Kicking the tires on Avid Media Composer 5.5

The EDIBLOG on PVC by Scott Simmons

An almost major update packs quite a few nice, new features.
It was a few weeks ago that Avid shipped another update to Media Composer, this time moving 5.0 to 5.5. It wasn’t the huge update that we saw in 5.0 but it continues to add features and bug fixes across the application. I’m guessing that since this was a smaller release Avid chose not to use NAB as the announcement/release for the upgrade (NAB is next week!) rather they’ll be showcasing it through out their booth. I was able to preview the upgrade before the official release and it felt quite stable. While very little has changed with the interface there’s a couple of really nice features that had me take a small window of opportunity between Avid jobs at the office and purchase the upgrade there as well. I put it through its paces on two recent edits.

The biggest thing added to 5.5 that will help my overall, day to day editing operations is the new TextFind feature. In older versions of Avid, you could look under the Edit menu and see a Find menu item. That really didn’t do much of anything but with 5.5 hitting command + F brings up a new Find window. This allows for a central search area that works across an entire project. There’s options to search across clips and sequences, timelines and script text all within the Find window. Parameters for your search can be refined by filtering bin columns or searching the timeline for clip text and locators.

It’s almost like this Find window is a bin in itself as all the results will populate the Find window (depending on what you search) and you can then load clips into the Source monitor right from the Find results. If a result is returned from within a bin that is not open Media Composer will open that bin before loading it as a source. read more...