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AVID EXPRESS on ALIENWARE LAPTOP
Hello
As a Mac guy who loves the Alienware PC. A two part question:
Is it possible to run AVID XPRESS HD on an Alienware laptop. The particulars: MJ-12m 7700 with an ATI X800 and 2 Gigs Ram and 60 Gig internal Hard Drive and external Firewire Drive?
I am enamored by the 3D that AVID offers – looks beyond the scope of FCP. Is this a correct assumption?
All advice is good.
Thanks
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2 Replies
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To my knowledge, FCP doesn’t have any sort of 3D effects at this time, with the exception of 3D titles through Boris Calligraphy. I’d expect that to change in the next release…it’s rather surprising that Apple hasn’t stuck it in there long ago. Xpress Pro’s 3D FX are pretty cool…especially the 3D PIP (Picture-In-Picture). If you’ve got the bling-bling, do a spring-spring for a higher-end Avid, like Adrenaline. Those systems have 3D Warp, which is essentially the 3D PIP effect with integrated keying, blur, corner pinning and a whole bunch of other goodies. Pretty sweet. The main problem is that Avid DVE’s suffer from some pretty bad anti-aliasing though and we’re all waiting for them to fix it. This problem has been around for some time. Just ask Grinner. 🙂 Avid has claimed they’re working on it.
The laptop looks good. It’s a certified system. Only problem is the Graphics card. Avid specifies the Nvidia Quadro FX Go 1400 with 256MB DDR3. I’d suggest you go with it. In fact, here’s the full-specs of the certified Alienware:
AlienWare MJ-12m 7700
Intel -
The Alienware laptop will run Xpress Pro. Check out the June issue of Videography for my review of it. The problem I had was with the audio system. It uses a Realtek surround card and that doesn’t work with XPro. I believe that has now been fixed by Avid, so check on the support info. It did work with Mojo, though.
And yes, FCP has a 3D DVE filter. It does Z-rotation and corner pinning in the motion tab and you can add a 3D DVE filter in addition to that. I personally prefer the way the Avid DVE works, but basically in FCP it is like After Effects. The Avid advanced keyframe model is extremely weak and is an attempt to create a filter-stack function which is totally lacking in Avid compared with most other modern NLEs. That’s because Avid effects are built around nesting, which made sense in the early 90’s.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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