Does Avid hate me?

[Paul Provost]

If you want fcp7 again, get premiere, or even fcpx. If you want to work in the post business and collaborate with other professionals, learn avid. Now. There are like 85 free tutorials on v6 here on the cow by Kevin mcauliffe. For free. Watch them. Only a few new things in v7, so it’s all still valid training.
If you are just doing personal or self contained projects, premiere and fcpx are really great.
But yeah, learning avid can be a bear, but it’s actually pretty freaking cool once you get it.

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[Scott Cole]

Another suggestion if I may… Find a friend who knows Avid and is willing to give you a few hours or a couple of days to walk you through the basics, show you all the settings windows, teach you about master clips vs media files, AMA vs native files, and all the other things that make Avid unique. Once you break the ice, learning all the details will be a lot easier. Avid is indeed a complicated program with lots of details, but and you’ll never know what you don’t known, but having someone walk you through it certainly makes it easier.

M. Scott Cole
Senior Post Production Editor
60 MINUTES
CBS News, NYC
sc6@cbsnews.com
mscottc@comcast.net

[Graham Tees]

In addition to Kevin’s tutorials there are 200 tuts by Douglas here
https://community.avid.com/forums/t/67003.aspx?PageIndex=1
and here
https://community.avid.com/forums/t/71781.aspx

They are free to watch (best viewed using a Firfox browser). Douglas also offers them on a USB Flash Drive here
https://www.gaijin-eyes.com/June2010DD/Offer200Thumb.html

They are excellent, and have helped many newcomers to MC. Here is the main site:
https://www.gaijin-eyes.com/June2010DD/SalesHome.html

[Kell Smith]

Thank you everyone,
I”lll be back at it today.
I originally wanted to learn Avid at the beginning, and went to FCP reluctantly since that’s what was available.
It’s just very different from my expectations. Never have I spent so much time fumbling around an interface, getting so little done, even in a new program. It’s not FCP and I need to throw that expectation out of the window and start from scratch and learn the way Avid thinks. It’s very different from the way I would think, where I would expect things to be – so….
Hopefully once past the hurdles, I’ll love it. Everyone else seems to so it must just require persistence.
Thx =)

[Kell Smith]

I wish I knew someone who works in Avid. Unfortunately right now I don’t, but point taken, it might make sense to sign up for some Avid training once I am able to – just to get that perspective from someone who knows it well.

[Roger Van duyn]

When I switched to Avid about 4 years ago, my experience was similar to yours. Now I love using it.

What helped me was to just forget everything about how my previous editing program worked and just start fresh. Avid uses a completely different approach, so I had to think different (and I’ve never owned a Mac, pun intended).

Roger

[Kell Smith]

I’ve started into the Douglas tutorials and they are proving to be very helpful. I did some of the Kevin tutorials the other day and really liked them as well.
Finally am starting to make some progress…..

[John Pale]

If you really wanna blow your mind, try FCPX and Lightworks next.
Also very different than FCP7.

You really need to forget what you think you know from FCP legacy and immerse yourself in whatever new tool you decide to go with…if you want to achieve proficiency. Even Premiere Pro has enough differences to get you into unexpected trouble.

[Kell Smith]

LOL sometimes I even find imovie confusing – but have not cared enough to spend more than five minutes in it, so maybe that’s why. =)

As for Avid…
LOVING the filmstrip track and the B key. and love the keyboard-focused approach.

The tutorials address a different method of editing than I am used to – I am used to dragging a clip into the timeline, cutting it up, and making my choices from there. It’s an easy way to get rid of the garbage by just dragging it to the end of the timeline, or deleting the clips.

Not sure how I would keep all my clips/scenes arranged any other way but am open to new methods/suggestions. I guess with markers in the source clip, once I figure out how to add them in Avid, and maybe could just color code the markers for the good scenes?

It’s probably just as easy to timeline edit in Avid but I am open to whatever methods are efficient.

[John Pale]

[Kell Smith] “I am used to dragging a clip into the timeline, cutting it up, and making my choices from there. It’s an easy way to get rid of the garbage by just dragging it to the end of the timeline, or deleting the clips”

I don’t do this personally, but you can do this in Avid with a little trick. Just drop a garbage clip or a title at the end of your sequence and insert a bunch of filler, way more than your intended sequence length (source monitor menu) before it. Now you have a lot of empty space to play with.