which is the lesser of the two evils, old 5.2 or new 5.7 xpress pro?

[Milton Hockman]

i dropped 5.7 and went back to 5.6.

read my post below about corrupt user settings. no matter what they keep getting corrupt and i couldn’t import a movie with an alpha channel.

[Michael Hancock]

Given no more information, I say upgrade. 5.7 is more stable and is much, much more responsive.

More importantly, though–what problems are you having now on 5.2? What’s slowing your editors down? We haven’t had problems with 5.7, and I’m not really sure what your reseller is talking about. What problems does your reseller see with 5.7? The general consensus on the Avid forums is that it’s a much better release then 5.5.x and 5.6.x. It definitely has been for us.

Give us some more information on what’s happening on 5.2.4 and we’ll let you know (if we can) if upgrading will fix any of your problems.

Michael

[Vito Defilippo]

Promoboy,

Can you expand on why it’s a better release? I looked at the list of new features on the AVID site, and decided not to upgrade at the moment as they don’t really apply to my projects.

But are there improvements beyond the new features that you are noticing?

Thanks…

[Michael Hancock]

The whole thing feels faster, as far as I know we’ve had no crashes or Access Violation errors (unlike the last version).

Scrolling timeline can be nice. When you have longer projects it’s great to hit play and not have to worry about zooming out so you can see what cuts are coming.

On version 5.6.x it took forever for the media tool to load. Doesn’t anymore. Scanning the databases? Doesn’t take nearly as long and isn’t needed as often.

Overall, it just feels more solid.

In case you’re wondering why we upgraded–we have an Assurance contract. After a few weeks, if there hasn’t been an uproar on the Avid forums, we upgrade because we can and because it’s “free”. The money’s already been paid–we might as well get something for it.

Another reason we upgraded–we have one P2 camera with (hopefully/supposedly) many, many more to come. The newest release allows you to write back to the P2 cards. This helps us because our news editors use Edius Broadcast which plays very nice with P2’s MXF. I’m thinking we might soon be able to take files from Avid to Edius without the constant transcoding–just load it, edit, load it back on the P2 and take it downstairs. Haven’t tried it, might not work, but I think it will. That will be nice if it does.

Note, version 5.7 defaults every project to MXF media, so if you still use OMF like we do you’ll want to change it back to OMF and make this a site setting.

If you can afford it, go ahead and buy the upgrade, clone your hard drive, install it. If you don’t like it, roll back to the last version you liked. Then, when the next release comes out, if it fixes problems you were having you can update again and be on the newest version. It will only get more expensive to upgrage and future releases come out.

I think most importantly–are there issues with your release that you want fixed? If so, what are they? They might have been fixed, but without knowing the problems–it’s hard to know! 🙂

Michael.

[Vito Defilippo]

Hi Michael,

Thanks so much for the detailed response. Very kind of you.

Just the quicker loading of media tool would be worth the upgrade, I think. Drives me nuts how long it takes to scan. It usually gets stuck on “loading orphan files”.

Your other observations are great. Just the kind of info I was looking for. Looks like a worthwhile upgrade, and it is only $50US, so it’s no big deal.

Thanks again, and greetings from Montreal,
Vito

[Michael Hancock]

Yeah, $50 is the cheapest upgrade I’ve seen on an NLE. I’d go for it–if anything, you get a new Audio plugin. Pretend like you paid $50 for that and got the upgrade for free!

Glad I could help. Let us know if you have more questions.

Michael.

[Andrew Shanks]

Thanks Michael, that was a great summary of benefits. We did end up upgrading in the end. We just had constant crashes with 5.2.4 (and cool things like it deciding it really didn’t like playing backwards), ..real random things, but annoying compared to the other avid we have on the show. We’re having a few teething problems with some P2 media that had been downsized then brought in from the Mac via the wrong codec, …avid thinking it was using interlaced in our progressive project, …on the Mac and the old PC version it complained but was cool with it, this version is good until you try to render a title over it, …freakout time, ….but it’s cool, we’ve got the assistants to re-export in the correct progressive codec and we think its now behaving okay (touch wood!).

Cheers,

andrew

🙂