Please bear with me as I am not an editor–My questions: Do any problems arise when you finish working on your project file, save it to your external drives using the free Avid Media Composer download then run the project file through another Avid setup licensed to someone else to make the final tweaks and output? Are there any Avid water marks? Will Avid disallow you from putting your completed project from their free software onto another Avid setup for the final output?

Many thanks, Billy

Someday Avid may be pushed off the top of the heap but if you want a decent NY or LA gig, learn and excel in Avid just like if and when FCP or another system takes over, I will do the same.

Oh and as far as integrated packages go, they’re great for small shop or home use but major productions have graphics departments with highly skilled graphic artists so that I can do what I do best… cut.

I agree with many (almost all) of your points, and I have no idea what motivates Avid any more than you do. All I’m saying is that there are different tools for different jobs. I like doing some things more in Media Composer than FCP, and for other tasks the opposite is true.

Finally, I think if you examined both software packages under a magnifying glass you would see they both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Keep cutting!
LJ

BTW: would that not be an stupid self limitation from avid to say “our adressed customers mainly hand their sound over to people with pro tools, so we don’t care about any improvements in that area” yes, its good to have the option to hand over to a dedicatet application but is that always happens? shurely you may right in the way avid delimit the Mediacomposers Sound Capabilities it is maybe protecting their own protools line. But hardly any Editor now would step into the sophisticated world of Protools because of its better tools for sound and scarcely any soundeditor would abdicate Protools because there would be an Avid MC which has SOME good to superb Sound Editing Features? I think that kind of fossilisation of Avids sound handling is sad to me because it boosts my acceptance of FCP.

And BTW: the (easenes of) workflow between MC and Protools is poor. At least improvable. Sharing Projects? Tracking Changes? Why not merge Avid and Protools into one Package? There is so much potential to improve this!

So soundediting im MC3.0 is as usual

I was just looking for any improvements to the drawbacks of my favorite editing application…

Thank you for answering

-Film Editing is not only about Pictures-

While I agree with your observations regarding working with audio in FCP vs. Avid, I think you need to take into consideration that they are two very different animals.

Many people cutting on the Avid will hand their tracks off to a sound crew to conform in ProTools, while most FCP users will need to make the tools in Final Cut Pro/Studio work for their needs. I think both companies have designed their products to try to most appropriately address their market segments. Most editors understand this. Unfortunately, cost has become the deciding factor in choosing post production tools, not functionality.

id like to ask if you could see any improvement in Audio editing/handling? For me its one of the big differencies between AVID and FCP. Its just a simple thing, but so useful:
-in FCP the sound during scrubbing or fastforwarding in clip or timeline renders much better so i can quickly find certain lines or slates
-in FCP i can change the Volume, Pan and even position of audio clips DURING PLAY, i get used to avids behaviour in this but more fluent is audioediting in FCP!
-in both, FCP and Avid the visual Rendering of Waveforms seems to me slower than in any Audioapplications, especially when zooming or scrolling – would be helpful if Avid could improve that too (the speed of visualisation)

what is your impression about that in MC 3.0?

Thank you,
chris

Avid’s Quicktime codecs are available as a free download from their website and can be supported on any Quicktime capable application. Avid only supports their native codecs for reasons of media management and performance, but in the majority of professional editing environments that presents no problem.

While there may be a wait for import of non-supported formats in Avid, that delay is only once and at the safer end of production. In FCP the same codecs would likely require extensive rendering to be able to play out – putting the delays at the deadline-end of the job. Plus minor changes to timelines or changes of output format will require entirely new renders. Once a clip is in an Avid codec it will stay that way and does require any further rendering for output.