[Daniel Frome]

I’m also a big supporter of Premiere Pro, and use it for all kinds of small corporate jobs for my freelance stuff.

I’ve got to admit though: when it comes to cutting (and especially trimming) Avid is just way better. Trim mode totally kills Premiere. No matter much I try, Premiere always ends up being the more “mousy” tool, which makes it fine for short format or graphics-heavy stuff… while Avid ends up feeling more like a real cutting program. You just feel more creative when cutting in Avid – It’s the best tool for jobs that require mostly just cutting (reality tv, feature films, etc).

I think that’s also a big factor.

It’s weird how we build our preferences like this… but that’s just my own take on it. Premiere’s UI and feel is closer to a design program, so I like working in it when doing corporate jobs where design (AE stuff, lower thirds, quick flashy effects, etc) is paramount to the picture. But If I’m going to be doing anything that relies mostly on edits, or any project that I have to keep open for a week or longer — I’ll gladly fire up Avid over Ppro any day.

[Daniel Frome]

Unfortunately even if you check on the “allow filenames to exceed 27 characters” in the settings / general area, file exports still get limited to 27 characters. There is no way to fix this right now.

I am reporting this to avid as a bug. I’ve been annoyed by it in the past too, but have simply learned to work around it for now.

[Daniel Frome]

Have you tried installing the free avid codecs pack?

https://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=392959 (download link at the bottom)

[Daniel Frome]

[Olly Lawer] “Working with proxies would be useful in terms of speeding up renders (or no renders at all!).

However, what’s the cost for Avid?
“

Since you’ve got FCP you would qualify for the crossgrade, which is $1499.

If you’re still a student then it’s better: $299 and 4 years of free upgrades.

[Daniel Frome]

I’m going to stay out of the FCPX talk on this one, and I won’t claim Avid to be the best for every scenario… but I will say from experience/evidence that if XDCAM is your format: Avid is your best choice.

Do you want to edit purely with proxies? Then relink to full rez when the edit is done?
Do you want to edit with proxy video, but use the high quality audio? And relink to full rez video?
Do you want to edit with the full rez XDCAM material?
Do you want to write your final sequence back to XDCAM disk when you’re done?

Avid supports all these modes out of the box, and it handles the offline/online type of workflow better than any other NLE by a wide margin.

Assuming you have the chops to learn Avid, the choice is self evident.

[Daniel Frome]

Working a lot with ProRes on 6.01, I feel that prores MXF is quite stable and relatively fast, but rendering effects and exporting is a little slower than DNxHD.

[Daniel Frome]

Edius does have a small but stable footprint in the news industry. As for why it didn’t grow bigger? I think it does over all have a little less capability then FCP7 or Avid. Back when I used it it will didn’t have 10bit support… but that’s been solved now. I’m not really sure to be honest.

[Daniel Frome]

I’ll just add my own personal story that Edius is indeed a monster. It rips through anything, faster than any other NLE.

I’m not a ‘freelancer’ in the sense that I use my home equipment very much, and therefore I’ve been happy to edit on FCP or Avid, which ever the television show has already set up.

However, I once edited a short piece on Edius and I can say with certainty: This was on a Core 2 Quad (non hyperthreading) with 8GB RAM … no matter how many FX and filters you throw at it, Edius screams. Even today, people say “oh you need a 12 core bla bla bla” — well I feel like I had already won that war with my home-made quad core system and Edius.

It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never seen/used it. Just about any NLE has a dedicated, expected render time, maybe even a bit of a delay when you’re scrubbing around the timeline, general slowness here or there. Edius, on the other hand, hardly ever does this. It seems that no matter effect, filter, or complex edit, you feel like the effect was already rendered to tape and you’re just shuttling back the playback to watch it. I actually like to refer to it more as if you’re a DJ with analog records… it feels very analog in a good way, in the sense that there’s no ‘computation time.’ Hope that makes sense.

[Daniel Frome]

So…solved.

When copying to/from “clip” folder, only select the MXF files. Accompanying XML files in CLIP folder, as well as proxies in Sub folder, are automatically generated upon writing to the disk.

[Daniel Frome]

Another update:

the CLIP folder contains MXF files and XML files.

Turns out that I can copy the MXFs back to the XDCAM disk just fine. But not the XML files.

However, when I copy over an MXF, the disk created a companion XML files automatically anyway.

So… I’m going to copy a whole disk full of MXF files into the clip folder (it’s taking about 25 minutes, not too bad) and see if the disk turns out OK. Fingers crossed.