Bye Bye FCP, Hello Avid.

XDCAM-USER.com by Allister Chapman

Well I’ve been deliberating, experimenting and talking to other editors over which NLE to adopt following the launch of FCP-X. I’ve played with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 which is really easy to transition to from FCP as it has a similar interface and editing style. I’ve experimented with FCP-X, which is very fast but has so many missing features and forces you to work in ways I don’t always like and I’ve even considered ditching my Mac’s and getting PC’s to run Edius or Vegas. Vegas is very powerful but has a quirky interface, while I hear nothing but good things about Edius, I guess I’m just not ready to ditch my Mac’s just yet. So that leaves Avid Media Composer.

For a long time my biggest issue with Avid has been the inability to use 3rd party IO devices like low cost Blackmagic or AJA HDSDi cards. But that’s all started to change. The current version of Media Composer (5.5) will allow you to use a Matrox MXO or AJA IO Express. So now you can easily connect to the external world from your Avid edit suite. A few days ago Avid announced that they will soon be releasing Media Composer 6 which is to be a very significant update. read more...