Diary of an Avid Switcher Part 3 – Things I Should Have Done

By Jonny Elwyn

Learning Media Composer – Doing Things Right From The Start

So this is my third instalment of my Avid Diary of a Switcher and thanks to the help of everyone who has commented I’m slowly learning how to do things properly in Avid Media Composer. Particular thanks go to Strypes In Post and Scott Simmons for patiently commenting and tweeting on my previous posts - which has led to straightening out a few things especially AMA.

AMA – Done Right

lthough AMA is improving it seems like the general consensus is that its ‘ram and processor intensive’ and not ideal for any serious editing. So the way most editors seem to be doing it is to AMA import in and then consolidate to Avid Media and go from there. As this takes some time people tend to leave it for an over night transcode.

Ben Hershleder’s ever useful Avid Media Composer Cookbook was also very handy for spelling this out in detail. Essentially the steps are:

1. Get your project settings right for AMA. Go to Settings > AMA and chose who MC will work with AMA files. How it will create a new bin and what quality it will link to.

2. File > Link to AMA Volume. If you have a folder of QT files from a DSLR or some such this will link to your original media and they’ll rapidly appear in the bin. The responsiveness of these clips will depend quite a bit on the speed of your drive. H.264 files from a firewire drive wouldn’t play correctly. read more...