MC 5 for tape recording

[Kent Nguyen]

This might be a stupid question; but is there any one knows how to capture videos from tapes using MC 5? I learn the Lyndia from getting start CD but find nothing about capturing tapes

[Chris Medico]

What deck are you using and how does it connect to the computer?

Once you have it connected you would have to configure it in MC then use the Capture utility.

[Kent Nguyen]

Thanks Chris. I use a Sony FX 1 to payback.

[Kent Nguyen]

I just simply connect the camera to my computer using E1394 source. The capture utility reconizes the camera and be able to control it. However the capture button as well as the video and audio button doesn't with the message :" no signal present". Do I need to have Avid capturing hardware to capture the video?

Best.

[Chris Medico]

Are you running Win7 by chance?

If so your problem could be the firewire driver. You need to go into device manager for your firewire port and manually change to the "legacy" driver. It will have the word "legacy" in the name.

That should take care of the problem. That one got me too.

[Kent Nguyen]

I tried to import a movie clip which is exported by Avid liquid. The task was failed as MC 5.5 does not support the Liquid format

My project details:
Size: 1080p/29.97fps
Color space: YCbCr 709
Rast Dimension: 1920x1080

I tried to export a clip from Avid Liquid using diffrent formats such as: MPEG-2 (HDV); AVI-DV, AVI for windows and many other ways but non of them works. What should I do?

Best.
Kent.

[Chris Medico]

There is a way to do that. You'll need to download and install the free DNxHD codecs from Avid onto your Liquid machine.

You can read more about the workflow here:
Error

Once you have the codecs installed you can export your timeline as DNxHD and MC should import the media.

I have done this on my old Liquid system and can report that it does work.

[Roger Van Duyn]

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the tip about Liquid being able to export in the DNxHD Codecs. I never realized it was possible, because I hadn't looked under the export as Quicktime--MODIFY PRESET--ADVANCED--COMPRESSION TYPE--then there all those codecs are in the drop down menu.

Thank you so much. It will make it SO EASY to transfer old Liquid Projects into Media Composer. Much easier than my present workflow of fuse timelime, then transcode using MPEG Streamclip etc.

There are a lot of instances where I work so much faster in Liquid than in Media Composer. Partly it's from familiarity I'm sure, but lots of times MC just seems to take more steps to do the same thing than Liquid.

All those years in the Liquid forums I never came across this.

[Kent Nguyen]

Thanks Chris

I know that there are new codecs for Liquid from Avid but still do'nt know if they would work.
I just wonder why it is so complicate in MC to do the same task in Liquid?. Well there are some possibilities in MC than Liquid, but how about the same tasking in both.

As a new MC(5.5.1) user, I am now struggling in exporting my current sequences to complete burning my Bluray Disc. There are too many setting and I had many error message in many exporting setting types, especially :Some destination in the export options are not available. Is there any tip to make it common and quick? By the way, should I use Sorento, DVD by Sonic or just my favorite Nero to burn BD.?

Best.

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Kent Nguyen

Thanks Chris

I know that there are new codecs for Liquid from Avid but still do'nt know if they would work.
I just wonder why it is so complicate in MC to do the same task in Liquid?. Well there are some possibilities in MC than Liquid, but how about the same tasking in both.

As a new MC(5.5.1) user, I am now struggling in exporting my current sequences to complete burning my Bluray Disc. There are too many setting and I had many error message in many exporting setting types, especially :Some destination in the export options are not available. Is there any tip to make it common and quick? By the way, should I use Sorento, DVD by Sonic or just my favorite Nero to burn BD.?

Best.

Kent I feel your pain as a convert from Liquid to MC myself. What I can tell you is that it gets better as you go. My advice first and most importantly is you have to completely let go of Liquid before you can start using MC efficiently (easier said than done but a lesson that I finally learned). Liquid was intuitive and MC is not. That doesn't mean MC is bad. What it means is you have to learn the Avid way of editing before you can be productive. After a solid year of using only MC I am now a faster editor than I was with Liquid. The major thing that helped me was going and watching every tutorial on youtube and the various websites I could find AND stop using the mouse for everything and getting the keyboard shortcuts into my workflow.

If you export your timeline as DNxHD I promise you MC will open the media files. I've moved LOTS of media from my Liquid machine to me MC machine this way.

To help you with creating DVDs you have to first make sure your timeline is compatible with the workflow needed to create a DVDs. The main rule - You can NOT have ANY long GOP and/or AMA media in your timeline. If you have any HDV or XDCam media (for example) in your timeline you MUST do a video mixdown to DNxHD before creating a QuickTime Reference file to send to Squeeze or AvidDVD. If you are importing and transcoding all your incoming media before editing to DNxHD then you can create your QT Reference file without a video mixdown. You will use Squeeze if you want to do any pre-compression tweaking of the file like de-interlacing, if all is good with your media you can take the QT Reference file directly into AvidDVD.

From there you will import the QT Reference file into AvidDVD and build the disk then burn it.

Have you seen any of the tutorials from Avid regarding how you get from editing to disk authoring?

I hope this helps some.

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Roger Van Duyn

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the tip about Liquid being able to export in the DNxHD Codecs. I never realized it was possible, because I hadn't looked under the export as Quicktime--MODIFY PRESET--ADVANCED--COMPRESSION TYPE--then there all those codecs are in the drop down menu.

Thank you so much. It will make it SO EASY to transfer old Liquid Projects into Media Composer. Much easier than my present workflow of fuse timelime, then transcode using MPEG Streamclip etc.

There are a lot of instances where I work so much faster in Liquid than in Media Composer. Partly it's from familiarity I'm sure, but lots of times MC just seems to take more steps to do the same thing than Liquid.

All those years in the Liquid forums I never came across this.

Your welcome Roger. Glad I could help.

[Kent Nguyen]

Dear Chris,
I followed your instruction and it worked great to make a video and audio mixdown. However, when I use sorenson to compress the Quicktime Reference, the compression is failed with error message: fail-encoding:ACE_MPEG_GEN_VIDEO_COMPRESSION. My video is quite long, it's about 4 1/2 hours and the compression takes all day (15 hours) to complete. Should I split it in to several segments?

My project due day is passed and I am still stuck around the last part of the project. Would you please show me a little more details of how to burn a BD starting from the quick time reference step. I have learned MC5 myself from fragments of tutorials such as the "getting start" disc from the MC5 package, youtube tutorials etc...

Many thanks.

Kent.

[Chris Medico]

Kent,

I checked on that error message and the indications are that you have a corrupted install of Squeeze. The solution was to reinstall Squeeze and try again.

Secondly, I recommend breaking the project up into shorter segments. That is an awful lot of video to be putting on one disk.

Please let us know if doing a reinstall gets you going.

I'm glad you were able to get the video compressed and on a disk.

[Kent Nguyen]

The Sorenson can only squeeze part of the file (2hrs) and my squeezed file lost its audio.

[Chris Medico]

There should be separate audio file in the same folder where Squeeze exported the video. It won't embed the audio into the video file.

You drag both files (audio and video) into AvidDVD and the final disk will have audio and video.

You can also open the QT reference file directly in AvidDVD and make the disk that way. It may save you some trouble.

AvidDVD can compress the video to the right format.