Review: Avid Media Composer 5.5 with ScriptSync and PhraseFind

IT.Enquirer

Media Composer is Avid’s Non-Linear Editing (NLE) suite for video and film post-production. It’s one of the four heavy weights next to Final Cut Pro, Lightworks, and to a lesser degree Adobe Premiere. Media Composer is a total solution for editors: it has powerful video editing capabilities, but also powerful integrated audio tools, and even special effect capabilities.

On starting Media Composer, the interface that greets the user isn’t particularly user-friendly. On my Lion system it even gave me an unfinished look, with some windows leaving a wide gap with adjacent windows with no good reason. Windows-haters will not love Media Composer for its looks, but looks aren’t everything. Media Composer is not in it for the beauty, but for the power. That becomes immediately apparent by looking at the dazzling number of options — including interface options, like command keys and mouse scrolling matching — you can change. Media Composer can be controlled by quite a large number of control surfaces, but if you lack those, a common keyboard and mouse will do.

So, the interface isn’t exactly Beauty, but it’s also not The Beast. The Beast is more into what you need to know before you start working with Media Composer to get the most out of it. In a sense, Media Composer is more of a professional tool than Final Cut Pro ever was: especially when starting an editing project, you’ll need to make choices and have material prepared. These require you to know your “stuff”. For example, you can synchronize a script with a sequence, using digital takes that you place in Media Composer’s own script environment.

Such a capability is overkill for a person who only wants to edit a simple YouTube movie. It’s essential for anyone who wants to create professional looking video. read more...