A look at AVID media composer 6

Philip Bloom

Earlier this week we had an in depth reassesment of FCP X by 7 different editors and it was fascinating reading. Today my good Canadian friend, Tej Bebra, has written an article for me about Avid Media Composer 6. Avid, like many, was my first professional NLE, although I learnt to edit tape to tape. I was a very proficient and fast Avid editor. I loved it. But it was expensive to buy and needed dedicated hardware (It has also been software based for some time now though). That is why I went down the Final Cut route, from 1 through to 7. Then I came unstuck when I found 7 was not using my mac fully, both is processor or memory and then it was dumped for X which I had issues with.

I then took on Premiere which is serving me very well indeed but I do have MC6 so I looking at getting back into AVID again, especially now it has opened up to 3rd party hardware and plug ins. We not have Magic Bullet Looks 2 for AVID MC6 which is great for me.

Anyway…enough from me…how is it? Is this your replacement for FCP 7? Let’s hear from Tej…

Avid Media Composer 6 by Tej Bebra

Avid has a long history of being a professional editing tool. They have long been the industry standard, however that all changed when Apple released Final Cut Pro. Apple was able to take 50-60% of Avid’s market. Today’s Market players are still Apple, Adobe and Avid. Adobe has gobbled up much of App le’s market with their aggressive marketing, and Avid with their cross-grade promotion is cutting into Apple ‘s share of the post-production market, but does Avid have what it takes to make not only Final Cut Pro users happy, but to regain much of the market they lost?

Avid may just become the dominate editors choice for NLE’s, with support from ACE and the recent significant upgrade to Media Composer. I say significant because the core architecture has be re-written to 64bit. Avid Media Composer 6 is now capable of harnessing more processing power and ram, making faster than ever before. Now other NLE’s have also gone 64bit such as FCPx and Adobe Premiere Pro,What makes Avid different? I will go into that further later on. read more...