Avid Media Composer 6.5’s drastic need to continue to update….

[Michael Phillips]

All good comments in this thread. Just a note that my comments do not come from an FCP comparison as I have never used FCP in a serious enough manner to compare the feature sets, but it is interesting to read the comments by those making the transition and their experiences on the advantages and disadvantages of each. A lot of this also depends on context, the type of program being edited, how many collaborators in the process, offline/online, etc.

Interesting that you bring up PhraseFrind. I am a huge fan of the Nexidia technology that powers both PhraseFind and ScriptSync. It is a fundamental change by which an editor can approach their material not only when crafting it, but even has applications beyond its current implementation. And this gets me back to the never finishing of a feature/solution – All my comments on “Find” were related to just the metadata based search function, and not the phonetic based search that PhraseFind offers. PhraseFind UI is a good example of a design that doesn’t quite understand the full power of the phonetic syntax that can be used and many users don’t realize what they’re missing (spanned based searches, optimization for acronyms and such). This is because the UI doesn’t inform them of this capability. It too suffers from the “let me give you all the results, then you filter through them” rather than a UI that offers some form of filtering up front as part of the initial search function such as “in this bin only” or “in scenes 3-6” or “on this date” etc. The results for PhraseFind could also be optimized by not having a clip for every result show up but a single clip with total hits displayed. As a user, the results of a clip that has 20 references to a word search versus one that only has 2 makes a bug difference in how I engage with those search results. The lack of filtering based on clip type is missed even more as the results will show all clips, even when they are duplicates, which happens often when your workflow is double system, reference track on original video, AutoSync to new subclips, and potentially sync those to make group clips. All of those show up, when as an editor, I only really care about the .sync subclips and group clips to edit with. This entails a sort and scroll to ensure you are using the right one when loading each one, one at a time. A phonetic score filter would help with many other search functions, but even that is missing.

There are great features in Media Composer, and for doing the long form feature editorial that I do, there really is nothing else like it – but I wish these type of features that have the potential to be truly innovative get the chance to be that one day, and not “just good enough”.

Michael

[Gerard Tay]

Funny thing is I wrote an article about the FCP7 search tool, and what started that was because I was on a job cutting promos on MC5, and I needed to search for a bunch of item numbers across a bunch of Avid bins. I could have done that in minutes in FCP7, but back then, MC5 only allowed you to sift within a bin, not across many bins. And while I was on that job, Avid released MC5.5 with a search tool and PhraseFind, which was the first time you could search across bins in MC history, and I really wished I could update my machine. Even then, I still felt FCP7’s search tool to be a lot more developed. Here’s the article on the LAFCPUG. (feel free to remove it posting links goes against forum rules)

https://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_fcp_search.html

Sad thing about FCP7’s death is that none of the other major NLEs got the search tool right, and it’s especially sad considering that we are living in the age of Google. If there’s one thing I wish everyone could borrow from Apple, that would be search.

[Michael Phillips]

I have always found the Lightworks search function to be quite nice as well as the original D/Vision.

Michael

[Chris Harlan]

[Michael Phillips] “OK – credit when credit is due – Avid did do a very nice follow up refinement with the latest point release (6.5.2) to the select left or right feature with an option modifier to not select filler. So while I may be critical to features taking many version to be refined from the v1 release, this one was done within a 12-18 month period.
“

Dang. I would like that. Time to upgrade from 6. Have to say, once I got the hang of it, I’ve been really enjoying MC.

[Gabriel Zeiter]

I agree soooooo much with what you say here. I recently bought Symphony 6 and I was quite disappointed. I started editing in the 90’s with AVID and loved it back then. But now that I was looking where to go after Apple abandoned Final Cut Pro (real PRO) and went back to AVID, I felt like I was really working with a really archaic editing system. Really buggy, not very intuitive I must say, and yes… I also felt, geeeeeeesss… This think that I’m struggling with would take me one min in Final Cut Pro! So, I left Symphony. I’m kind of reluctant to go to Premiere, but the more I read, the more it sounds it’s the real answer. Although, they could also make the interface a little more elegant!

Thanks

g