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REVIEW - Avid’s Media Composer 5

The editing world has become a strange place.  For professional editing applications, we have Apple and Adobe with their flagship bundles Final Cut Studio 3 and Creative Suite 5 respectively (and yes, there is Vegas, but I do not consider it to be a professional editing application as none of the major broadcasters are editing with it), and then there is Avid, with their flagship editing application, Media Composer.  Avid, and Media Composer, have been around a long time.  I’ve been using it since version 5.5, and with it, there is no bundle of tools for you to work with.  Just an editing application, and that is it.  You don’t see many schools teaching it, as everyone thinks that Final Cut Pro is the way of the future.  Is it true?  Well, for this review, I’ve tried to do something different.  I’m not going to go over all the new features, and tell you how they work. Scott Simmons has already done that, and you can check it out here.  For this review, I’ve decided to go editorial style, and give you nothing by my honest opinion about Avid and what they’ve done with Media Composer in this version, and I’m not holding anything back.  Here we go!

I always get asked a very “basic” question.  Are you a Final Cut Pro editor?  My answer to people who ask me that question is “No, I’m an editor, and I edit with the tool that will get my job done the fastest for my client, and the smoothest for myself”.  Is that Final Cut Pro?  Sometimes. But, with the new release of Media Composer 5, I’ve had a chance to sit back and think about Avid, and what has been going on for the last few years, and my opinion of Avid has changed quite a bit.  Here’s what I mean.

As the big player on the block, Avid has always set the bar.  Argue all you want, but when a new release of Final Cut Pro, or Premiere Pro comes out, in many cases (not all cases), there are tons of new features, and everyone goes crazy and talks about how great FCP or PP because of all these new features and in many cases, they have been standard (or have had a similar features) in Media Composer for a while.  For Avid editors, it really hasn’t been that big a deal when Avid releases a new version of MC, and there are only a few “main” updates, as those “main” updates are normally huge, like Script Sync, (If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to take a look at it in an upcoming video/article), or a little thing like a Stereoscopic 3D workflow.  There has been one problem though, and it’s been one that has been costing Avid big, and that is that they, in my opinion, have been telling the user base what is good for them, and not listening to what the users have wanted and needed, and that has caused a lot of editors to jump ship to Final Cut Pro (and yes, Premiere Pro as well), and Avid has needed to do something drastic to try to get editors back, and they have done it with version five of Media Composer.

MC5 is a huge leap forward, not from a technical standpoint, as MC as always lead the way when it comes to editing applications, but from a user standpoint.  Avid has finally accepted the fact that there are other editing applications out there, and editors like myself, need to be able to work with not only EDL’s, but media from other systems in a quick and easy way.  Also, Avid has needed to change things up to open the doors to editors who cut in Final Cut and Premiere Pro to easily make the jump to MC and start editing.  It used to be Avid’s way, or the highway, but not anymore.  With the addition of both “Link to AMA” (Avid Media Access), and the new Smart Tool for improved editing in the timeline (which will make Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro editors feel right at home) this is the biggest step forward that Avid has made in the last five years, and it’s how they’ll stay on top of the editing world.  I want to talk briefly about these two great new features (check out more new features in Scott Simmons article here), and why they are big steps forward, not for Media Composer, but for Avid themselves.

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Interested to see what MC5 is like.  I’ve cut on MC for 10 - 12 years and despise when I am forced to use FCP. I can cut with half the headache and twice as fast because Avid’s trim functions are lightning fast and it’s keyboard heavy.  Can’t do that with FCP, even on a diesel 2010 machine.  (Having used good RAIDs for both) 

Until FCP matches the instant response speed of play/trim/edit/play/etc on the Avid, it’s not going to cut it.  Keyboard ftw.  Mouses are slow and result in end of day pain.

Dragging and dropping is like cutting in moon shoes.  You can dump all you want in the timeline, but you still have to do in/out cutting to get it right, which requires ridiculously laborious clicking in FCP, where it’s clackity clack of muscle memory in real-time on the keyboard to get where you want to go on the Avid.  No interface barrier, just a learning curve that suits the craft quite well.

I’ve yet to see the same.

Posted by praxisseizure  on  07/19  at  10:58 PM

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