Hands on Mixing with an iPad – Avid Media Composer

By Robert Salsbury

Part one of this post addressed using an off-the-shelf solution to provide a tactile mixing board for Final Cut Pro 7. Here, I’ll walk you through using two apps, slightly less off the shelf, to control the audio in Avid Media Composer.

iPad Faders Chasing Media Composer Audio Levels from Robert Salsbury on Vimeo.

iPad Control Surface with Media Composer

Now, Avid being Avid, the situation on Media Composer hasn’t been so easy. It was kind of driving me crazy as I spent much of the past year cutting on Avid again after a long time doing FCP job after FCP job. Every few weeks I’d troll the internet again looking for a way to do this; I’d re-read the Avid manuals and stare at all the menu options again and again to see what I’d missed. Media Composer 5.5 supports a few control surfaces – the Command | 8 , Euphonix Artist series, another Digidesign surface, and the ProMix 01 – but I’d failed to get my AC-7 app to connect successfully.

Then, a few months ago, I stumbled on a message board thread, which lead me to another editor, located in London.

Mark Burton had gotten his hands on some of the Avid approved hardware interfaces, and recorded the signals they sent communicating back and forth with Media Composer. This gave me the idea to try and use some of the more general purpose iPad MIDI apps to emulate some simpler hardware. After a few days of emailing each other our baby steps forward, I’d managed to get a system working for faders, emulating a mixing board I’d previously owned, the Yamaha ProMix 01. Mark had built settings emulating a JL Cooper device, and eventually I ended up using that as well. read more...