DVDSP compatability with AVID

Dear All,

We have just finished the offline pass of a 90 minute doco using an AVID media composer. The final output will be DVD as well as broadcast. I have a G4 867 without analogue caputre device that could handle the DVDSP if only we could get the media here in the first place. Any thoughts on a possible workflow? My thoughts at this point are:

(a) Online with a FCp uncompresed suite, export to a fcp movie, import to my box (assuming that AutoDuck works like y'all say it does; the show is not graffic intensive...disolves, titles etc)

(b) Online with an Avid Symphony, output to Quicktime, import to my box

Cheers,

Adam

Can you output to MPEG-2 directly form Media Composer? I would doubt that there is a problem doing that since the point of outputting from an NLE system is final content.

AutoDuck only allows you to semi-output FCP content to Avid - One Way!

So, if you can get a Quicktime output from Avid, you can use a compression tool to MPEG it and use DVD Studio Pro to format and build the DVD.

ON another note - iDVD can handle 90 minutes of content and if you are primarily interested in looking at it without really fancy menu's or titling, iDVD may be another route to get to DVDland.

It sounds like the Media Composer is not the same computer he plans to use DVD Studio Pro on, correct? I am not even sure it is a Mac, correct? Is it a PC based Media Composer?

If that is the case, I would simply look to export to a compatible MPEG-2 directly from media composer to MPEG-2. Take that output file and send it to the Mac via a FireWire portable drive or a via a Local Network.

In short, the easiest, best way to deal with this in my humble opinion, is to look for a compatible MPEG-2 solution directly from Media Composer. Everything else is going to be a hassle. Just make sure the MPEG-2 output is not a single video / audio output file. It must be an elementary stream file. Video separate from audio. Our common type is a multi-angle compatible file format, m2v and for audio .aif.

You might toss this question around an Avid forum as well. I am simply not clear on what platform your Media Composer is on.

If it is a Macintosh and OS X, you should have the option to Export to QuickTime and just use the Codec that comes with DVDSP2.