Adrenaline DNA vs Nitris DNA

[Angus Mackay]

Hi Dan,

The difference is that Nitris can handle uncompressed HD while Adrenaline can only deal with fairly heavily (but well) compressed HiDef. The tools are also substantialy different, Symphony Nitris has a deeper finishing toolset and better CC than MC on DNA. We run adrenaline at our studio and as an edit workhorse, and for light finishing work, it pretty much rocks. But we went for Smoke on Linux (against DS Nitris) for our more hardcore finishing work, I’m really glad I made that call, our customers are blown away by the speed and sophistication of the Smoke toolset.

HTH

Angus

[Dom Silverio]

Many, including me, consider Nitris Symphony as one of the best Avid NLEs in a long time.

It is very fast. It is hardware based for most of its effects (some legacy FX that you can bypass are not). It is 16 bit quality. It is also more stable than Adrenaline – which is surprising considering it is a 1.x release.

If Nitris is within your budget, I highly recommend it. Or at least test drive it. My experience with smoke is limtited so there is no point for me to do a comparison. You can ask around people who has Symphony Nitris. I would not be surprised that 9 out of 10 would highly recommend it. The 10th would just recommend it.

[Fazz Powell]

Thanks for the input. Yeah, I can’t go with Smoke. After what Discreet/Autodeck did with Edit* I can’t trust them to be around a few years from now to support it. Do you have any feeling of using Nitris DS instead of Symphony as a primary editor?

Dan Powell – Take One Digital Media

[Dom Silverio]

I have a show tht I support that uses the SN as both the offline and online. It works great just like any Media Composer or SD Symphony.

If you have the storage, you can even offline in DNxHD for your HD projects. Just note that the drive space required is about half of uncompress SD. In fact, none of the DNxHD is really offline res. Hopefully, Avid will release an update to fix that. I know they are working on 36 Mb/s DNxHD codec but that is supposedly only for 24p HD crowd doing film and such and not for 50i/60i crowd.

[Bob Zelin]

Fazz,
if your primary market is training and corporate video, the Adrenaline HD is MORE than enough for your application. The entire AVID line is dramatically more stable on the PC platform than on the MAC – you are thinking about the Windows NT days – this is 2006, and everything is rock solid with XP (but no so much on OS-X) with AVID.

The Adrenaline is the industry standard, and the Nitris is the Bentley for those that can afford it (which is usually LA companies doing network shows). Most “hi end” AVID owners are Adrenaline owners (or older Meridian owners, like the original Symphony). Your response is from the “lucky few” that can afford the Nitris. Again, for your application, the Adrenaline is perfectly fine.

Bob Zelin

[Lj Corwin]

I totally agree. I am also an ex-discreet edit* person and have been the owner of (2) Adrenalines and (1) Media Composer “Light” for the past year. My work is episodic television and long-form documentaries. The Adrenaline is more than enough to deliver to the networks. For Varicam stuff at 720p, Adrenaline is fine. We recently did a doc for PBS Frontline and they require the final finishing to be on THEIR Symphony Nitris in Boston so being able to simply consolidate everything to a drive and send it up there from NY was easy enough. My point is, if you need full HD on only a few occasions as we do, it seems easier and more economical to port the job over to someone else’s Nitris and finish there.

And yeah, there is no f*^%k%g way I’d give Autodesk another cent.

[Fazz Powell]

Bob/LJ-I guess my hang up is that I’d like to have the ability to do uncompressed HD, which I understand Adrenaline doesn’t do. Most work will probably be in DNA145/220, but from what I understand the hardware accelration is handled much better in Nitris, plus color correction and more real time stuff. It’s not uncommon to do 3 sessions in a day in one suite, so we like to run as much real time as possible. I’ll have 3 Edit*s to run into the ground for SD, but this will be our flagship NLE, so Nitris Symphony seems to be the overly expensive way to go, it will take us 3/4 years to pay for it, if I’m lucky I’ll get 4 more years of use on the back-end. As our Edit’s die, we would add Adrenalines.

LJ-Love the endering discreet refernce. Do you run Marquee? or Boris Continuium? anything close to Inscriber?

Good news about XP stablity – thanks!!

Dan Powell – Take One Digital Media

[Lj Corwin]

Hey Fazz,

If you need uncompressed HD and you can pay it off hey, go for it. Particularly since you say FCP is not an option. Personally, I like the FCP interface better than Avid’s but FCP’s Media Manager (or lack thereof) made Avid the choice for me.

I use Marquee. It does a lot of cool stuff but it’s no Inscriber. I miss being able to independently change the height and width of a font. You can do this in Marquee but it’s cumbersome. Inscriber does have an avx plug-in for Avid but the titles get rendered as separate elements. Again, cumbersome.

The main thing I hate about Avid is the modes. For example, having to go into segment mode to move something is so annoying. So many keystrokes to do so little. The only people who argue with me about my hatred of modes are, well, Avid editors who have never used any other NLE.

The thing I love about the Avid is the talent pool available to me, the flexibility of working in groups by sharing jobs and media, and the abilty to start and or finish elsewhere. Aside from that, after working on edit* for years, I think Avid is an overpriced, clunky, slow, outdated jalopy of a system that I feel I must own in order to be competitive in the marketplace. So the only thing I like about it that it is a standard that keeps me in the game. I believe this is what Avid relies on to keep their arrogance thriving.

Just my 2 cents-Laura.

[Fazz Powell]

Laura – You hit the nail on the head on every issue. As a die-hard edit* fan I’ve felt like a lone ranger amoungst the sea of Avid folks. Yeah, just “slipping n sliding” or triming seems like an ordeal on an Avid. I’m just freakin’ floored someone hasn’t been able to develop an NLE comprable to what edit* did 10 years ago. FCP has many “issues”, and since we’re a post house we need to offer something way beyond what my clients can afford to go out and buy. Kills me to spend 90K on something I’ll probably hate, but I rather do that than 25K on a tricked out FCP rig. XPRI-is a no go, eQ-too propratary, Maxtrox AXIO-Premiere interface and anybody who does Titling is Photoshop is nuts. 🙂 – uggg

Dan Powell – Take One Digital Media

[Bob Zelin]

Hey Dan –
I hate your analogy of “no one has developed an NLE like one that Discreet did 10 years ago”. I come from the old linear world, and it is beyond me that 15 years ago, we could push a button on an ADO or KScope (or DVEous which was in discreet edit for 10 minutes), and do effects instantly , where today, we have to be in render hell. Every one of these products has their advantages. FCP is fantastic because of AJA and Blackmagic hardware available to it. AJA is the old Grass Valley guys, and the image resolution from FCP because of AJA is incredible- this has NOTHING to do with Apple. The AVID Nitris can do 4:4:4 input only because they license the Xena card from AJA. So don’t give me “FCP is crap”.

With all of this said, all these NETWORK big money shows are being done with AVID Adrenaline and FCP, and only the houses that are trying to charge top dollar (mostly from 35mm film transfer) are using Nitris. It’s a fantastic box – no question about it – but it’s EXPENSIVE, and most people that are doing MAJOR WORK are not using it. I do the same stuff you do – corporate video, training videos, sales videos, presentations, local spots. For this you DO NOT NEED UNCOMPRESSED HD. Take the extra money, and buy yourself a BMW.

bob Zelin