Chris Conlee
Forum Replies Created
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I was sort of ribbing you, Dan. I guess the printed word isn’t the best for conveying light-heartedness, huh?
Anyway, to answer your question, Avid doesn’t have the best audio editing, at least in the application, to be sure. They’ve always assumed you’d do your fine audio work in another application (coincidentally, they own ProTools, of course). But I think that’s going to change. In the 5.x release they finally added realtime track based audio plugins, and I think more ProTools functionality will creep in over time.
Avid also has a hard time differentiating the differences between their Symphony and Media Composer product lines. Symphony has the so-called professional built in color correction capabilities and Media Composer does not (it has CC, of course, but it’s rudimentary). That’s the major difference, although there are some other finishing things in Symphony as well. But even the CC in Symphony is getting long in the tooth.
Honestly, Avid is a top notch editor–the absolute best, in my opinion–and they have always expected color and audio to be done elsewhere. Therefore they have probably the best support for AAF/OMF/EDL and film list export in the industry, coupled with absolutely frame accurate tape control, etc. On the broadcast episodics I work on we routinely drop fixes and FX into master tapes from Avid without a thought in the world and I cannot remember Avid missing an insert by even a frame in over a decade of doing it. Those same post houses aren’t as comfortable doing the same thing with FCP. Fair or not, a few years ago FCP wasn’t always 100% accurate in the tape department and those concerns still linger.
All of this isn’t to say that Avid can’t do an extraordinary amount of FX and finishing work in the timeline, though. On a pilot I just worked on for Fox I was one of two assistant editors. We had a lot of VFX (over 200+ in a 48 minute show), and the other assist and I had to temp a bunch of them for previews and whatnot. The other assist was more comfortable taking shots to AE and doing composites and animated mattes, etc. But I was able to do nearly everything he was doing natively in the Avid with it’s built-in tools. The AniMatte plugin is first class and the SpectraMatte keyer is pretty good. The only thing he could clearly do better in AE was planar tracking using Mocha, which is kick ass, btw. In Avid, I’d have to manually rotate my composites using the 3D warp tool and then track with single points.
I guess all of this is a really LONG way of saying, I’m sure all of these tools, FCP, Premiere Pro, and Media Composer have the capability of getting your jobs done. It’s just a matter of truly learning the tools and going for it.
Although, as I think about it, if you’re truly cutting film, as opposed to any flavor of video, I think there’s really only one game in town now, and that’s Avid. It has film tracking tools built in. With the likely demise of Cinema Tools, I don’t think FCP X will ever track film. And I’m not sure of any tools for Premiere Pro that will do it. Because of this, for the foreseeable future, a good many Hollywood films that might have considered another editor will swing back to Avid’s court. Although, to be sure, the days of film acquisition are waining.
Chris
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Ahhh, THE Tim Wilson from Avid. I remember you. I think we met in Los Angeles in about 2006 talking about P2 workflow issues?
Chris Conlee
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Dan,
I’m not trying to be disagreeable, but you make it sound like FCP invented those capabilities or something. Truly, Avid is a professional application which caters to ALL levels of professional need. It has always been professional, and it will continue to be professional until the day the company ceases to exist.
I use FCP occasionally, and I own CS5.5 and have dabbled with Premiere Pro, but I personally prefer Avid whenever I can because for me it’s hands-down the fastest, most intuitive editor out there. Obviously, each editor’s mileage will vary.
Chris
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Actually, I don’t think it’s meant to represent a paper clip. I think it’s just the selection indicator, and since it’s only a few frames it happens to look like a paperclip. I could be wrong.
Chris
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Hmmm. I haven’t taken the FCP X plunge yet, but this caught my eye. I’ve been having issues with Firefox lately too, which is a bummer, because it’s my favorite browser. Lots of force quits, and frozen web pages.
Chris
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My bad. I have an MXO2 mini and a keyspan adapter, which worked with FCP 7, and I couldn’t find any serial control options in PP. And the threads I was finding seemed to indicate that it wasn’t available either.
Chris
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I’m not saying this to be a d*ck, and I mean that 110%, but a healthy portion of the work I’ve done over the past 5 or 6 years has been unscrewing FCP jobs in general.
I work in feature film post quite a lot and a bunch of independent producers, apparently not wanting to pay anything, have hired lots of unqualified editors who would cut for cheap. And then, when it comes time to make final deliveries, those same producers come squealing to an editor or post super who knows what they’re doing.
This in no way reflects on FCP 7’s capabilities, it reflects on short-sighted producers who hire editors without the experience to make deliverables, which is the technical side of editing and has nothing to do with telling the story.
It’s not rocket science, but there are definitely technical as well as aesthetic and creative aspects to editing. Apple didn’t help anybody by making FCP X so single-user centric.
Chris Conlee
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I responded to a similar question above, so I’ll just post it here again:
Welcome aboard. Just so you know, Avid is much different than FCP, and it’s just a fact that you WILL be resentful at first at some of the methodology. It’s a different animal.
I moved to Avid from Toaster/Flyer, Speed Razor, Incite, and D/Vision Pro. Almost all of those are closer to one another than to Avid. It took me a month of beating my head against the computer until one day I had an epiphany and started to do it “the Avid way,” and the clouds parted and God rays shined down on me. Why had I tried to bend the software to my way of thinking for so long? I couldn’t say.
Now I’ve been using Avid for a decade and I don’t touch another editor unless I absolutely HAVE to. It’s so fluid and second nature to me that I don’t even think about it any more. It’s like an extension of my own two hands.
Jump in and start pushing it. Don’t be discouraged. Eventually it’ll make sense and I’ll wager you will become a die-hard fan sooner than you expect.
Chris Conlee
PS: Make sure you join the forum on Avid’s site as well. The people there, as here, are top pros and will help you a lot.
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Welcome aboard. Just so you know, Avid is much different than FCP, and it’s just a fact that you WILL be resentful at first at some of the methodology. It’s a different animal.
I moved to Avid from Toaster/Flyer, Speed Razor, Incite, and D/Vision Pro. Almost all of those are closer to one another than to Avid. It took me a month of beating my head against the computer until one day I had an epiphany and started do it “the Avid way,” and the clouds parted and God rays shined down on me. Why had I tried to bend the software to my way of thinking for so long? I couldn’t say.
Now I’ve been using Avid for a decade and I don’t touch another editor unless I absolutely HAVE to. It’s so fluid and second nature to me that I don’t even think about it any more. It’s like an extension of my own two hands.
Jump in and start pushing it. Eventually it’ll make sense and I’ll wager you will become a die-hard fan sooner than you expect.
Chris Conlee
PS: Make sure you join the forum on Avid’s site as well. The people there, as here, are top pros and will help you a lot.
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Fox, NBC, ABC, and Warner Brothers won’t accept hard drives for delivery. Tape still rules the day, and that’s a fact. Part of the delivery requirements for each show are full OMF/AAFs, EDLs, lined script, Tape, etc. Lots of things this new application doesn’t do.
Chris