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Thinking of Avid Xpress Pro and ditching Final Cut Pro.
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Okay guys. Thanks for all the detailed posts above. The Avid name looked good for a minute there. But as most people here have pointed out, the Avid name is fading fast. You are right, I’ve been using FCP for a long time now so in hindsight there is probably little point in changing over to another system.
I’m convinced.
Cheers.
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[Scott Witthaus] “Dont think Xpro is the main competitor to FCP. I recently had an Avid rep tell me that Avid now considers Media Composer Adrenaline as the main competition to FCP5. He put a demo in my shop and the list on it was $57,000. I said thanks but no thanks.”
No question. I’ve been saying that for over a year. The Adrenaline owner nearest us has learned that the hard way, as we’ve been doing uncompressed SDI 10 bit for over two years. Many of our customers were his, but with his investment his rates are much higher…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com
http://www.insightproductions.com -
in my short excursions in the avid land, the main features that makes Avid stronger than FCP is for project management.
Like everyone is saying, media management is much stronger on avid, but in online/offline workflows, for FCP you need Automatic duck. FCP EDLs are unreliable in many situations: 24p timelines, speed changes, audio not linked to video, unreliable out point, etc. The log and capture interface is also much more flexible and complete on Avid.
When working on longform projects, Avid’s markers are so much better than what we got in FCP. You can print them with a preview of the frame, and all is layed out very cleanly with lots of info. With FCP, you can’t even export the markers to a text file ! How useless they are.
The other aspect where I find FCP weaker than Avid is for colorspace/gamma handling. With Avid, when you export or import, you choose wether you want to do it in RGB or 601. With FCP you have to guess. For example, to export with RGB conversion you must use “using quicktime conversion” instead or using “Quicktime movie”. This is totaly unclear. Same thing goes for 2.2 -> 1.8 gamma conversion QT does to DV. It’s not even told clearly in FCP’s documentation where is gamma converted or such.
I don’t know about MC, but on Symphony you have much better time remapping quality. FCP5 is supposed to have better scaling algorithms, but it’s unclear if time remapping was also revamped. Shake 4 does advertise optical flow remaping which will be awsome, but did they integrate optical flow in FCP5 ? I whish. The time remapping GUI is also very bad in FCP. In fact keyframes all over FCP should be more flexible…
A toggle switch for chroma smoothing built into the DV codec is another thing I find FCP is missing. In fact, it’s missing or hiding lots of advanced settings we sometime need to control.
But who can work efficiently with edit modes… arg
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on this I totally agree. AVID got their crap together with getting into and out of the box – that is, going into online, getting a negative cut, etc…. Final Cut has been HORRIBLE in these regards. EDL’s with speed changes were never right, even it’s own XML didn’t work half the time, and a negative list with keycode? Cinema Tools just didn’t cut it. But Apple is getting better on this front – quickly.
They HAVE fixed that damn gamma conversion problem. That was the most irritating thing I’ve ever seen in a “pro” app.
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on this I totally agree. AVID got their crap together with getting into and out of the box – that is, going into online, getting a negative cut, etc…. Final Cut has been HORRIBLE in these regards. EDL’s with speed changes were never right, even it’s own XML didn’t work half the time, and a negative list with keycode? Cinema Tools just didn’t cut it. But Apple is getting better on this front – quickly.
They HAVE fixed that damn gamma conversion problem. That was the most irritating thing I’ve ever seen in a “pro” app.
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[Donato M. Rondinelli] ”
BTW, I have a used $90K Symphony & a $40K Adrenaline that I’m willing to get rid of. The Symphony will never do HD & the Adrenaline will do HD for a $10K upgrade.”I think the debate between the two systems starts and ends with this comment. It’s a no-brainer.
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Hello:
I’ve been using Avid products for years, from the high to the low end. I find that Avid still holds the title, so to speak, when it comes to being the “Industry Standard.” That being said, it’s apparent that Final Cut is moving in fast. That’s why I installed Final Cut on one of my Macs. I played with it, and had a very hard time with it. Two NAB’s ago I bought the book “final Cut Pro for Avid Editors. It didn’t help much, since it was written for FCP3. Does anyone know of a training DVD teching FCP4.5 or 5 for the Avid editor?
Thanks,
Andy
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[Sean ONeil] “I think the debate between the two systems starts and ends with this comment. It’s a no-brainer.
“Well said. I was wondering when someone was going to bring up that. With the difference in price between doing FCP in HD and Avid in HD, I could pay off the balance of my mortgage…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com
http://www.insightproductions.com -
[Andrew J. Bricker] “I’ve been using Avid products for years, from the high to the low end. I find that Avid still holds the title, so to speak, when it comes to being the “Industry Standard.” That being said, it’s apparent that Final Cut is moving in fast. That’s why I installed Final Cut on one of my Macs. I played with it, and had a very hard time with it.”
Avid installed base was 1/3 of FCP’s. In television they are losing ground, and now that HD is coming to the forefront FCP will gain ground even further.
The problem Avid editors have is that they want to operate FCP like an Avid. That won’t work any more than operating a chain saw like a hand saw. Different tools need retraining… ask F-16 pilots.
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com
http://www.insightproductions.com
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