Phil Lowe
Forum Replies Created
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“Humans are causing global warming”???
That’s like saying fish cause flooding and birds cause tornadoes (think about it).
Sorry, not interested in supporting junk science with my time or talent.
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Are there alternatives that are more stable in use? Thanks for your recommendations!!
I take by this you’re on a workstation and not a networked system, correct?
I can address the only other piece of software I use for the PC when it comes to editing: Avid Media Composer. It’s stable. It’s also nothing like Premiere Pro. Whole different workflow. I use both, occasionally using PPro when the need for simple DVD authoring arises, and I mapped my keyboard in PPro to work like my Avid keyboard. Much easier that way. If you go that route (mapping PPro keys to Avid’s) you may find the transition somewhat smoother to make.
Having noted all of that, I’m not a big Avid fan right now, as I am forced to use their really god-awful networked Newscutters at work, and – like you – am sick and tired of dealing with bugs and crashes much of the day. But that’s another story. Suffice to say if you stay away from Avid’s networked “solutions”, you may find Media Composer stable and – once you get used to it – even easy and fast to use, if you can swallow the initial cost.
I can’t address FCP: I don’t use Macs. Maybe someone else can tout its virtues. 🙂
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Media Composer won’t change this workflow, as it still depends on external/3rd party apps to seal the DVD deal.
You didn’t mention the purpose of the DVD. Is it for client approval or final presentation (with chapters, menus and such). If the former, just get a cheap DVD recorder from Best Buy, hook it up to the system, hit record and playback your timeline. That’s the fastest, most efficient way to do this.
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Well as an Avid licensee, once rabid supporter and now disgruntled user, I can only say this: I don’t care whether Avid attends NAB, does road shows, or sells out of the back of panel vans with the guys who do velvet paintings of Elvis. All I care about is whether their products actually WORK!
When you lose a whole day and a half of editing because their P2 consolidation workflow is precisely 180 degrees out of phase with what you would and should expect to do, then your software has problems. Until Avid fixes some of its software issues (I mean real engineered fixes and not half-a$$ed workarounds that users have to discover for themselves!), Avid should forget marketing and concentrate on making their products at least as bug-free as Premiere Pro 2.0!
The P2 problem is a real doozie! If you consolidate linking the master clips to the media on the target drive and try to consolidate from other P2 cards in the same bin later (as was the situation I recently encountered), the first set of consolidated master clips loses their links to the media on the target drive and returns to pointing at the P2 card reader!!!
When that happens, any previously consolidated media suddenly appears “offline” even though the media still exists on the target drive!
When I had a project that had 9 x 8gb P2 cards, plus media on a 60gb P2 storage drive, consolidating a second set of cards would cause all the media from the storage drive and previous cards to go offline!
It wasn’t until halfway through a second day of editing that I finally got an answer from broadcast support: don’t link master clips to media on the target drive!
OK, so if that workflow doesn’t work, why the hell is it not only an option, but the most logical of the two options provided for consolidating P2 media?!?!?
Want another Avid issue? Under General settings, selecting “NTSC has setup” causes the application to add setup (7.5% black) to incoming video. That’s fine if you’re bringing DV material in that possesses no setup. But when your Mojo is hooked up to a broadcast Sony SX deck with a TBC on the analog outputs that already adds setup, suddenly your video has 15% setup, not 7.5%!!!
I wrote Avid once and suggested that simply changing the wording on the setting from “NTSC has setup” to “NTSC needs setup” would go a lot farther in actually explaining what their software is doing when that option is selected! That suggestion was made at least two years ago, and as of this writing, nothing has been done to fix this!
How ’bout a Pan & Zoom plug-in that is such a memory hog, using it is likely to cause your Avid DNA device to stop working, forcing a shutdown of the entire program and reset of the Mojo or Adrenaline!!! I can run Combustion 4.0 rendering in the background and capture and edit with Avid in the foreground and not run into the kind of memory problems Avid has WITH ITS OWN PLUG-INS!!!
Avid is full of these kinds of traps and pitfalls that simply don’t exist in other applications. If Avid is in trouble, it’s because the marketing guys promise features and performance that the engineering guys can’t deliver. And – until fairly recently – their customer support and service was abysmally bad, too.
Sorry for the rant. Didn’t mean to hijack the thread, but I work with craptastic Avid Newscutters every day and am frequently left wondering how I’m actually going to get my work done. If my experience is any barometer for other people’s experiences with Avid, then Avid should stay away from NAB and any other potential customer until they get their stuff together!
Just my $.02.
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Do the clubs make Tiger Woods the best player in the world, or could he use the cheapest set of clubs made and still be number one?
Editing applications – like golf clubs – are tools. In the hands of a novice, even the best will produce crap. In the hands of a master, even the cheapest will produce excellence.
Stop thinking about which software is better and start focusing on how YOU can become better.