Creative COW Magazine : Best Nonlinear Editing System Report

Creativr Cow by Walter Biscardi

The 2010 NAB Convention had the Post Production world buzzing about the Three A's of the Industry: Apple, Adobe, and Avid. Well, really more Adobe and Avid since they were actually at the show and had something to demonstrate.


ADOBE

Adobe brought their CS5 Creative Suite to the show with some incredible announcements -- not the least of which to me is the ease of integration with other NLEs like Final Cut Pro and Avid. Adobe has decided to "play nice" with with their competitors to make it easier for Post Houses like mine to get projects into and out of After Effects, and other programs.


PREMIERE

Premiere has taken a huge step forward with their 64 bit-enabled Mercury Engine. Much more realtime functionality and you can see in their online demos 4k and 2k material scrubbing and playing back in the same timeline. You will have to install CS5 in a 64 bit system to run, and run an Adobe Certified graphics board in order to take full advantage of the Mercury Engine functionality. That aside, the functionality of Premiere is very much on par to what Final Cut Pro based facilities are used to and the real-time functionality of the CS5 package simply blows FCP out of the water.


AVID

Avid brought us Media Composer 5, excellent in itself, but what really got the show buzzing was their support of Quicktime -- more specifically, Apple's ProRes codec. So now there is the very real possibility of Avid working right alongside Final Cut Pro in the same facility or for sharing projects across facilities. Not only that, Avid's H.264 native editing support refutes everything we've been saying about that codec and Final Cut Pro for the past few years. Whenever someone said they could not get H.264 to edit well in FCP (such as from a DSLR), we would inform them that it was not a proper editing codec, it was a finishing / delivery codec -- transcode it to something else like ProRes. Avid (and Adobe for that matter) is now showing that assumption to be false. Take the H.264 and start editing right away in realtime! read more...