REVIEW: AVID Media Composer 7

Definition Magazine

Let’s say you earn a significant part of your income from a review website – you’re a tech blogger. Fundamentally, you need to attract traffic – visitors – to your site so that you can rake in the ‘dosh’ from all that lucrative advertising.

The best way to do that is to say something contentious – after all, tabloid newspapers (and, increasingly, the broadsheets) have been doing it for decades.

If I was a blogger, I know the headline article I would post:

“Ten Reasons that FCP X is Better than Avid Media Composer 7”. Yeah! That would get the old hit-rate up all right.

And I bet I could find ten too.

Actually, you could probably replace ‘FCP X’ with ‘Adobe Premiere Pro’, ‘Sony Vegas’, or any one of the currently available bunch of NLEs that are out there.

But are they better than Media Composer 7?

Well, no. Not at all. Sure, as I said, you can find features of every NLE that they do better than Media Composer, but as a package, for editing TV programmes or feature films or even, nowadays, web videos for bloggers’ review sites, it’s hard to beat – and there are some great new features in version 7 that possibly signpost even more exciting things to come.

The first signals a possible end to Media Composer’s hard-coded resolutions. Sure, it supports 1920x1080, but more and more productions are being finished at higher resolutions – and that means doing the final conform in a different package. That is still true in MC 7, but you can now natively access higher resolution video through AMA – rather than just down-rezzing it to your project’s raster dimensions. You just ‘AMA Link’ to your high resolution footage, as normal, then go into the ‘Source Settings’ for the clip. There is a new tab, called FrameFlex which gives you a resizable window on the source clip – select the whole frame, or ‘zoom’ in and select the part of the frame you want. There is a selection to force the box to be the same raster dimensions as your project. It works very well – though you are, of course, forced to use AMA which still gives some people the collywobbles (there have, historically, been issues with shared projects, AAF export and sub-clips with separately recorded audio and video). It worth noting that the selection is ‘non-destructive’ – once you have edited the clip into your timeline, you can go back and change the framing at will. This is, effectively, a very flexible implementation of resolution independence on the input to MC7. Could we, one day, see a version of Media Composer with arbitrary resolution output? read more...

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	Avid Media Composer 7 $988.00			Avid Media Composer 7 Upgrade from MC 6.5 $288.00			Avid Media Composer 7 Student Version with 4 years FREE Upgrades $288.00