Rip Van Winkle just woke up

[Jan Maitland]

Steve

One other thing to note is that Avid’s Media Composer software is currently on-sale for $995, a sale price which will end on September 30th. Adobe is offering an equally competitive price for their product as well, though I’m less familiar with the time-frame of their sale.

Since you’re already using Adobe’s Creative Suite (which includes Premiere Pro) it may behoove you to buy the Media Composer software at its sale price since you’re unlikely to see it that low for quite some time (it’s typically $2,995).

I agree with Chris’ statements about the fundamentally shorter learning curve when jumping from FCP to PP and while what you’ve read about PP’s interface being somewhat cumbersome is true, I haven’t found it in any way disruptive to my FCP-style workflow.

Having said all that, I did, in the end, choose Avid’s Media Composer as my “new” editing system following the FCP-X apocalypse because it just feels so much more “solid” than either PP or even the recently deceased FCP-7.

While Media Composer is considerably less “sexy” than either FCP-7 or Premiere, after having just recently completed my third TVC project in it, I now can’t imagine going with any other software solution (i.e. PP or even the old FCP-7). It’s just that good…at editing. For graphics? Meh, not so much.

Best of luck with your decision and please let us know which route you take.

[Job Ter burg]

It’s typically $2495 (not 2995) for the boxed version (including 3rd party apps bundle: Squeeze, BCC etc). Download is like 2295 but excludes the 3rd party package.

[Oliver Peters]

Just as an FYI – the boxed version of Media Composer includes Avid FX and Boris Continuum Complete filters. I think the Avid Production Studio bundle (the third party software) is still available as a separate download for a few hundred bucks if you get the download version of MC.

Avid FX is Boris RED, so it gives you way more advanced effects and compositing tools inside MC than MC alone. Also Automatic Duck or Boris AAF Transfer gives you some nice tools to move between After Effects and Media Composer. Lastly if you have BCC in AE and BCC in MC, then Boris AAF Transfer will translate the effects data between the two hosts for most of the BCC filters.

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Eduardo Serrano]

Hi,

Even tho I’m now an offline editor, and I basically work on avid mc everyday because I really like it. I have been a motion designer in the past and like you lived in AE and used fcp as a compositor.

There’s no question about it. Get Premiere. I was very snobbish against premiere on the past, but the ui being cumbersome is not true anymore, at least since the “pro” version came along. You can still work with s lot of layers like fcp did and it’s very similar. And you get full 64bit with the cuda acceleration that will help you in AE. And just the dynamic linking should be your killer feature. Come on, I used to dream about that on my designers days.

But yeah… Take a look on the premiere to fcp tutorials videos on the net.

Avid is amazing for editing offline and althought it is a very capable compositor, it’s a bit cumbersome and not really intuitive for someone that comes from a graphics background.

Cheers,

E.