Avid, Final Cut Pro, and Streaming Training Courses: Avid Xpress - Media Composer Archives

To create a PIP effect in , you must first have two video tracks with the desired footage placed over top of one another. You could perform the PIP effect with just one video track if you desired, but remember that the video in the track would then be placed on a black background. For this example, make sure you place the footage that you want to appear in the PIP effect on top of the footage that you wish to serve as the backdrop.

1 Open the Effects bin and under the Blend options select Picture-in-Picture.
2 Drag the PIP icon over the video clip in track 2. You will then see the effect in the Composer Window.

3 Click the Effects Mode icon and you will see a bounding box surround your PIP effect. Click in the middle of the bounding box to move it and use the handles to change its size.

In the Effect Editor Palette you will be able to further manipulate the PIP effect.
The ability to enlarge waveforms gives you the flexibility of seeing spikes in the audio with your naked eye. See how to !

When you are in the Color Corrction toolset within and have finished making adjustments to a clip, you can save the color correction parameter to use later on a similar clip.
1 After you have finished color correcting the clip, control click for Mac or Option click for PC the C1 bucket to save the adjustment parameters.
Keep in mind that when you end your Avid Session these saved parameters will not be retained.

Create a color correction bin and drag the icon from the C1 bucket to the bin to save it.
Take a look at this !
Have you ever wondered what the different colored bars mean at the bottom of your timeline after playback ends.

Well, those little bars are an indicator about the difficulties that your avid application is having during playback. This can help you determine the important parts to render or help you find problems tha may come up later during playback.
Red bars mark the ranges where the Avid editing application was unable to display frames.

Yellow bars mark the ranges that caused difficulty for the Avid editing application during playback because of processor limitations. No frames were dropped; this is only a warning.
Blue bars mark the location of frames that caused difficulty for the Avid editing application because of disk speed limitations.

No frames were dropped; this is only a warning.
If you find that your playback information often includes blue bars, it is likely that replacing your media disks with faster drives will improve the Avid editing application's ability to play back effects in real time.
Giving your text that extra look is a very important part of taking your work to the professional level.

I frequently use some form of glowing title. You can add a glow very easily in the new Avid Marquee Title Tool which is now bundled with Express Pro HD. To simulate a glow follow these few steps.

1. Highlight the object you want to glow and choose windows then properties and shadow.
2.

Adjust your shadow properties to match these.

Avid Express, Media Composer and HP XW8200

HP computers and Avid go hand in hand. Avid spends a lot of time with the HP products so they work seamlessly with all Avid products.

If you are using the HP XW8200 with SATA boot hard drives and have noticed slow playback then you may have a bios issue. To fix this you need to enter into the bios menu. First you need to restart your computer and wait for the blue and white HP screen during the boot process hit the F10 key.

You will see the word Setup in white appear in the lower right hand corner of your monitor if done properly. If you miss it just hit Ctrl+Alt+Del during the boot process to restart the computer.
If it set to something other than Ultra DMA 0, change it to Ultra DMA 0.

Hit F10, then F10 again, then F10 again to save changes and exit.
In director Tony Scott's highly anticipated film Deja vu Denzel Washington plays a federal agent who travels back in time to save a woman from being murdered and falls in love with her in the process. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, this visually complex and dynamic film delivers all the action that fans have grown to expect from a Hollywood blockbuster.

Viewers are kept on the edge of their seats as realities and timeframes cross over and merge and the main character catapults through the mind-bending plot.
Bond, who had been a beta tester for Media Composer software, says that Avid's newest software-only solution provides the entire toolset found in prior Media Composer systems as well as some new enhancements at a fraction of the cost.
Because Media Composer software was so affordable, we could expand our implementation and bring in more systems for greater efficiencies.

- J.C. Bond, Associate Editor, Deja vu
I hope you enjoy this You should be able to complete the filmstrip tutorial regardless of what version of software you are running.

If you find any errors or problems, please email me and I will correct them.
The first step to creating a moving filmstrip with Avid Xpress is to find at least 6 clips and set a duration of 3 seconds for each of them.
To do this, double click on each clip within the Avid Xpress bin window and mark IN and OUT points for each clip so the duration of each clip is exactly 3 seconds.

Avid Express, Mojo and Joesph Kahn

You need to take a minute and become familiar with . Joseph started is own production company in 1999 called Supermega. He currently works out of his Hollywood home, where he has his own Avid editing suite.

With two hardware, Kahn and his assistant Chris Abel rely on the system's creative toolset and portability to work at home or on location, under the banner of their production company Supermega. Kahn is a hands-on creative professional who handles everything from conception to shooting, directing, and editing. In fact, he has been single-handedly credited with helping to launch the careers of artists that he has worked with, and his lineup includes: U2, The Chemical Brothers, Blink 182, Eminem, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Moby, Black Eyed Peas, and Muse.

He has garnered multiple awards for his music videos, including several MTV Music Video Production Awards and a Grammy award for Eminem's Without Me video. His roster of commercial spots is equally impressive. Corporate clients include Acura, Ford, Budweiser, Miller, Sony, and, most recently, British Telecom, for whom Kahn launched one of the most expensive and aggressive advertising campaigns ever produced in the U.

K. His Fox/NASCAR campaign won a 2004 Clio award for visual effects. And in 2003, he found time to make his feature film directorial debut with Torque, a tongue-in-cheek motorcycle action movie, starring Martin Henderson and Ice Cube.

Kahn is one of the most creative filmakers you will come across and to know he does all of the work himslef makes it more impressive. So if you are wanting to be successful in the filmaking business then look to for a great rolemodel.
This is a continuation for Avid Express/Composer definitions.

I have compiled what I feel are some misunderstood terms to help you communicate with your peers. I will continue to add more definitions so stay tuned for more!
Kerning: The space between text characters in print or media.

Luminance: The measure of the intensity of the combined color (white) portion of the video.
Nonlinear editing: A type of editing where you do not have to edit from start to end. This includes all the types of computer editing and there is no physical order in which the shots must be assembled.

This is the modern way of editing and can be used for traditional film cutting once captured digitally.
Postroll: A preset period of time during a preview when a clip will continue to play past the out point before stopping.
Preroll: The process of rewinding tapes to a predetermined cue point so the tape stabilizes before it reached the desired edit (in) point.

Progressive media: Media composed of single frames; each is scanned as one pass.
Replace edit: An edit in which a segment in the sequence is overwritten or replaced with source material of the same duration.
Hopefully this will give you a little more vocabulary knowledge to either impress your peers or at least understand what they are talking about.

Stay tuned!
I know when I first started editing and got into this great business, there were a lot of terms being thrown around that I did not understand. Having an understanding of some key words in the video and film world will help you communicate much better with your peers and co-workers.

I will spend the next few entries defining a few key terms you may not hear enough to understand but when they do come up you will want to know what they mean.
Anti-aliasing: A computerized process of digitally smoothing out jagged lines around a graphic or title. This is especially important with large text and high contrast graphics.

Codec: This is simply either a compressing or decompressing of data to fit into package of either software or hardware. Some examples of codec are QuickTime, OMFI, MXF and so on.
Field: This is concerning interlaced video.

A field is half the scan lines of each frame of interlaced video. Standard NTSC video contains 60 fields in the 30 frame per second. So their exists two fields per frame of video.

You will mostly find that most systems use the odd numbered lines to make up one field and the even numbered lines for the other.
Video Gain: This refers to the amount of white in a video picture.
Gamma: This is the measurement of the midpoint in the luminance range of an image.

Used in color adjustment to control proportions of brighter and darker areas in an image.
IRE: This is a very important unit of measurement if your productions go to broadcast. IRE is used to measure the video waveform for your video levels.

You do not want to exceed 235 IRE in your broadcast productions.
Hopefully this will give you a little more vocabulary knowledge to either impress your peers or at least understand what they are talking about. Stay tuned for more!

This tutorial is not for the light hearted. I have included as many screenshots of the as possible. If you are having a difficult time mastering this effect, I reccomend that you take a certified Avid Training course.

In particular, take a look at the .
I will also mention, that this tutorial is only going to work with certain effects. For this particular example, I will use the 'swirl' effect that is located in the illusion plug-ins folder.

Many seasoned Avid editors are used to holding down the (alt, or option) key to auto-nest effects on top of exisiting effects. The problem with this method, is that it will not work with titles, or keyable graphics. The end result will look like this:
Finding out what systems the "Big Boys" use and how they use them has always fascinated me.

The show Punk'd on MTV is no exception. To meet the show's ever-increasing demands for more sophisticated content, the post team upgraded its editing setup this season to include three Media Composer Adrenaline systems with speedy, 10-bit, real-time video processing, running on Macintosh G5 systems. The systems are all linked through an Avid Unity Media Network shared-media solution with 3 TB of storage, providing the entire editing team with simultaneous access to any footage that they need.

Prior to the new Media Composer Adrenaline system setup, Punk'd editors Miles Barken, Ramin Mortazavi, and Grant Houser and assistant editor Sam Eskandari used Avid Meridien hardware-based systems. The changeover was easy, which is what Barken appreciates most about working with Avid systems.
"When it comes to an industrial job and doing the heavy lifting, Avid is an industrial tool.

It has the horsepower, the strength, and the stability to get the job done."
- Miles Barken, Editor, Punk'd
Creating the 'Plesantville' effect in Avid Xpress or Media Composer is a fairly simple task. In fact, a similar technique can be used in almost any other non-linear editing system.

For learning purposes, find a short clip that has a dominate object that contains mostly one shade of color. In this example, the orange flower.
Start by editing the same exact clip to V1 and V2 on the timeline as shown below.

Make sure the starting and ending points and each clip match up exactly.