So, that project that I took from FCP and converted to Avid, you know, this, this and this one?  Well, after sending off three of five masters, we got notes back.  Not QC (quality check) notes like one would expect, but some more online notes like “blur this more, blur that…and blur that,” and “the graphics are the old ones, please replace with the new ones, link below, and the font needs to change as well.”  But notes like, “instead of blurring that shot, can we replace it?  And the sound byte here seems to cut short, can we fix that?  And this series of stills, they repeat too much, can we replace with others?”  More than a few CREATIVE notes.  Notes that should have been sent before we mixed audio and onlined and color corrected.

The producers did manage to talk down the number of notes to just a few, but a couple of those included the creative notes.  But those were handled without too much difficulty.  I fixed the Master, then I needed to fix the textless version.  But then…oh yeah, I needed to fix the AVID project too.  I had done all these changes on the FCP cuts, because I onlined in FCP, and just converted to Avid after I was done.

I wondered if I could just export another AAF via Automatic Duck Pro Export and have that cut reconform in Avid, connecting to the media that already existed.  But after a few attempts (with help from Wes), I couldn’t get the media to connect.  I unlinked the clips changed the source names to match, and tried to connect, but no go.  So I had to just redo the cuts AGAIN.  It wasn’t so bad, it just took a bit of concentration, exact number matching…and an hour.

Then I needed to add Bars to the front of the Avid Sequence.  I neglected to do this the first time.  But, how did I do that?  I had been on FCP so long, I didn’t know where to look.  I remembered that you went through the mixer to create tone media, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find the way to make BARS in the menus.  So I had to ask someone…I wanted to avoid the forums as to not seem like a complete hack.  But here I am, telling everyone how I forgot where to get color bars…whatever.  We all forget things like this.

So I asked Bryce of Post Fifth Pictures as he was on iChat, and used Avid every day.  He explained that I go FILE>IMPORT and then look in the Avid Media Composer folder, then Supporting Files, and in there are TEST PATTERNS.  Import the ColorBars.pict and I was good to go.  Oh, but then the sequence started at 59:59:00…and I needed it to start at 58:00;00.  I remembered that the command to get the window to change this was CMD-I (on the Mac), but it wasn’t working.  Again, Bryce reminded me that I need to click on the Composer window, THEN click CMD-I.  Brilliant!

Now I just need a gig cutting on the Avid so I can get my Avid legs back…