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Checkvist - The Holy Grail of web-based to-do lists

This falls slightly outside of the purview of Avid Tips, but if you use checklists and to-do lists as religiously as I do in my day-to-day editing, then this might just interest you.

Just stumbled across a new webapp called Checkvist.  I've used (and abandoned) quite a few similar applications like Remember the Milk and Todoist simply because they weren't exactly what I needed.  Well, I've been using this for the last couple of days and it is so close to the perfect online to-do list that I think I'm converted.

The genius here is that it is a combined outliner and todo list, with one of the simplest interfaces I've ever seen.  I'm not much one for tech punditry - but if this isn't quite a big hit in the next few months then I'd be very surprised.

Disclaimer

A little resource for Marquee

Software: Avid (all with Marquee)
Platform: Any
Skill Level: Intermediate

One slightly annoying thing about Marquee, is that it won't display a 4:3 safe / title action grid inside a 16:9 aperture, the way that Avid's inbuilt grid will.

To get around this, I've made a marquee title that includes a 4:3 aperture grid which you can compose with, and then turn off when you save the final title.  I've only tested this on PAL (and Windows) but it should work for other applications.  At any rate, it would be easy to modify for other applications (like 14:9 aperture for instance).

To use this template you'll need to:

1. Download this marquee title file, and put it somewhere on your Avid so that you can find it again.
   
2. Start Marquee, and then use File > Open to open the file 4x3 Inside 16x9.mqp that you just saved.
   
3. Once you've opened the file you should have a safe action and safe title box with accompanying text.  These four objects are on a layer called 4:3 Safe inside 16:9.
   
   
4. You can then create your title on the Main Title layer and line it up correctly inside Safe Action.
   
5. When you're finished, click the eye icon (with the line through it) to the left of the 4:3 Safe inside 16:9 layer and it will be hidden.
   
6. You can now save your title and it will appear in Avid with only the elements you want, not the Safe Area boxes.

I've locked the objects on the Safe title layer so you can't move (or remove) them by accident.  If you create your new title objects on the Safe title layer by accident, you can cut and paste them so they are on the Main Title layer.

There are other ways of doing this, of course, but I hope for the dedicated marquee users out there, this might prove to be a useful technique.

Disclaimer

Excellent Animatte tutorial at GeniusDV

This is an excellent technique for simulating everything from painting on an image to writing text on as if it were handwriting.

Not to risk deluging you with new posts, but....

Benjamin Hershleder has just launched a range of clothing and other products for the fashion conscious Avid Editors amongst you. I'm particularly fond of the 'Media Offline' mousepads. Check it out.

Drobo - early days, but useful so far.

Software: Avid (All)
Platform: All
Skill Level: Basic

Not a tip, sorry - and a long time since my last post - but I just wanted to draw your attention to a useful bit of hardware that might assist smaller productions like my own when Unity or other media space gets tight.

The item in question is a Drobo.  This is essentially an empty box into which you can place any combination of SATA (or SATA II) drives to create a protected storage system.  In our case we bought the Drobo plus two 750Gb SATA drives - giving us roughly 680Gb of protected data storage.

Now I know this seems kinda stingy, considering I stated with 1.4 Terabytes of storage - but it's that 'protected' word that makes all the difference.  The media that we've moved off our Unity represents about 120 40-minute Digibeta tapes at DV25 4:2:0 (which is what we use for offline).  If the offline storage of this media were to fail, then it would mean a least two weeks of very late nights for my assistant (hee hee) and some loss of sleep for myself.

Now I know I could have gone with a Raid (which the Drobo is not - don't ask me, read their explanation) but I like the simplicity of the setup, the fact that I can add drives later, and that the Drobo will take care of formatting it, and making the extra space available.

So all-in-all this is a pretty useful (if admittedly niche) solution for us, and one that has gotten us out of a bit of a Unity Storage hole (when the show is a bit tight for space - like now).

One Caveat - this thing writes at about 20 MbPS and reads slightly above that - so it's only ever going to be a media drive for DV-res stuff.

And the price?  $899 Aussie (or $499 USD).  Pricey compared to a DIY raid - but a fair bit simpler, and it just works.  And the SATA drives?  Well check your local supplier (or your odds-and-ends box; you might have a couple you could use that are just lying around.)


Disclaimer

Title Tool / Marquee Improvements - please add yours!

This post isn't really a tip, it's an invitation to add your thoughts to improvements that could be made in the whole Avid Title Tool / Marquee environment for adding text to video. I've been having a sort of blog conversation with Steven Cohen over at Splice Here (an excellent editing blog if you haven't already discovered it) about the pretty woeful nature of the whole text on graphics experience inside Avid.

So I've been in touch with my one good contact at Avid (who will remain nameless so they don't get flooded with feature requests) and they've promised to at least get a list of suggested improvements to the right people. So in this post I'd like to do two things - outline my suggested improvements to Avid titling, and then invite any readers to add their own suggestions via comments.

I do understand that there is a Feature Requests forum on the Avid Website, but having looked through that it seems as if the Title Tool requests are a bit buried, along with many other calls for improvement. I also appreciate that there are other areas where Avid is less than perfect - but my intention here is to focus on one fairly narrow category of improvements and see if any results are forthcoming. Who knows, if this works I might move on to something else.

I also need to declare my interests here as an Online Editor working in Standard Def. on a one-hour weekly lifestyle show - a format where a substandard titling interface costs me a lot of time - so this post is pretty selfish, but by inviting comments not as selfish as it could be.

So; here are my ideas for a better titling tool - and these points are in my rough order of priority.

1. Powerful, integrated in-line titling - I want the upgraded UI to work directly on the record monitor. If I need more space I'll switch into big effect mode (or some other fullscreen mode provided in the UI)
2. Full control over character and paragraph spacing, kerning, leading and all other options that you now find in a modern graphics app like Photoshop.
3. Global Title styles - I want to be able to define Character and Paragraph styles that apply to a series of titles, and if I change these properties all the titles with that style will automatically update.
4. Graphics and Logos integrated with titling. At the very least I want to add a sponsor graphic into a rolling title without the title size expanding to megabytes. And no, I don't want to import it as Matte and hand-animate it to match.
   
5. Text Animation - sophisticated, fast text animation without exiting to After Effects, or starting Marquee. Marquee is powerful, but so slow.
6. Data driven title templates - I want to be able to autofill a series of titles with text (and title properties like size) from a Word Document, a text file, an Open Document Format file etc.
7. Virtually infinite text size, or change the title model to completely vector-based.
8. Less, or no rendering

So please, add anything you think I've missed as a comment- and I'll post again with a collation my ideas and yours.

A motley crew of Little Tips....

Software: Avid
Platform: All
Skill Level: Basic

I thought I'd share some of my smaller but no less useful tips.

1. If you can't play a sequence in Avid, it's often because of corrupt media, so use the binary chop to find where that niggly piece of media is hiding. Mark an in/out on half of your sequence. Press play in-out (usually 6 on most keyboards). If that half plays, then the corrupt media is on the other half. Keep chopping the other half into halves, and you'll very quickly narrow down where the corrupt media is.

2. If you work on a weekly show, where each show is a project, don't use the same bin names in each project, because you'll often want to open bins from one project in another, and Avid won't allow two bins of the same name in each project.

3. If you want to guarantee that bins will follow a particular order in your project window use a number system before the bin name i.e.

4. I get sync drift (a common problem with Avid and Digibeta) all the time. To easily correct your drift, duplicate your sequence just before you re-conform your video and give it a name like Offline Backup. Hi-res your sequence, and then load your Hi-Res sequence in the record monitor and your lo-res sequence in the source monitor. Click the gang button in either monitor. You can now move through your sequence, checking the shots in your record monitor to see if they line up with the source. If they don't, use the slip & slide buttons (usually m,./) to correct it.

Disclaimer