We're currently using a Drobo to occasionally archive offline media from our Unity. It works extremely well, although we use it over USB2 so it ain't fast - but the simplicity of adding storage and the protection factor is extremely useful to us. My assistant tells me he occasionally plays back from it if he's checking what to restore, but

I'm pretty sure it 'copies' it. I did some difference matte tests in Photoshop a while ago to try and answer this very question, and the mixed-down and unmixed-down frames were identical (at least visually) Anecdotally, the speed of mixing down rendered vs. unrendered effects would also support this conclusion - but I guess we'd need

Andrew, you bugger...I just spat the remainder of my trim milk latte over the keyboard.....

And you're sure it's not the Open GL issue?

This is probably artifacts being caused by interlacing, where fine detail in your graphics 'pops' on and off field lines as they are redrawn on the video monitor. I routinely add a gaussian blur in Photoshop of 0.3 pixels (this is for SD work) and this 'bleeds' the detail nicely into the next field. This also applies to stuff I've

This isn't available yet - but it might make the job easier in the near future... http://www.divergentmedia.com/blog/?p=14

Some Boris effects are dependent on your Open GL hardware, and if you don't have the right card/driver combo, this can cause the sort of problem you are describing. There is info on the Boris support site about this - if you can't find it - let me know here and I'll dig around and try to relocate it. (This was a problem I simply couldn't

Larry's right - Use Pan & Zoom with the 'B-Spline Catmull' option or higher. If you're still getting flicker after that, one option is to edit the original image in something like Photoshop or The Gimp and add a very small gaussian blur - somewhere between .3 and .6 pixels.

Just to add to jwrl's thoughts - you may be surprised what can be done inside Avid using the Paint effect (in the image category).

I might be committing audio heresy here, but I find 320kbps .mp3 files are perfectly acceptable for use in Avid.