Avid Tip
Avid Workaround:
Using Subclipsby Tod Modisett & Scott Burnette
Scott and I have been engaged in an increasingly competitive Avid duel over the last few years to see who can come up with the most efficient and ingenuous workaround. Recently, we thought that perhaps not only would other assistants be interested in some of the techniques we've stumbled upon, but that they might have encountered the same problems and found better solutions than our own. It seemed appropriate to begin by talking about subclipping, the first topic that sent me running across the hall back when Scott and I worked in adjacent editing suites.
I had received dailies that were logged as entire camera rolls instead of individual takes. After I digitized each of these 10-minute long clips, I subclipped the takes for the editor. I noticed that while my keycode was continuous, the sound timecode, being time-of-day, was not continuous at all over the course of a camera roll. So, I went into my new subclips and changed the sound timecode to match the sound burn-in for each take.
The Timecode Was Off
The Avid accepted my changes and so initially I thought I had no problem. But I was wrong. Much later, when I was checking lists, I found that the sound timecode on the subclips was off. The subclips had automatically updated themselves to match the sound TC of the master clip, as if the master sound TC had been continuous. Subclip information refers directly to the master clip. It worked from the master clip - in this case, a 10 minute long camera roll - and assumed a continuous count. The only thing that I found disturbing was that the Avid had allowed me to change the subclips' sound TC without any sort of warning. If I hadn't been randomly checking lists, I wouldn't have caught it.
One of the peculiarities I found of subclip infomation is that it does not consistently alter itself. Sometimes it will maintain the entered value over various restarts and multiple openings and closings of the bin. I'm not sure what specific act - reconstructing media databases, copying sequences, listing out multiple times - would cause the subclip to reference back to the master and then change its information, I only know that it can happen. And if it happens at the wrong time, it could prove troublesome.
To solve this problem, I moved all my subclips into a bin and then exported that bin to the desktop as an ALE file. I then created a new bin and imported that ALE. The subclips came back in, with all their information intact, as master clips. I redigitized the material as master clips and updated the sound TC information.
Later, however, Scott and I discovered a better way. Scott liked the notion of importing subclips to create master clips, but he wanted to eliminate the need to redigitize. He suggested that I consolidate the subclip. When I tried it, I found that by simply consolidating a subclip the Avid created a new master clip. No exporting or redigitizing is necessary. After all of the subclips are thus consolidated and converted into master clips, I could delete the original, working media and continue with only the new masters.
Scott and I found that this technique can frequently come in handy with wild track logs, where the facility will typically transfer your sound in a single chunk without regard to changing sound TC. It can also come in handy if there happens to be keycode breaks on your singly-logged camera roll.
In addition to creating a new master clip from a subclip, John Axelrad suggested simply leaving the sound TC column blank in the original master clip itself; this allows the subclip's timecode information to "stick" appropriately. He often digitizes and then subclips camera rolls and has never had a problem with the information updating itself.
C-Sort Mode
Recently, subclipping came to my rescue in another unusual way. My director wanted to go into a final color correction session with not just a C-sorted [ascending by source name, ascending by timecode] select list, but also with an Avid output that matched that list. The editor had made a "selects" sequence, but the sequence was certainly not already C-sorted. I tried several different ways to get the shots into a C-sort mode, including creating a new sequence from the C-sorted list, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, I decided that the best thing to do would be to subclip each of the shots in the selects sequence, sort the subclips within the subclip bin by source (command-E), drag those subclips that pertain to my first source into a new bin, and then sort again by timecode. I repeated this for each set of subclips by source.
When all the subclips were thus then in their proper order by source and timecode, I selected all the subclips and option-dragged the bunch into a new sequence I had created. This new Avid sequence, when output, matched the on-lined, C-sorted tape exactly.
There's A Trick
There was a trick to the above subclipping procedure that I wasn't aware of when I started, however. The editor's original selects sequence was made from a MultiGroup. That meant that I first had to go to the head of the each edit, match-frame, then match-frame again from the source monitor to get into the Group, then match-frame a third time to arrive finally at the original clip. Why the triple match-frame? I found that if you subclip from the MultiGroup, your timecode will not match the source timecode, and if you subclip from the Group you will not have a source listed in your bin. Thankfully, match-framing multiple times is easy, especially if you have the function assigned to a key on the keyboard.
If anyone out there can think of a less painstaking way to C-sort an Avid sequence for output, or other interesting uses of subclips, we would love to hear from you via e-mail. And thanks to John Axelrad, Tom Costain, and Carmen Abramian for their help with this piece.
