Twitter is always a good place to chat about film and video post-production. It’s also a great place to pick up tips and tricks. Recently editor David Michael Maurer spent his Twitter day tweeting a slew of Avid Media Composer tips and tricks. It’s often tricky to distil a complex editing tip into 140 characters but Mr. Maurer did a good job. Since not everyone who would like to see some good Avid tips is on Twitter I’ve reposted those here, with permission.

Ok, I’m going to just come right out an admit it … I miss digitizing. For those young ‘uns unfamiliar with the term that would be the process of actually having to take a video tape and capture that into the computer for editing. Some folks call it ingest, others do use the term capture but I’ve always referred to it as digitizing. I used to hate it but now I miss it. Sometimes I miss it a lot. Is that crazy?

It’s been an eventful few days in and around the general world of film and video post-production. If you haven’t heard (but of course you have) Adobe made the decision to move all of their software licensing to the cloud, their Creative Cloud, and charge $50 a month to access to everything they make. No more paying some $1,500 up front for the Production Premium and having a box shipped to your door. While it would be nice to have a less expensive monthly access to only those video-centric apps (I’m never going to use Dreamweaver, InDesign or Muse among others) you really do get a lot for that $50 (check out the pricing page for other price options that could lower your monthly bill to Adobe). 

Another NAB has come and gone so things can begin to get back to normal. With that end to NAB let’s have a new entry into the Useful Tools for Editors category with our After NAB Edition. We talk PCs, relinking, keyboard emulators, slideshows and (of course) FxFactory.

I was having a discussion with some students recently about hard drive speeds and why it’s important to have a fast drive for editing. All the discussion of data rates and different types of connections can only go so far as students new to editing need to see that speed in action. The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test (Mac App Store link) is a good way to visualize drive speed but we didn’t have that handy so here’s those big speedometers scaling from USB up to a very fast Thunderbolt connection.

I know I probably shouldn’t get excited by something as simple as a bunch of buttons but I have to say that one of my favorite things that I saw at the 2013 NAB show were the X-keys Sticks from P.I. Engineering. These things are just a strip of 4, 8, or 16 buttons that I envisioned as an extra set of function keys. I know it seems silly but boy did I immediately see a big use for something like that. I’ve tried so many different input devices over the years but nothing seems quite a nice as buttons.

Not everyone in post-production has the need for shared storage and probably even less of those need portable shared storage but if you’re one of those that do look no further than the TitaniumZ–5 from Small Tree. It’s got some impressive specs and an eye-catching, yet useful form factor. It looks like it would be the perfect fit for certain editing situations.

One thing I noticed when walking the South Hall of the 2013 NAB show was there are quite a new more PCs in the various booths running various software demos. There were also quite a new vendors offering fast, customizable PC workstations. One of those vendors is ProMAX and their very MacPro looking machines are called the ProMAX ONE and One+. I loved the description of the machine from the ProMAX rep I talked to: It’s like a “higher end MacPro … it doesn’t run OSX.”