New York Post Houses

[Steve Covello]

WARNING! Biased, unsubstantiated opinions to follow! Read at your own peril!

I’m going to ignorantly say that they all do by now, and if they don’t, you wouldn’t want to work there anyway.

My biased opinion is that any so-called boutique editing house that is creative oriented has abandoned Avid by now. I believe that the ideal creative dynamic right now for editing talent is a place that does both shooting and editing, or maybe editing and graphics. You will want to always be working in collaboration with another team of specialists since it will improve your editing skills in ways that working only amongst other editors won’t. And I don’t mean just editing — I mean in terms off pre-shooting conceptual stuff, workflow management, and being included in the entire process.

Not only that, but the talent pool of Avid editors is [again, ignorant statement to follow] “aging” compared to FCP editors, mainly because FCP was able to be “obtained” for many years fairly easily, spawning a new generation of talent that used it in concert with DV shooters. There were a few years where I would say that the FCP talent wasn’t quite as good as the top-end talent of Avid editors, but now that is not the case. Plus, Apple has gone out of their way to make FCP compatible with as many third party hardware and software developers as possible, which Avid eschews.

Once I saw what an FCP editor could do with AE/PSD-style transfer mode layering, I knew I had to leave the Media Composer world ASAP, even though I whole-heartedly liked the interface of Avid much better than FCP.

The only places you will find Avids these days are in broadcast facilities who have Unity systems, and editing houses leftover from the 1990’s who can’t stomach trashing their $120,000 Avid systems [each], and then forcing their staff to retrain on a new system. if you call yourself “creative”, then run away from these places.

This concludes my biased opinion.

steve covello