Avid unveils Media Composer 5 at NAB 2010 and we get a sneak peek [NAB 2010]

Production Apprentice by John DeMaio

I have been an Avid editor for at least 10 years now, but I always thought that they were catering to their higher-end users and news stations – not people like me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It appears that Avid is listening to their user base, and it definitely shows in Media Composer version 5. First the big news – Avid now supports third-party hardware! I couldn’t believe it! Don’t get me wrong, I love working on an Adrenaline just like the next guy, but I definitely couldn’t afford one. Now that Matrox is on board with their MXO2 Mini, editing on an Avid just became affordable again.

Third party HD monitoring

The Matrox MXO2 mini provides professional level monitoring, with support for HDMI as well as component, composite and S-Video. This is huge news in and of itself, but Avid decided to go a few steps further with some groundbreaking developments for Media Composer 5. Let me say that the coolness factor just went up a few notches!

Avid and Quicktime living in harmony

First let’s talk about Quicktime. Avid and Quicktime go back a long way, but Quicktime support has always been “tricky” – to say the least. You always had to have Avid’s supported version of Quicktime (which was always a few versions old) and you had to wait for all Quicktime files to import to Avid’s specs. Obviously, this was done to help provide us with a truly robust media management platform (what Avid is best known for in the editing world) but it was always a bit of a pain.

Now with Media Composer 5, Avid provides native Quicktime support – including support for ProRes. What does this mean to you? Well, simply put, you can import all of your Canon 7D or Canon 5D Mark II camera footage (h.264 .mov files) directly into a bin in Avid and start working with it right away. No more long imports. As Bob Russo puts it, “if Quicktime can play the file, Avid can play the file.” read more and watch the video ...