Pros and Cons of MC6?

[Pete Fausone]

[Shane Ross] ” It can relink to media like no other NLE”

This is where you are wrong. It can’t reconnect to anything in an online environment like FCP7 does, no comparision. I deal with this everyday.

I even had four of the top Avid engineers out to Fotokem to confirm this, they left agreeing that for file based online I should keep using FCP for now until they fix
it. Here’s what goes wrong…

Editors work on DNX36 files that I don’t have, they are offline resolution anyway. Then I get a finished sequence. You can’t just relink that to online media like FCP7. If you have RED raw files, or Alexa camera files, try relink all day and it will not, ever.
So you “link to AMA” to get the online files into a bin. This is the part that’s broken. Avid fails to put the filename into the tape column, and the only way MC links to a file is with the clips timecode and whats in the Tape column. Works great for tape based media, but not file based!

So people do ridiculous workflows like importing all the dailies when only a fraction of them are used in the cut, or going through all the files and manually adding the filename to the tape column one at a time with “modify clip”. Insanity. I think MC is extremely weak for online until they make it work like FCP7 for relinking clips.
So for now, I use the absolutely brilliant Boris AAF transfer tool to take the Avid sequence into FCP7, relink to my rendered RED or Alexa clips instantly.

[Shane Ross]

Yeah…true. When it comes to relinking to items accessed via AMA, Avid is still working on that. What I meant was when the media is in the Avid file structure, relinking is solid. Stray outside the design, and things get problematic. Although I have gotten Avid to relink to RED files. But the project was a short :30 spot I did as a test (I cut a commercial using footage a friend had to beta test MC6). That worked fine, but the file path to the originals never changed.

FCP is very powerful in what it can do. Very powerful in capable hands. The issue was that because it allowed people to do so much, users who had no clue about editing or codecs would always paint themselves into a corner. Head down the wrong path so early that fixing it meant redoing just about everything.

But now with AMA, and Avid touting that you can “edit native!” and not need to transcode…that is opening things up to a lot of people to make mistakes.

Shane
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