Someone switching from Vegas to Avid, seeking advice:
Example advice from that thread:
- (Implicitly, from the following) Try AMA as a first port of call.
- “Import” is used for file types that can’t be accessed via AMA (Avid Media Access). There are two types of Importing: fast and I guess what I’d call slow.
- Fast Import rewraps the file in an MXF container, but it does not transcode, so it takes very little time and there is absolutely no quality hit.
- Slow Import is necessary when the codec is not natively supported inside MC or one of the import settings dictates a transcode, e.g. going from 601 to RGB color levels (hard remapping all colors so 16 becomes 0 and 235 becomes 255). Slow importing can take time
- Avid will most certainly accept (content in) a MOV container, but will always generate new MXF mediafiles when you import these MOVs into the system.
- Indeed that’s what happened when I imported a MOV file containing ProRes content. The MXF was about the same size as the MOV.
- I guess this would have been an example of Slow Import
- Avid works mostly with its own codec, and with some other codecs. Not with ProRes.
The comment about ProRes conflicts with advice I have read elsewhere (and repeated elsewhere on this blog). Possibly it is context-dependent (e.g. PC/Mac, Avid version, QT version, workflow) ??? I will reserve judgement until I have tried it.