Friday, January 18, 2008

Avid data entry tip

Are you sick and tired of Cmd-V, pasting your way down a entire bin of takes where you want the same information applied to all the takes you have selected? I.E. date shot. Of course you could export the bin, open it in a spreadsheet and do a fill down command, re-import the bin, but who wants to deal with that?

My friends, our time has arrived.

I received this info from a Avid engineer who saw me doing this and said "we fixed that."

I'm not sure which version the fix came in on, but I am working on Adrenaline v2.7.7

-Select/sift the clips that you want the data duplicated into.

-Hover your cursor over the field you want new data in, right click and select "set COLUMN NAME for selected clips"

-A new dialog box will come up named "Set COLUMN NAME." Enter your text and hit OK.

-Click on on the confimation dialog box and your new data will be entered into the clips you had selected.

Days just became a little shorter.

-Scott

Friday, January 11, 2008

Production Sound

It happens often. You cut to the best performance of a character, and another character steps on the line. Picture departments often will find an alternate reading to "clean up" the area were the overlap of lines happen. However, it is still important that sound editorial has access to the original line reading.

So what you do in these situations is keep the original production in one of your tracks, but bring it down to zero (infinity on the audio mix tool). That way, you get your clean line reading for screenings, but sound has access to the sync track when you turn over your OMFs.

This is a very simple thing to do and will save time down the road.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Commenting

Information is my friend, so I am always looking at things and trying to find new ways to organize that info or refine existing info.

So, in the AVID, they give you the standard array of columns, which is growing by leaps and bounds, but not always the way I want or need.

Add a few new columns and name them:
Comments_Pix
Comments_Snd
Comments_Mx
Comments_VFX
Comments_DI
Comments_Whatever...

When you export to a codebook, your comments are broken out by category making it really easy to do a search for sound problems and not having to sift thru ancillary comments.

-Scott