Media Composer 7 is coming soon…

[Michael Phillips]

This is intriguing… a Symphony option to a Media Composer… hmmmm. What is everyone’s interpretation of that?

Michael

[Joel Ray]

I would assume that symphony will be just another option like Phrasefind or Scriptsync

[John Pale]

Certainly less confusing to refer to it that way.

It’s the same software with a couple of very nice features turned on.

[Rocco Rocco]

I’m still on 6.0. Is it likely to be a $500 upgrade like 6.5? Or are full upgrades usually more?

[Joel Ray]

I upgraded from 5.5 to 6.5 and it was $599, I would suspect that will be your upgrade price. $499 is for those who have the most recent version prior to the update.

[Scott Witthaus]

Must have been a slip-up because the link now takes you to a MC 6.5 upgrade offer. Maybe someone jumped the gun. NAB is here, so we will find out soon enough.

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Michael Phillips]

Yup – that was quick! I knew I should have taken a screen shot! 😉
Joel copy/pasted the verbiage anyway of what was there in his original post.

Usually Avid does its Press Conference Sunday early evening, so everything should go live then.

Michael

[Scott Witthaus]

Media Composer and Symphony are basically the same product, save color correction and a couple other features. Many of us have long been pounding the drum that there is no need for 2 separate products, marketing campaigns, etc. While there are not a lot of details to go on (at least for the next 12 hours), this seems like a very positive step in that direction. Of course, pricing will be an issue as Avid has yet to realize that the world has changed so much since the early 2000’s in what bang you can get for your buck these days (FCPX being a perfect example at $299), and MC7 will need to bring its Symph CC up to current standards. Should be very interesting. Great time to be in this business!

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Chris Harlan]

[Scott Witthaus] “Media Composer and Symphony are basically the same product, save color correction and a couple other features”

With the software-only versions, the ONLY difference is the color correction, plus you get Continuum. The standards conversion is a hardware feature, so, yeah, very little difference. Selling advanced color correction as an option makes more sense, I would think.

[Michael Phillips]

The tape-based Universal Mastering is the other major difference that is tied to Avid hardware (don’t know why though from an I/O perspective). I am writing up a workflow where you can do file-based universal mastering with pitch correction with Media Composer – albeit a few more steps, it is files based which more and more of the deliverables seem to be.

The other difference in the software is advanced color correction comparatively speaking to Media Composer which one can argue should have been part of Media Composer by now – but that is open for debate. Maybe portions of it like secondary as it has more metadata related tricks such as relational color correction and a few more control tabs as well as sequence/source control. It will be interesting to see if there is actually more control available other than existing Symphony color correction as an option to Media Composer – since in the end, that’s just a Symphony. Depends on the pricing for option, upgrades, and what happens to existing Symphony owners – what is their path/upgrade? There certainly has been rumblings by owners in the past that they paid more for upgrades when there was nothing new, specific to Symphony to justify the cost difference. So they have been paying for that advanced color correction many times over through the years.

😉

The news will start rolling out in about 3.5 hours. I’ll be on a plane making my way to Las Vegas so I’ll get to the details after I check in.

Michael