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AVID – Why Not?
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[Shawn Miller] “Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by that? What kind of effect(s) did you do, and what made it high-end?
““High end” is just being used as a term to describe a project that involves a major client (Loreal, Cover Girl, Bourjois Paris, to name a few). I’ve done roughly 20 projects in the beauty-product market. All of them finished on media composer with a combination of Boris and Sapphire filters, as well as the baselight AVX plugin.
In essence, I am just profiling the fact that Media Composer, in this example, is not being used for its editing prowess, but it’s abilities to be a ‘finishing’ product (with the right combo of plugins).
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[Daniel Frome] “[Shawn Miller] “Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by that? What kind of effect(s) did you do, and what made it high-end?
”“High end” is just being used as a term to describe a project that involves a major client (Loreal, Cover Girl, Bourjois Paris, to name a few). I’ve done roughly 20 projects in the beauty-product market. All of them finished on media composer with a combination of Boris and Sapphire filters, as well as the baselight AVX plugin.
In essence, I am just profiling the fact that Media Composer, in this example, is not being used for its editing prowess, but it’s abilities to be a ‘finishing’ product (with the right combo of plugins).”
Ah, I see. I was hoping to get some insight into the specific kinds of effects you were doing, e.g., blemish removal or object removal/replacement. I don’t use NLE’s for compositing or effects anymore (not since Vegas 3.0), even when I probably could. But that’s mostly because I’m more comfortable using other tools for those purposes. It makes me wonder how much you can actually do in an NLE now.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] ”
Ah, I see. I was hoping to get some insight into the specific kinds of effects you were doing, e.g., blemish removal or object removal/replacement. I don’t use NLE’s for compositing or effects anymore (not since Vegas 3.0), even when I probably could. But that’s mostly because I’m more comfortable using other tools for those purposes. It makes me wonder how much you can actually do in an NLE now.”Oh yes, blemish removal, general wrinkle softening, extra whitening of the eyes, that sort of stuff. That is all done inside Baselight AVX.
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[Daniel Frome] ”
Oh yes, blemish removal, general wrinkle softening, extra whitening of the eyes, that sort of stuff. That is all done inside Baselight AVX.”I’ve seen some training and promo videos for Baselight and it looks amazing. On the projects where you used it, did you work with a colorist at all?
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “On the projects where you used it, did you work with a colorist at all?”
Nope, I do all the post: ingest, edit, color/FX, output to air.
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[Michael Aranyshev] “Sure. Call me back when backtime edit is not an afterthought and there is a Replace on Playhead there.”
And that is the deal breaker for you? You don’t recognise any positive tradeoffs?
stupid question.
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You can certainly do a lot of FX and finishing using MC/Symphony but it can be much more labor intensive to get the same/similar results compared to using other NLEs. Maybe if I used the FX in Avid more often I wouldn’t find them so cumbersome but it’s always seemed like a PITA to me.
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[Michael Aranyshev] “FCPX still doesn’t get basic editing right so it shouldn’t be included in this discussion at all but yes, you cannot work without the mouse in any current NLE. And that’s a shame.”
Half of editing (if not more) is scanning through your footage to look for shots.
The skimmer makes that faster than anything else to me. You use the mouse with the skimmer.
Why wouldn’t I want to use that skimmer?
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I’ve been cutting a lot of television shows on FCPX this last year and I must say: it’s rather underwhelming.
When I do a documentary series or a children’s series (meaning a lot of footage available for all the episodes and a lot of the same formatted elements (sequences, graphics etc)), I find FCPX clogging up very quickly. As soon as it gets complex, there’s trouble: using a lot of synchronised audio, 6+ audio tracks, graphic layering etc etc… FCPX gets enormously SLOW! I find working with it in a bigger environment (with a facility house and a network) is only posing a lot of problems that take ages to resolve.
Relinking a project for instance when sending off a project file to another station with the same media… FCPX has a tendency to lose its links to media, causing the editors that finish the shows that I make rough cuts for, spending lots and lots of time doing that.
I just had an issue with synchronised clips. 80% relinks perfectly, the other 20% relinks well but there’s no audio audible when cutting it in the project. All the footage is from the same source, synchronising is exactly the same, yet FCPX always finds little things it can’t hack. I found out that having separated audio where some have 6, some have 7 or 9 tracks, causes problems. Took me 1,5 day to get everything right. In AVID the exact same work takes me an hour max! Including checking the occasional one frame delay correction.
Now, this is just one of those typical complex things that FCPX doesn’t seem to handle properly on a larger-than-one-clip-or-video-scale, things I find absolutely horrendous. Asking myself WHY… Why does FCPX have so much trouble handling large libraries (for six 30 minute shows for instance)? Why does it have so much trouble with handling or processing audio? Why does it have such a hard with basic stuff we’ve been using for ages and that FCP7, AVID or PPRO doesn’t seem to have major problems with.
For instance: I had to cut a MUSIC EVENT in two, because…there were TOO MANY CLIPS in it. It crashed all the time when I tried to open the event. I mean: what is that all about? Too many clips???? I often need a lot. FCP7 could handle it, AVID can handle it just fine. I suspect all the audio and waveform generation is something that bears heavily on CPU and sic speed… too heavily to my taste.But for me the worst is bloody beachball showing up all the time, slows the entire process down. There are days I find myself working more with FCPX than the show I have to cut, finding another of the 1000+ workarounds that FCPX obviously needs.
Support?? Where? There is none.
No, I prefer AVID all the way at the moment. It’s a solid beast, it’s fast, it always knows where its media is, it always handles all it’s imported media super fluent and it’s great for exchange between different locations and sets.
FCPX looks nice, has some nice features but it is too underdeveloped for me. The programming is faulty when it comes to complexer projects. It’s an NLE that is far from finished yet it claims to be professional. It’s too bad my biggest client uses it now as their only NLE, but it is gonna cost them. Because, and most editors working there agree, it’s in the end for regular tv work slower… slower than AVID, slower than PPro… and it has nothing to do with the way it looks or how you cut, I can work around that. I can work around the fact that a lot of things take more actions than in does in AVID, as long as I can do it quick. And FCPX just isn’t very quick on larger projects.
Oh and for those who like to rant to people not liking FCPX: I work on a trashcan 6 core for MacPro, I use Thunderbolt external drives, libraries and cache on my internal SSD etc etc… I did everything the avid FCPX fans said I was doing wrong and it is still Final Cut SLOW…
So AVID… yes, why not! I like it a lot!
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I don’t “scan” or “skim.” I watch it. Carefully, many times.
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