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Been forced to use Avid for a while now.. thoughts about whats better..
I have to work with avid now for a couple of months, and I think in general that I feel much more free when editing with FCP. Doing fancy short stuff is so insanely much easier on fcp (WHAT.. make subclip for speed change ??
However, there are a few things that i REALLY like about Avid
1. Zooming. Listen up Apple. I don’t care about zooming to a piece that is selected. I ALWAYS want to zoom to where my “pointer” is.
2. Adjustment layer.. sort of. The way Avid deals with “nothingness” is extremely annoying, however you can slice a slug and put it on top of a group of pictures.. and put your color correction on that layer, and everything below it will be color corected too. Fantastic.
Anders
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13 Replies
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yeah and the scrolling timeline… i wish FCP had a scrolling timeline option.
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Zoom to pointer NOT selected clip!! PLEASE!!!
Another thing which is better on Avid IMHO is the fact that, if I mark in and out on the timline and hit lift (delete), it deletes the section that I have between the in and out NOT the bloody clip I left selected further down the timeline which I cannot see because I’m zoomed in. The amount of times I’ve lost a clip from an edit because of this daft way of working I can’t bare to think about.
You can scroll when playing by holding down the shift key and using the mouse wheel. (not at my system at the moment but if it’s not shift it’s either control or option.) Realtime playback and a kind of scrol option for you.
Dave
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thanks for the tip Dave! shift + scroll is better than having to click.
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[Anders Haavie] “1. Zooming. Listen up Apple. I don’t care about zooming to a piece that is selected. I ALWAYS want to zoom to where my “pointer” is.”
Easy, hit apple-d (to deselect everything) then zoom. One more keystroke will get what you want.
Can’t help with the scrolling of the timeline, except for the scroll keystroke. This is a flaw and should be fixed.
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G5 Dual 2Ghz <> 4GB RAM <> FCP 5.03 <> Kona 2
ATTO 42XS <> Huge Systems 4105 Fibre
OS 10.4.2 <> QT 7.0.3 -
I was thrown back into the Avid world for seven months last year to offline a Discovery Channel series. I’ll add a few “Avid does it better” items since we’re on the topic…
1) The Digitize Tool. One window contains everything: big flashing red button that easily tells you when you’re digitizing, buttons for track selection (how many times have I captured audio only in FCP because the track selection is hidden behind a tab?), the ability to name a clip WHILE it’s capturing, actual live timecode display during capture (very helpful when a deck is in another room), and live software audio meters during capture.
2) Zoom. ‘Nuff said on this one in previous posts. It’s the only Avid key I still reach for after 4+ years of FCP use (after 8 years on a Media Composer).
3) Digital Cut Tool- Avid’s “Edit to Tape.” This shows the playhead moving through the sequence during layback as well as live software audio meters and timecode display from the record deck.
So, my gripes are mostly I/O based (getting stuff in and out). FCP’s capture and output tools haven’t changed much since version 1.0, but a refresh could go a long way…
Despite my minor gripes FCP is still by far my tool of choice for actual cutting and effect work.
Cheers,
Bill -
Cmd-Shift-A. Cmd-D hasn’t been since v2 I think.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” DVD
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And the FINAL thing that is better on Avid:
Drum Roll Please……
MEDIA MANAGEMENT!
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What? You haven’t remapped it back to CMD-D?
Don’t believe there’s anything else there…. 😉Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Seminar!
fcpworld.com -
Avid is better at a few things, but over all it’s not better at all. yea the media manager is great but have you ever tried to look at a drive w/o the media manager, you would have no idea of what you have. apple works in QT and QT is very simple to figure out and does not care about the structure of the info as avid does, you need to stop thing about effects and drive arrays, thats all avid is doing for you, as a matter of fact they give you to much info which makes it easy to throw away the wrong stuff. if you ever did a real complicated show on both systems, you would never care about avid ever again, FCPHD smokes it when you know how to work it. Oh and the color effect on the top line is such an old trick that if you use it it shows how lazy or bad (you pick) of an editor one is. can we all just stop the avid VS FCP stuff and just do the dam work.
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I had to step back into Avidland today to cover for an editor that had a family emergency last night. It took a little while to get back into it, but it’s like riding a bicycle. A very weird bicycle. I agree with the above post about log & capture on an Avid. I do like it better, especially being to name a clip while it’s being captured. Ditto for digital cuts. But for the most part, I’ll be glad to get back to my FCP system tomorrow. FCP just makes more sense to me and I’ve been cutting on Avids since the early ’90s. Some things in Avidland just don’t change much.
Nothing more fun early in the morning than finding out that you have to finish the final edit on a project that you haven’t even had time to watch all the way through before the client arrives. That’ll get you going fast. Lots of coffee today…
Oh, I did a quick color grade on the project as well. I do like the Symphony’s color corrector as well. OK, that’s all…
Tom
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