyday life (the money in my wallet is always organized in order of bill size; my mp3’s are all tagged and named in the same exact manner), then this sort of thing will be almost second-nature. Everyone has his or her own organizational style, but I thought I’d share a few systems I’ve used to simplify my job and make life easier for everyone I work with. Remember, a few extra organizational steps can save you major headaches down the road.

1. Keep a binder full of tips and tricks, technical specs, and notes.

I have a 1.5″ 3-ring binder full of all sorts of paperwork that I’ve collected over time. I have separate tabs for the following categories:

• Contacts - You never know when you might need to call a fellow assistant editor you worked with ages ago to ask a quick technical question.
• Post production schedule - Always make sure you’re aware of upcoming deadlines.
• Important e-mails regarding the current project I’m working on
• Technical specs - Here are a few of the things I keep in this section: screen grabs of import and export settings, data bitrates and resolutions of various codecs and file formats, a list of Avid-supported HD decks, common OMF and EDL specs, and a cheat sheet on how to work the router
• Tips - This section mostly contains various Avid tutorials that I’ve stumbled across on Avid forums and at various blogs like this one. GeniusDV has some particularly helpful how-to’s that I use a lot.
• Notes - Jot down any important information during your work day - a to-do list, important telephone numbers, a timecode you need to remember…
• Keyboard settings - I have a print-out of my keyboard in the transparent front cover of my binder (see above photo) - this is helpful when I’m rebuilding my settings at a new work station or if I forget where one of my rarely-used commands is located.

I occasionally weed out dated material that doesn’t seem important anymore, but you never know when you’ll be stuck with a minor problem that you have a solution for buried in your binder from months ago. I can’t tell you how many times my improvised “assistant editor Bible” has saved me in a tough spot.

 

How to make bulletproof Avid multigroups

Media Composer’s “Group Clips” feature is best suited for very simple multicamera shoots. As long as all of the cameras start and stop around the same time with no drop-outs in between, and as long as the timecode was shot time-of-day and jam-synced between cameras right before the shoot, you can easily make groups in a matter of seconds. In practice, however, it is rarely this simple. Cameramen with itchy trigger fingers start and stop recording every few seconds, independently of the other cameramen. This can cause the shots in a group to cycle through all of the available window positions in the four-frame display and force you to use the nine-frame view with smaller thumbnails. Maybe both cameras stopped shooting for a period of time, but you want to include footage after the break. Sometimes production jam-syncs the cameras once in the morning, and by the afternoon they have drifted several frames out of sync. Luckily, there is a way to work around all of these issues and create convenient multigroups that contain all of your footage for a given scene and are perfectly in sync. Each camera can drop in and out, and the multigroup will automatically adjust and play smoothly throughout the duration of the footage. Put your thinking caps on - this tutorial is not for the faint of heart.

 

Avid’s “New Thinking” and suggestions for Media Composer 3

In recent weeks, Avid has announced a change in their company philosophy, dubbed “New Thinking.” In March, they announced the end of the Xpress Pro line of software and aggressive price reductions on their Media Composer software. Perhaps more significant was the implementation of a stronger online resource base of tips, tutorials, and forums, which had always been an advantage of Final Cut Pro.

This week, Avid generated some spirited discussion on their message boards after an event in Universal City that gave a sneak preview of their newest hardware products (the official announcement, including pricing, should come early next week). The jury is still out as to whether phasing out an expensive line of hardware that is only 5 years old (Adrenaline) was a good decision, but it’s not hard to get excited about lower prices and faster, more powerful equipment (the new DX boxes will attach via PCI-e bus, which is vastly superior to Adrenaline’s current FireWire connection).

 

The underappreciated art of color correction

Editing is often underappreciated due to people’s lack of comprehension as to what an editor does and how it is important. Along the same lines, and perhaps to an even more extreme degree, professional colorists usually do not get the respect they deserve. The untrained eye often cannot distinguish the work of an expert colorist from untreated raw footage unless it is compared side by side. I admit to being rather novice at noticing good color correction myself (I like to use my red-green colorblindness as an excuse), but the first time I sat in on a Da Vinci session as a post P.A., I was blown away by the scope and precision of the colorist’s work. Not only did he correct for hue, brightness, and contrast errors in the original footage, but he also was able to enhance the tone and mood of each scene by applying lighting gradients and shading that did not previously exist. In short, he was able to turn ordinary looking footage into much more than what it was originally. And for that reason, colorists are rightfully qualified as creative artists, just as editors are. (Equally underappreciated: audio mixers, sound designers, and Foley artists, but I’ll save that for another post). Take a look at this series of images, all of the same shot, but with different color and lighting effects applied to each. They will help elucidate just how much creative effort goes into the color correction of each shot and prove how important it is to spend the money for a true online edit with an experienced colorist.