Michael Kammes (.com)

Avid Media Composer & Symphony 6.0 and You: New Features

We’ve got the purple kool-aid, and we’ve got the firehose: New. Avid. Releases. Now that the cat is out of the bag, I can share with you dear readers a comprehensive list of what is new and groovy inside the latest offering from Avid. Like what you see? Join me for a more in-depth webinar on all that is contained therein plus a huge helping of bonus material on November 22nd. More details here. Until then, let’s whet your appetite, shall we? Announced today, Media Composer 6, Symphony 6, and NewsCutter 10 will begin to ship November 15th. Lots of ...

Choosing the right shared storage solution: Part 2 of 3: Size, Spindles, and Protection

This is Part 2 in a 3 part series on Choosing the Right Shared Storage Solution. You may want to check out Part 1: Bandwidth & Connections. Hard drives are a dime a dozen nowadays. At last check, I think Best Buy and Fry’s had them at the checkout counter next to the latest Star Magazine and Chewlies gum. Despite the seemingly over abundance of drives, not all drives (let alone a collection of ‘em) are created equal. Most hard drives, as I’m sure you know, have spinning platters in them were data resides. While spinning, they allow data to ...

FCP X – from a unique perspective

Let’s all take a deep breath. Relaxed? On day 1, this isn’t a rant about how great or not so great FCP X is. I’m in a very unique position to be impartial. Gratefully and luckily, I work with virtually everything within the walls of Post. Thus, I’ve attacked the issue of FCP X and have decided to examine the ramifications to this creature with many heads we call workflow. I think we all need to put these 3 truths on a sticky next to our palette monitor. I believe: The good of the many outweighs the good of the ...

Choosing the right shared storage solution: Part 1 of 3: Bandwidth & Connections

Shared Storage – the least sexy of the post production technologies. Shared Storage is not the hot chick in class. She’s the quiet librarian with glasses that you end up falling for when the unreliable hot chick loses her sheen. She’s got everything you need: reliability and stability, and flashing lights. (Maybe the flashing lights thing is just me.) In part 1 of 3 part posting, I’m going to examine shared storage for video – SAN & NAS. Many factors go into choosing the correct shared storage solution: Bandwidth & Connections Drives: Size, Spindles & Protection (RAID) Management, Permissions & ...

Avid PhraseFind: 10 Tech Notes

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s go over some of the basics of PhraseFind. *Update April 12, 2011: Avid has given some feedback on the blog post, and I have posted their comments inline in bold.Thanks Avid! PhraseFind is a phonetic matching algorithm, developed by Nexidia. It’s been wildly successful, serving as the basis of AV3’s “Get” software, which is used in conjunction with Final Cut Pro. Avid has licensed the technology and has branded it “PhraseFind”. It is available for $495, or $1295 when bundled with ScriptSync. Additional language packs can be purchased for $149. “There are some ...

What I do as a Demo Artist

I am a Demo Artist & Post Production Workflow Consultant. WTF is that? Quite humbly, I’ve been told “Hey! You do what I wanna do!” or “I want to know as much as you!” following a presentation. This alone makes my day, if not my month. But I don’t think many people really grasp what I (we) do. Probably because the job title is a tad esoteric; it’s usage is generally relegated to the tech industry, and partly because the façade of a demo artist is one of confidence and domain expertise, when in reality, that’s nearly impossible at the ...

Avid 5.5 new features and what they mean to you

Kool-Aid! Get your Kool-Aid here! Avid has unveiled the latest update to their editing suite family: Media Composer & Symphony 5.5, as well as DS 5.5. Below are some of the biggest features to the Media Composer and Symphony 5.5 releases. Video I/O: AJA I/O Express. Easily the biggest announcement. Avid has traditionally restricted baseband video input and output to Avid built hardware. We saw a glimpse last year of the move off this paradigm with the adoption of the Matrox MXO2 Mini. This toe in the 3rd party wading pool allowed users to output broadcast quality reference video through ...

Play Avid MXF for Free

In the spirit of the season, I have a holiday geek treat for you: The ability to freely play Avid MXF Media. It’s all happened to us what time or another – we find our storage drives are overflowing with media goodness. This limits the amount of media we can put on the drive for another project; as well as decreasing the performance of said media drives. Avid’s ability to track media is excellent, and this ability is partly responsible for it’s pseudo proprietary format – the Avid flavor of the MXF wrapper (a tweaked Op-Atom MXF, in case you ...

Avid is Self-Aware – Fast Import

Avid is self-aware. And while not in the Skynet sort of way, Avid is aware of it’s own. Commonly this is found in a shared user environment (Unity, ISIS). However, it can also be found in terms of raw media. A little known feature within Avid is the concept of a Fast Import. This complicated term does exactly what is says – it imports media into your Avid faster than a traditional import. However, lately I’ve been frequently asked, “well, why not use AMA? No importing is needed!” Let’s address this before we jump into Fast Importing. AMA in Media ...

3D in Post: Avid vs FCP

Unfortunately, we’re looking at the lesser of 2 evils. No mainstream editorial platform truly understands 3D natively. Through trickery, masking, and video hide-and-seek, we can manipulate our editing platform of choice to limp along for stereoscopic editorial. I’m a firm believer in the right tool for the right job, and choosing the tool requires a fair amount of research. We’ll examine the 2 top choices in today’s professional post arena: Avid’s Media Composer and Apple’s Final Cut Pro. While Avid has a built in ability for 3D tomfoolery, Apple must rely on 3rd party products. For this analysis, I am ...