[Daniel Frome]

Cineform is a great codec, basically a good substitute for DNxHD for AVID and ProRes for FCP. I don’t have too much experience with it, though.

An annoying factor is that an out-of-house artist may not have the codec…and then you’re stuck re-encoding their work.

In my opinion I would rather leave third-party codecs out of the equation when possible.

[Daniel Frome]

“Needs to be able to edit DPX, XDCAM, DSLR.”
Both Can do that.

“*Work with Resolve”
I haven’t heard of Ppro successully doing this.. so I’m not sure. Resolve is supposed to support AAF… while AVID’s AAF export seems solid, I haven’t had a single successful AAF export from Premiere myself.

“*Footage will need to be sent for compositing in either Nuke or Fusion. Rarely After Effects.”
AVID will be an advantage here, since you could get your artists to encode straight into DNxHD format. Premiere doesn’t have it’s own “format” … which can somewhat be annoying when picking a format to render to and not wanting to say “uncompressed”. The DNxHD codecs are a free download for all users, whether they own avid products are not, mac or windows — it’s all the same. Of course… you could always import those DNxHD files into Premiere … but you wouldn’t get the same real-time performance that way.

“If it matters, applications such as Maya, 3DS Max and Lightwave are often used in such projects.”
Same advice applies here as above.

[Daniel Frome]

“MC5 blows and Avid has done very little in the past few years.”
Yikes… Media Composer 5.5 is very good actually.

AVID is a pain to learn, because it’s quite different from FCP and keeps a lot of the old school editing terms and thought processes.

That being said, take a seasoned FCP editor and an equal AVID editor and leave them off to the races… the AVID editor nearly always finishes first. MC 5.5 still lags behind in the rendering department (both in real time effects and especially outputting to file formats) but it cuts faster. It also has some extra editing tricks/techniques that you’ll hurt over when switching back to FCP (yes… that’s right… us editors will still be using both for a long time, gasp!).

So… if you don’t want to go the FCPX route I guess you must also be thinking Premiere Pro CS5.5 ? It’s also pretty rockin…

[Daniel Frome]

I own both CS 5.5 and Media Composer 5.5.

This year alone (before this FCPX issue) I considered both of them my favorite, but for different reasons.

If you do a lot of smaller projects (commercials, generally anything under 20 minutes) then Premiere Pro is probably your best bet — because those projects tend to be short turn-around and heavier on graphics. As a sandbox editor (something you just mess/playing around in) it’s more fun than AVID. However…

I know that a previous poster said they liked Adobe for their metadata — but I’m sorry to disagree and share that I actually ended up preferred AVID for metadata-sake.

And even more funny… AVID’s biggest ‘feature’ that wins over myself and my clients is the AVID timecode generator: able to show filenames of video and audio clips on screen and a whack load of other features beyond just showing timecode. This feature has always carried some nerdy humor for me because AVID invended this generator what..like 10 years ago? I bet not even AVID knows the money they’ve made from that small feature… gets’em every time…

[Daniel Frome]

You do realize that the AVID $995 deal is still going on right? I know the date is officially past, but plenty of retailers are still doing it (videoguys.com comes to mind). If you’re having doubts why not just do it? It might not be the most pretty editor, but it’s a guarantee to handle your tasks.

[Daniel Frome]

No it doesn’t

[Daniel Frome]

Why so afraid? Media Composer 5 is actually a really good program. Once you get over the cursing and frustration from learning it (which, believe me, won’t be easy) you’ll wonder how you got by without it.

[Daniel Frome]

The “hate” is actually a pretty reasonable reaction considering that this is a professional forum and many people have a lot riding on features that FCPX has omitted. I won’t bore you with a list of them because all the responses here are rife with answers.

It’s a great and powerful editor with a lot of missing features that we’ve come to rely on.

[Daniel Frome]

I think he’s stating a non-mercury rendering in 5.5 is worse than 5.0.

[Daniel Frome]

Kevin –

I never got to thank for you for your help!

Is there a way to automate this process for say…several hundred clips? For example — importing a whole bunch of files, creating comps for each file with a text layer over each one and then applying this expression to burn-in the comp name?