[Dino Sanacory]

Avid and FCP have fundamentally different core architectures for managing media files. An import into Avid generates a completely new file that represents a conversion of the source file into an Avid specific format. The codec used in the source file is irrelevant (as long as the system can decode it) as the imported media is a new, Avid formatted file. This form of this file is determined by the project settings.

FCP doesn’t really import media so much as create a link to it. You can place almost any type of media that QuickTime understands into an FCP sequence, regardless of codec, frame rate, frame size, sampling rate, etc… The downside to this is that if the file is not in the same format as the sequence, FCP will need to render it or do a poor real time conversion for playback.

MP3 is not a native Avid format. Importing them into an Avid simply converts them back into uncompressed media. This is essentially the same step you need to do for their use in FCP, except that it is here a manual process.

To add my opinion to the discussion, I don’t think allowing lower quality compressed material to work natively is a feature. Fast, portable mass storage via Firewire/USB is so cheap and easy to use, I feel that cost/convenience as an excuse to deliver compressed source material (especially audio) is unacceptable. The time it takes to convert everything to MP3s could just as easily be used to convert to 48K aiffs.

Dino Sanacory
Edgeworx, NYC