ProVideo Coalition.com: Bruce's Blog by Bruce A. Johnson

I confess: I’m a freak. An outcast. A hard case. Why? Because I use the wrong NLE.

What’s the wrong NLE, you ask? Well, obviously, it is the one all the other guys aren’t using. Or, in a worst-case situation, the one your employer is using.

Full confession: I just can’t cut on an Avid. The whole layout, the interface, makes no sense to me. None of my colleagues have this problem, and I know exactly why. In the 1990’s, my shop was moving glacially towards non-linear editing, and at the time there was essentially one choice - Avid. While we were still cutting 90% linearly, all my shooting buddies would occasionally get to dip their toe in the Avid pool. Me? I was shooting every week on a news wrapup program, and received scripts on Friday so close to air that there was no chance of digitizing, cutting, and managing output in the timespan I had to work in. And I was happy that way; my linear editor - a Sony 910 in a three-Beta SP-deck A/B arrangement - and I knew each other so intimately that I never missed a deadline, routinely cutting 7-minute packages in (often) less than 3 hours. It was like playing a piano to me - and much better than I can play a real piano.

But this doesn’t mean I had no NLE experience. At the same time, I was writing for a certain two-letter video magazine, and in that process got to see lots of NLEs - all of them, essentially, except the Avid. (Remember when Avid didn’t care about the low end?) I tried to sort the good from the bad and the bad from the terrible. And there were lots of bad editors. The best of the bunch each had their charms, but over time, I settled on the one NLE that made me as comfortable with it as I had been with the 910 - Adobe Premiere. As I didn’t own a Mac, FCP wasn’t in the cards (although I did edit a 30 minute doc on it once - a fairly easy transition from Premiere), Vegas just didn’t have much structure in the interface, Edius made no sense at all, and anything with Pinnacle in the name just crashed time and time again. So Premiere and I became great friends, and I find myself fast and creative on it like no other software. And now that Premiere (OK, Pro) has finally become tightly enmeshed into the Creative Suite structure, jumping from it to Photoshop, After Effects, Encore DVD and other indispensable tools is just…simple.

Of course, the world can’t revolve around me; I have no illusions that my workplace will (or even should) switch from Avid to Premiere Pro. But still, for me editing on Avid is like trying to talk English in deepest Mongolia. I always hear about Avid’s vaunted media management, but all those bins, more bins and SuperBins just leave me cold. A friend once opined that the Avid is a great database with a crappy interface, whereas Premiere Pro (and, in his example, FCP) are great interfaces fronting deficient databases. Whatever.

I know Adobe is a big company, and I bet they are doing fine without any minuscule boosts from me. What I can’t get past is the widespread idea that if someone isn’t editing on Avid (or FCP) then they aren’t editing…or worse, aren’t an Editor. I can’t agree. In the final analysis, it should be all about the show, not how you got there.

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I couldn’t agree more. My company used to be on Edius and i got many baffled looks from fellow editors at the time.
Another friend was telling me that After Effects and Shake were not proper apps to do vfx work. He’s been working on Flame and Inferno and can’t possibly imagine doing any kind of serious work without a dedicated 50 000$ plus machine.

Posted by Corbor on 05/10 at 08:30 PM

I couldn’t agree more. I remember when Avid actually did luanch a consumer boxed editor (forget the name, it wasn’t around long….) we purchased one, just so when someone called and asked “you’ve got an Avid right?”, we could say yeah!. Then we went ahead and edited on whatever took fit the job!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/10 at 09:52 PM

One NLE to the next these days is pretty much same buttons, different places. They all do essentially the same thing, just in a little different way. One is stronger in one area, one is stronger in another. Anyone who disagrees is .. well… wrong!

Posted by Scott Simmons on 05/11 at 07:32 AM

I remember a coworker telling me “they are all just tools”.

I learned to edit on Avid. Used it exclusively for years. But now I am a FCP trainer. But I still teach Avid products and use Avid freelance. Students ask why they need to learn Avid if FCP is so popular. I tell them it’s just another tool in their arsenal.

To prove my point to them, I currently have FCP, MediaComposer and Premiere Pro loaded on my laptop. I use what ever tool fits the job. Last year, I freelanced at a place that still had, and used, a Abekas Sphere.

BTW, I think product Scott mentioned might be Avid VideoShop.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/11 at 07:47 PM

Well, I have to say that Premiere was my first NLE experience ever. It was the easiest and most affordable think to get my hands on before I knew any better. It allowed me to edit video out of PII 350 Mhz some little church videos.

I used FCP 2.0 (not fincal cut studio 2) in a community college class. It was soooo much better than premiere, I thought. I really fell in love with the interface but I didn’t have a Mac at home yet.

Then I landed my first TV gig on a local TV station and Oh BOY, they edited on Avid Media Composers!!! When I interviewed I told my soon to be boss than software was not a problem for me and that I would learn it in a heartbeat, or so I thought.

Coming from the Premiere/FCP intuitive drag and drop mouse and layer heavy editing Avid made no sense to me. Alpha channels worked backwards, multilayer compositing was so not straightforward and everything else was just weird. I thought I would be able to pick the thing up like I had with FCP and Premiere and start flying solo.

I HAD TO READ THE MANUALS! So it took me longer to get around it but I was determined to do it. Then all of a sudden it all made sense. I started seeing the great benefit of certain features that I once thought were useless. All those things that seemed to be an obstacle actually became my helpers. There’s no way we could turn around a TV show as fast as we did with any other tool out there. Avid was just rock solid.

I presently work at a facility that runs several edit suites, including a fully loaded digital linear online suite (there is a guy that’s worked there for 20 years and still edits on that thing, amazingly fast) an Adrenaline, an Avid DS, a Smoke, and a Flame. We also run 6 FCP suites with a shared Xserve SAN system.

The numbers don’t lie. It is so much more financially efficient to have FCP than anything else. When my boss asked me what did I think about replacing the adrenaline with “pimped out” FCP suite I said NO WAY.

Bottom line, FCP still feels like a little toy and is not solid enough. The time remapping tool is a joke. Of course you can edit a feature film on it, but it can also be done in iMovie if you know how to edit.

Until you sit down, and actually learn the software you will understand why it is and has been the best editor there is. Anyone can pickup Premiere or FCP or anything else with a more intuitive interface, but only real editors understand the value and the power there is in Media Composer. I can edit fine on FCP but my personal choice is Avid all the way.

That doesn’t go without saying how out of touch Avid has been with the present reality of the market. They were slow wake up to the fact that lost contact with their users and just started spitting out products that didn’t break any new ground at prices that were very questionable when put against FCP.

So anyway, I just wanted to put some perspective here. And yes, the media management on Avid makes the world of a difference.

Posted by Jorge on 05/17 at 07:54 PM

Anybody remember “Play” and the digital workstation?
Now it’s Global Streams I think. It was a big orange and blue box, and you could increase its performance by adding warp engines, which were large circuit boards. It was all very exciting the day it arrived!

Apparently the owners were big trekkies, ‘cause it had this spaceship feel to it. We even had the virtual sets, which became popular on the Naked News website. They would’ve killed for those sets in the sixties! There was supposed to be a real mini- switcher, (as opposed to the virtual switcher, which never seemed to work right); but it never materialized.

Air Command, Predator, PFX, Panamation, Title Wave, ahh….
it all brings a tear to my eye.

I quite enjoyed editing on it, except for the fact that it
didn’t like timelines over 10-12 mins.

I think the latest incarnation is the VTK 400, but I don’t know if it offers the same features. When GS bought them the price point went up dramatically. At the time it was cheap compared to most options available.

Never cared much for the early premiere, wasn’t intuitive to me at all, but I hear it’s much better now. We almost bought a Pinnacle Targa 300; with speed razor?

We had an Avid at the tv station where I used to work;
it had 3 x 9 gig hard drives, if I remember correctly.
It was considered the Holy Grail at the time. Friends of mine used to talk about how Avid never seemed to use the latest computers or software, and that if you didn’t recoup the $125,000 rapidly you had a nice paperweight?

Non-linear editors are more flexible, but I could always edit faster with a couple of 3/4 decks. It’d be close in speed now, and I’d have to dust off my jog shuttle skills.

Insert or Assemble anyone?

Next week kids, I’ll tell you about my Commodore 64…...

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/18 at 12:43 PM

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Your NLE: The most personal choice you can make?