Editing with Avid Artist Color and Media Composer 6.5

The Film Bakery by Ben Allan ACS

We’re currently testing the Avid (formerly Euphonix) Artist Color control surface for colour grading – more on that soon. But, I wanted to share a few surprising discoveries I’ve made about using it for editing as well.

Avid Australia’s Karen Eastmure, who I know from her time at Kodak, convinced me to try the Artist Color with the new Avid Media Composer Version 6.5.

Back To The Future

I’m having a bit of a back to the future thing going on right now.

About 12 years ago post production for me meant Avid for editing, DaVinci for grading and ProTools for mixing. Although I’m loving Logic Pro at the moment, ProTools is still on the radar, and the other two are back for me in a big way.

Around the turn of the millennium, using each of those meant calling up the facility and booking a suite with one of these these very expensive installations. Fast forward to today and I can now use them quite effectively on the same desktop computer I’m using to write this article …plus they’re all affordable.

Because Avid had grown through the early days of non-linear editing where it was at first considered a very open platform because it was based around a personal computer rather than a dedicated hardware system. But it made that work by tightly controlling the special add-on hardware that was required and the management of the media in projects.

When Apple’s Final Cut Pro came along it had the luxury of taking an entirely different approach by allowing users to choose pretty much whatever they wanted in terms of hardware and media management. While this has undoubtedly led to many flaky FCP installations over the years and many people scratching their heads while saying “why is my media offiline?” it also allowed a lot of people to build systems and workflows that pushed the envelope of what was possible in productions from small corporates up to feature films. read more...