AVID: My Conversion

ProjectedLight by Josiah Sill

Yes it’s true. I have finally converted from a Premiere and FCP fan to an Avid maniac. I love this NLE.

Premiere and FCP pale in comparison to the speed, ease of use, intelligence, and incredible support that Avid. On top of all that About 90% of all of your favorite feature films and prime time television programs are all cut on an Avid system.

My Experience

If I break down all of the pros and cons of FCP, Premiere, and Avid you would be reading this for a long time. However there are few things that I have learned in my experience.

FCP

FCP is the king when it comes to price. Especially since it moved to the Mac App store…but…it appears that Apple (and I love them dearly) is shifting away from strictly Pro Users. With the release of FCP X and all the hoopla that it brought with it, to the recent rumors that Apple is gonna kill the Mac Pro . When it come to Prefessional use, there is no security left in FCP.

Premiere

Premiere is a bit more up the chain in price but it’s definitely worth it if you are going to be doing any work in after effects or collaborating closely with a after effects designer. I know there are third party plugins to import after effects projects into FCP but who wants to do that…I know I wouldn’t trust em’. With premiere you can natively import your entire after effects project! This is huge. This could literally save you thousands of hours of render time. However as far as I’m concerned that’s about all that Premiere offers. Not a completely winning selling point.

AVID

Now for Avid. There is no doubt why FCP and Premiere are more popular with the Indie crowd-money. In my honest opinion, I believe everybody would flock to Avid if it was more affordable and wasn’t so hardware reliant for some features. read more...