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You have to be careful using your cel phone near digital video equipment. In production and post production some cel phones can cause interference. I recently captured 10 minutes of video, and when I brought it into Final Cut Pro I noticed that 3 minutes in the video was jittery, and the audio was crackled. I had noticed this a couple other times over the past year, but this particular time I remembered recieving a call when that portion of video was being captured. An Avid editor in Las Vegas told me of having the same problem, primarily with audio pops. This is easy enough to fix by simply recapturing, the real issue comes when the interference comes when shooting. Some cell phones can interupt the camera recording process, which embeds the distortion on the tape. Whenever possible turn your cel phone off, especially the the ones with the direct connect feature.

Recent versions of Avid Xpress and Media Composer comes bundled with an incredible title tool called Avid Marquee.  Problem is, it doesn't ship with any hard manuals and the learning curve can be daunting.  Here are the basic steps to creating an extruded title.

Avid Xpress users know that there are constant updates to the Avid applications that we use. When you update your Avid software this requires that you uninstall the old version of Avid before you install the latest version. This is very straight forward on a PC but is slightly different on a Mac. Before you can upgrade, you need to uninstall any older version of Avid already installed on your computer.Newer versions of Media Composer and Xpress Pro have separate applications, Avid Uninstallers, that make this process very easy.  But older versions didn't have separate uninstaller applications.  This includes Xpress Pro 4.8.x and Media Composer 1.8.x. 

Uninstalling older versions of Xpress Pro and Media Composer on Macinstosh systems is a very simple process, but it is done using the avid installer .  To perform the uninstall procedure, you will need to use the Install disc, or downloaded zip file.

Download complete instructions to uninstall your Avid software on your mac. 

Now that Panasonic  P2 is a very successful format there are a few things you need to be aware of when editing and importing these files. There are time that a  multiple MXF file will refer to the same clip. This is because P2 cards are formatted as FAT 32 (so that they are compatible with both PC and Mac.) FAT 32 drives have a 4 gig file size limit; thus when the MXF file for a clip reaches 4 gbs, it creates a second MXF file. This is similar to the 2gb limit that OMF files have.

When the clip is imported, it will display the name of one of the clips; the name is usually the same as the first MXF file, but if you attempted to import both MXF files, it may display the name of the second clip. If you use a program like P2CMS to transfer you P2 cards to a drive, it will create a separate folder for each individual MXF file. It is only necessary to import one of the MXF files for a clip that contains multiple MXF files - all of the media and metadata will be preserved. These are very important steps to keep your P2 MXF files online!

With storage being less than .30 a GB in many cases it makes more sense to just import entire tapes, and use the same drive to archive. If you budget $50 for a 100 GB project just for storage, and charge $150 you make $120 on not having to ever recapture that media. 12 years ago when NLE was getting going, storage was over a $1000 per GB, and it wasn't cost effective to back up to a drive. In 2008 we can give our tape mechanisms a break and just ingest the entire tape. With the DV start stop feature of Final Cut Pro, you can separate the clips into subclips, and have all your clips with plenty of handles. Capturing the whole tape also gives you B roll that you don't expect to use, but as a project comes to a close you find the clip you wouldn't have batch captured, but it is the perfect clip to fill your need.