One of the great advantages to Media Composer in the past was that the editor got to make all the decisions. Where Final Cut made assumptions about whether a shot was anamorphic or not, Avid made you decide what format it was. Frameflex seems to have made that concept obsolete and stolen my sense of security about what the Avid does to my edit.

I've been working with v7 now since July and it's been a generally positive experience. Till yesterday.

I'm working in HD 25p with lots of different sources (C300 files, 5D movs, DigiBeta SD, blown up youtube, archive MXF, archive movs, you name it) with lots of different picture formats (16:9, 4:3 and sometimes historical footage that is close to but not quite 4:3 and needs to be manually reformatted).

Frameflex I thought would be a great help, allowing me to pillarbox 4:3 archive screeners for the creative edit. Once picture lockoff happened I began replacing layout archive with "broadcast-quality" SD archive, mostly movs, some DigiBeta. As I replaced the footage I used the reformat tool, as usual, to format the footage for 1080. I was surprised to see that even in footage that I hadn't pillarboxed and that hadn't had any changes made to its source settings, the frameflex effect showed up in the effects editor.

Online and reformatting finished I viewed the cut (all 72 minutes of it). Now and then I noticed streched and/or blown up shots. I thought I must have missed them on the first reformatting run through. So I repaired the reformats where necessary.

I exported the file for grading, checked the file and discovered to my horror dozens of shots with the wrong aspect ratios and/or where shots had been excessively blown up. Often it was only the first use of a particular clip but not the subsequent uses of other parts of that clip. Changing the frameflex setting might repair the first use of the clip but would have an uncertain effect on the other shots.

The only solution I thought of 10 hours before delivery was going through the whole film (again), removing reformat effects from the ruined shots, videomixdowning, editing the video mixdown onto another video track and reformatting each and every video mixdown. That should work, I  thought, and most of the time it did. It looked great. And then I exported the sequence again. Now some (but not all!) of the video mixdowns (!!) were reformatted by frameflex after (!!!) I had checked them, played them and reformatted them manually and checked them again.

Now most of the film is okay. But the grader has at least one short, fat and blown up shot in the film. I'll find out how many other ruined shots there are when I get the graded film back.

So, my question, how do I turn off frameflex? I can't trust it and for my workflow it is incredibly dangerous.

Cheers

Rodney

Hey Rodney......

I was just talking about you :)  I had a convo with Rob D'Amico this morning regarding your post and he has already asked the design folks to check it out.  We dont want anyone to have this kind of experience especially with a new feature like that.  

The engineers are going to attempt to reproduce this but they might need to connect with you as no one has even reported anything like this at all.

Can you email me any additional scoop and your email address and phone # as they might need to get in touch with you directly to see what might be the issue at your site.  

jumping on it ASAP.

Marianna

So, how do you turn it off?

Rodney - here are a few answers to some of what you need......

"  Frameflex I thought would be a great help, allowing me to pillarbox 4:3 archive screeners for the creative edit. Once picture lockoff happened I began replacing layout archive with "broadcast-quality" SD archive, mostly movs, some DigiBeta. As I replaced the footage I used the reformat tool, as usual, to format the footage for 1080. I was surprised to see that even in footage that I hadn't pillarboxed and that hadn't had any changes made to its source settings, the frameflex effect showed up in the effects editor."   

FrameFlex will be inserted when media does not match the format of the project (aspect ratio and raster dimension).  So an SD image in and HD project will introduce a FrameFlex, even if both are 16:9.  Prior to version 7 SD and HD were seen somewhat as the same format and no green dot was shown even though under the hood we did apply a transformation.

"  Online and reformatting finished I viewed the cut (72 minutes of it). Now and then I noticed streched and/or blown up shots. I thought I must have missed them on the first reformatting run through. So I repaired the reformats where necessary."  

It would be interesting to get the steps leading to unexpected results.  Could you provide to my email?

"  I exported the file for grading, checked the file and discovered to my horror dozens of shots wirth the wrong aspect ratios and/or where shots had been excessively blown up. Often it was only the first use of a particular clip but not the subsequent uses of other parts of that clip. Changing the frameflex setting might repair the first use of the clip but would have an uncertain effect on the other shots."  

Changing the Frameflex setting (in the source setting dialog) and then doing a refresh sequence will update the framing for all the relevant clips.  However, if some FrameFlex changes were done on the timeline (in the effect editor), those clips are not refreshed since they were reframed in the context of the sequence (local changes). 

Luc who is looking at this might contact you directly with a few more questions....  

stand by.

Marianna 

Yes - I am seeing the  same thing (I innocently started showing students how to reformat 4:3 in an HD 16:9 sequence and was bitten by Frameflex). I think that one problem is that Frameflex misinterprets some of the source footage and you'll need to manually fix the Source Settings in the bin – a bit tedious. Also (echoing Rodney), some of the tweaks I have made in the Effect Editor in a sequence and they won't stick. I think you need an 'Apply' or 'OK' button in the Eff Ed. Not something we have for any other effect, though. He said 'How do you turn it off?' and I feel that this should be an option for raster sizes that are smaller than the project format.

And adding to this, if you open a sequence containing a bunch of unwanted Frameflexed clips in an earlier compatible version of MC, you get a whole bunch of 'Unsupported Effect' icons!

Picked up a new macbook pro and installed 7.0.3. OS is Mavericks 10.9.1. Getting 'serious error has occurred'. Any help?

There are some instructions in the Readme about disabling Gatekeeper for 10.9. did you try them?

here is the tech note that explains it.

http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/compatibility/Disabling-Gatekeeper-is-required-to-install-Media-Composer-or-Symphony-on-Mac-OS-10-8-Mountain-Lion-and-10-9-Mavericks

Marianna 

Thanks but I was able to install the application. Based on the link gatekeeper is an issue with installation. I am working with a thunderbolt display attached to new MPB Retina 15". I believe the issue is when I mirror the display. Is this a known bug?

Yup.  Turn off mirror displays.

Sounds simple but see the thread that I started: http://community.avid.com/forums/p/124949/718174.aspx#718174

Some of us NEED mirroring!

Hello! Just a shout out from the HDV land. So, any good news/improvements for us mortals? How about HDV-AMA, maybe? :-)

You are talking about HDV captured as files? I agree - my students shoot on Sony Z7 cams and we have to import. Also, no luck controlling a Sony HDV tape deck via Firewire with MC7. This is probably a minority requirement but it would be good if it worked.

Yes, of course, that one too Roger, a smooth HDV-tape capture workflow! Although I've read and been scolded a lot of time in the past years about this 'consumer' complain, it will be awesome if Avid actually re-consider it  :-)  Blessings!