Avid Media Composer 5 Advanced Video Editing Software Review

Videomaker by Jennifer O'Rourke

A powerful editing program that is the industry leader, with a media management system that invites extensive collaboration. This is a professional program that savvy video editors should aspire to learn, but beginners to nonlinear editing will be seriously challenged.

Avid's founder, Bill Warner, literally wrote the book on nonlinear editing - when he figured out how to take video taped footage and copy it to digital hard disks, allowing video editors to use computers for random access editing. That was in 1987 and the company hasn't looked back. Avid's flagship video editing program, Media Composer, isn't a beginner's program - it is geared towards the professional and everyone knows it. In fact, since the mid-1990s, the majority of professionally edited TV shows and Big Screen movies have been edited on an Avid editing system. Avid has earned hundreds of awards for their program, including Oscars, Emmys and Grammys.

Hail to the King

While other companies followed suit with nonlinear programs, Media Composer has always been a step ahead, working at controlling the massive amount of data a film or video project can collect. And this is where Media Composer shines. While most electronic data like spreadsheets and word docs can be accessed through networks at work or within other collaborative settings, most video and music editing programs work with singular users only. Avid changed that long ago in the late '90s with its Unity MediaNet shared storage system, Media Composer version 3.5 improved upon it and Media Composer version 5, Avid's latest version, is the ultimate program for collaboration.

What's New

Smart Tool - is a feature that allows for drag-and-drop editing and trimming for direct manipulation of the video and audio clips in the timeline. In the past, users of Adobe Premiere or Apple's Final Cut might have found some frustration to working with Avid Media Composer when it comes to editing because of the need to change functions in your timeline, depending on the process you wish to perform. If you needed to trim a clip, you had to be in the Trim Mode and if you wanted to drag and drop clips you had to be in Segment Mode. Smart Tool is a tool sitting to the left of the timeline that lets you select which process you wish to manage at the moment, Edit, Trim, Splice, Overwrite, Ripple, etc. Each selection programs your cursor to work differently, and once you get it down you'll enjoy the ease of moving in and out of different editing functions. read more...