Mac Compatibility

[Michael Phillips]

See here on page 27:
http://resources.avid.com/SupportFiles/attach/README_Avid_Editor_v20.6.pdf

It does not appear that 2020 Macbook Pros are supported. Doesn’t mean it won’t work, but should you run into issues, it is not supported. I am on a 15″ mid-2015 with 16GB of RAM and I feel that is right on the bubble performance-wise, mainly memory issues. I wish I could add more RAM… but I can’t. I hear Cataline OS uses more memory than past OS’s so I would opt for at least 32GB if not 64 these days.

Michael

[Philip Owens]

CAUTION: I just spent today wrangling my new MBP. I went for 64GB RAM and the 5600M GPU. With Premiere, it’s fantastic – exporting to h.264 is almost FIVE times faster than my 2015 MBP. But Media Composer is, frankly, a wall-punching hellscape. Cannot export to h.264, meaning your postings need to be double transcoded. And you can’t import almost any of the things you typically need – mp4, m4a, HEVC, and, I read here, animations with embedded alpha.. Deprecating Quicktime looks like something Avid just shrugged their shoulders at. It’s very seriously concerning me, as you can’t downgrade the OS from Catalina on a new system, and even MC 2020.8 is quite frankly, Catalina-unusable. It is a complete nightmare.

[Philip Owens]

CAUTION: I just spent today wrangling my new MBP. I went for 64GB RAM and the 5600M GPU. With Premiere, it’s fantastic – exporting to h.264 is almost FIVE times faster than my 2015 MBP. But Media Composer is, frankly, a wall-punching hellscape. Cannot export to h.264, meaning your postings need to be double transcoded. And you can’t import almost any of the things you typically need – mp4, m4a, HEVC, and, I read here, animations with embedded alpha.. It’s very seriously concerning me, as I can’t downgrade the OS from Catalina, and even MC 2020.8 is quite frankly, Catalina-unprepared. It is a complete workflow nightmare.

One last thing that’s almost as bad about MC 2020 is that they’e eliminated the old titler, and you have to use the Avid Titler+, which is a Godzilla-like disaster of a piece of software. Utterly unusable. 2019 was the last version to retain the Title Tool, which wasn’t good but was at least perfectly usable. There’s something called the ‘New Blue FX Titler’ which I haven’t tried yet but it all sound like a kludge on top of a kludge.

Looks like I came back to Avid just in time to need to leave it again.

[Job Ter burg]

Philip,

This is not quite correct.

MC does allow export to h264, it is under the new MOV and MXF export options. These use the Avid UME, rather than Quicktime.

The old Title Tool is still available in 2020.x, just not on Catalina. On Mojave, install the Legacy Components, and all classic QT import/export and Title Tool will be available.

I agree that MC on Catalina is still limited.

[Glenn Sakatch]

Bit of a sidebar, as i’m on PC, but i’m actually finding the “new” h264 outputs on my box to be waaaaay faster.

[Philip Owens]

Yes, you are correct in that you can export an h264 as a MOV, but the audio is uncompressed PCM. Which still makes it impossible to do a one-step export for posting.

EDIT: I’ve finally decided to not send in my old machine for a trade-in, and keep it on Mojave and exclusively for 2019.12.2 Media Composer. Meanwhile, my new system powers through Premiere (five times faster h264 exports than the old system).