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Filed under: Editing •Post Production •Software •Final Cut Pro •

Avid Media Composer 5.0, one month later

Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way first: the new Drap and Drop timeline in Avid Media Composer 5.0 isn’t a direct rip-off of Final Cut Pro’s timeline. Nor will an FCP editor sit down in front of MC5 and instantly be able to rip into the timeline via mousing in the same way they do with FCP. Nor will an Avid editor sit down in front of MC5 for the first time, turn on the new Smart Tool, and instantly have their editing world changed. Avid’s implementation of the open, Drag and Drop timeline is complex, well thought out and will take some time to master. Like most big change / feature implementations in Avid’s Media Composer product, it often takes some time for things to get added to the software but when it happens these features are usually feature rich and often leap-frog the competition.

I posted an article about some of the many interface changes in Media Composer 5.0 just after its release but I’ll recap them a bit here as these visual changes are important to convey a later story. If you’re overly familiar with all these new features then skip to page two of the article for a story and some commentary.

A Few of the Biggest Changes

The best thing about Avid Smart Tool and the drag and drop functionality that it adds to Media Composer is that it can be turned on and off. Want Media Composer to act pretty much like it always has? Turn the Smart Tool off. Want the timeline to behave more like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro or Avid’s own DS? Turn the entire Smart Tool on? Want to customize the timeline interaction where you can grab clips and move them around the timeline without entering Segment mode but not have the option of click and dragging to trim edits? You can do that too by customizing exactly what parts of the Smart Tool operate. It’s like one of the best features of a professional editing application: built fully customizable to suit the needs and desires of the editor. Plus all of those different features of the Smart Tool can be mapped to the keyboard as well so you don’t have to use the mouse to enable or disable the Smart Tool and it’s features.

The second big addition to Media Composer 5.0 is a greatly expanded Avid Media Access architecture. Most already know this but for those that don’t: AMA was the first step in Avid opening the Media Composer universe beyond the Avid way of importing and tracking media. Before AMA all media was copied into proprietary Avid media (OMF, MXF), logged into Avid’s database and placed into a special folder on the editor’s media drive. With the introduction of AMA Avid offered the ability to directly link to certain media formats like Sony XDCAM and Panasonic P2 media. This introduced an amazingly fast workflow where you pointed to a supported volume and clips would instantly populate an Avid bin and playback in their native format. I openly wondered when we would see more formats supported, most notably DNxHD Quicktime files since these were clips using Avid’s own codec. With 5.0 Avid delivered full QuickTime support with playback for pretty much any .mov file that your system can play. This include both Apple ProRes and H.264. The ProRes support works very well. The H.264 support isn’t as good with those files encountering some choppy playback. I ended up transcoding a Canon 7D job to DNxHD 115 as there was some critical lip sync that I need to get just right. I stayed native H.264 to whittle over an hour of an interview down to about 5 minutes. I then transcoed those 5 minutes and an hour plus of b-roll into DNxHD media and finished the edit. The native MC5 H.264 playback is nice to have but it takes a backseat to Adobe’s Mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro CS5. This isn’t necessarily the case with RED.R3D media which is natively supported in MC5. AMA adds RED support with all RED media playing back at HD resolution but it does this very well and playback was smooth in my testing. There’s also full RED color control settings that can be accessed and tweaked as well.

Avid has also added RTAS to Media Composer. RTAS is the Real Time Audio Suite technology that has brought over from ProTools. It’s most notable for me as an editor who has to do the occasional audio mixing for two reasons. First, it’s realtime. Second these new audio tools can be added on a per-track basis as opposed to clip by clip. There’s tiny “wells” that are now part of the MC timeline where these RTAS plug-ins can be dropped. And there’s a fair amount of them that ship with 5.0.

The Visual Changes

Veteran Avid editors will notice a few changes once they boot up for the first time. There’s a new icon that does away with the Avid logo entirely:

The biggest visual change within the application will be in the timeline. The new Smart Tool resides on the left in a new tool palette:

The familiar red and yellow Segment Mode arrows that used to reside at the bottom of the timeline are gone and have been relocated as part of the Smart Tool. The segment modes still operate the same, and if you have had them mapped to the keyboard they will still work, but they can be toggled to stay on and whenever the mouse hovers over a segment in the timeline you just click the segment and drag as you are instantly jumped into Segment Mode. While this is a totally new behavior the old segment mode behavior of not being able to move non-adjacent segments still exists.

Avid added the ability to move clips on different video levels via Segment mode a version or two ago.

You can also move clips like those selected above.

But you still can’t move non-adjacent clips on the same video track like those selected above.

Let’s hope that gets fixed in the next version as it just seems silly that you can’t do this.

The other big visual timeline change happens when you toggle open a little drawer by clicking the small arrow next to the new upper timecode display and timecode bar at the top of the timeline:

On my install, this was closed by default. It opens the drawer to reveal the wells for the RTAS plugins as well as toggle buttons for audio waveforms and audio clip and keyframe overlays. These were previously located under the timeline Fast menu and they are still there. Solo and Mute buttons were added too, very Pro Tools like. There’s also a toggle to allow the per track settings for audio data display in the timeline so make sure that’s checked if you aren’t seeing the audio data when toggling the buttons in the timeline:

Make sure Allow Per Track Settings is checked to toggle the items in the timeline. Mine was unchecked by default so the timeline buttons worked.

Next Up: An interesting discussion with a long-time Avid user about the new changes

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It baffles me..  who does this?  IOx the offending part and trim into the new cut, or rather if you need to trim two parts, then slide the middle and M<>/ the center clip.  0 to 2 clicks while commanding jkl realtime control.  The rest is quick clacks on keyboard, snap your preview key and poof, done in seconds. 

Do people really spend that much time mousing, thinking about where that cursor has to be, rather than the cut?

That is why FCP is annoying, because it doesn’t let you go keyboard nuts at lightning speed.  (The only reason why TBH.. otherwise it’s awesome)  (Except the part where everyone puts media everywhere and then moves drives around WITH THE MEDIA, because they didn’t remember where it was being saved..  haha..  yea. )

-P

Posted by praxisseizure  on  07/20  at  12:01 AM

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Though to be fair to the article, I’ve not tried it yet.  If it helps working with audio rubber bands, then I’ll be delighted.  I normally default to H\ click > length/center > num-pad clackity to make audio tweaks because the audio rubberbands are kind of lame.  Later using pro-tools to deal with that anyway though.

We’ll see, its on my purchase list next month.

Posted by praxisseizure  on  07/20  at  12:41 AM

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“It baffles me..  who does this?”

praxisseizure, are you talking about moving the non-adjacent clips in the timeline via segment mode? I think there’s a lot of reasons to do this but I have to agree that Avid lets you be much more keyboard driven overall and that’s a good thing as you can work faster. Faster is better!

Posted by Scott Simmons  on  07/20  at  09:03 AM

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Hey, thanks for this over view - I haven’t worked on and Avid for some time now - but I believe it vital to stay current and thorough reviews such as this will minimize the “cramming” I might need do should I find myself in a position to be working with this tool in the future.

Regarding speed in editing - I would hope all editors would keep the pressure on the software writers of whatever tool they use - to debug and streamline their code so that it “just works” “fast” with whatever hardware or OS or file format and codec. New features are great - but - performance is everything. I think most editors - once they decide “how” they want to cut something - can do it relative fast with any “tool” - what takes up all the time is the amount of seconds - to even minutes that it takes the hardware to respond to those decisions or experiments - What takes up all the time is the rendering and the transcoding of files to behave nicely on the timeline and what not. Not the button pressing.

Posted by Jim Hines  on  07/21  at  09:52 AM

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I’ve used Avid since the last time they released a version 5 in and around 1994. AMA and the ability to mix formats and frame rates has been an incredible blessing to my editing workflows, Right now I’m mixing 24f Canon, 30f Canon, 24p XDCAM and 60i standard def on a storytelling project. In real time!!

But, so far I’ve kept the smart tool off,,I plan on playing with it more later. I understand the basic segment and replace functions because they’re not new, but the smart trimming without trim mode I’m a little uneasy about.

I can see versioning in a supervised edit where it might speed things up for reordering whole sections maybe, but i’m not sure it will change me from entering trim mode. I’m an old dog!!!

I agree with Scott that the more precise you are on first version edits, the more flexibility you have on the back end content adjustments. I still believe basic 3-point editing and building a sequence with precision from the get go works better than throwing a bunch of non subclipped clips around in the early stages of an edit. A writer on deadline, doesn’t take random sentences and words and throw them up in the air to see where they land. IMHO, video editing is not much different than writing.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  07/21  at  10:09 AM

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