[Rhewitt]

Sure, some clients are abandoning the Avid product line. For some the workgroup features are overkill, some just need a simple, cheaper, standalone edit station but there are quite a few now having to explain to their Financial Directors why the FC system they just bought doesn’t now do what they had wanted it to do.

NAB for Avid showed the new releases of existing products and integration with third party providers in addition to the launch of Media Network 5.0. These products were aimed at the higher professional and broadcast markets as a complete end-to-end solution and there are very few systems available that can achieve this. Apple is no where near this stage yet but it is a very good standalone editor with the capability of external storage and this is competition for some of the Avid Editing client systems.

ISIS is the preferred newer workgroup storage system for Avid’s editing systems and to date no-one has the capacity of the storage or bandwidth to compete with this. With a SAN (read Apple) storage server, the bigger it gets, the slower it gets and the bandwidth reduces. With ISIS the bigger it gets, the faster it gets and the wider the bandwidth.

Once Apple come up with a real shared storage system and can provide global support for the product, then the challenge will be on and I’m sure Avid are planning way beyond this.

But hey, I mentioned Avid again!! Sorry.

[Rhewitt]

Hi Renato,

No problem with this spec.

Transfer from camera via firewire will be lossless.
Editing in Premier Pro with the MS codec will preserve the image.
Converting back to DV will incur a slight drop in quality but not significantly.
Transfer into DV camera will not add any additional compression post via firewire.

What you are doing is a standard DV workflow used by many, many folks out here.

Happy editing,

Richard.

[Rhewitt]

Avid… all I can say is the train left the station, and they forgot to buy their ticket. There’s little an FC or CS3 suite, can’t match, or beat.

Wow, really?

Then why is the majority of the world editing on Avid systems against FC and PPro.

The big differentiator is Avid produces a system solution for standalone and workgroups. Premier Pro is stand alone only and always will be. It is not designed to share media in a workgroup environment. FC is a standalone application with the option to store media in a central location – that doesn’t mean it is designed for sharing or workgroup use.

What Avid have produced is a product based on the original Media Composer concept that is available in many versions ranging from the top end hardware accelerated Nitris through hardware accelerated standalone or true workgroup Media Composer and down to software and/or hardware assisted versions for Broadcast Newsrooms and right down to a fully FREE, non-time limited version. Regardless of which version you buy into, the interface and workflow is the same for all. It is a true broadcast grade, professional system.

Try mixing media formats on the same timeline and see which system runs in realtime (including software only versions) with the original media. Err, nope… FC has to render in advance and PPro has to convert to AVI. All Avid systems can even do a mix/dissolve on the timeine between formats without any additional rendering in realtime.

We should perhaps drop Avid from this thread. Premier Pro is the competitor that has to challenge the improvements in FC2.

Edius is an interesting product with some stations taking it on. It’s an evolving product but has little market outside of Asia.

Am I biased? Well, no, I edit at home with PPro but have come up with so many fundamental problems (audio being the biggest issue) with this app that I have recently moved my home system to Media Composer. It wasn’t cheap but it just works without any of the issues I’ve had with PPro. I might also add I’ve edited with Avid systems in a broadcast environment for a long time and tried three iterations of Premier in an effort to find a cheaper, though less capable, solution to save money. In the end I could have bought Media Composer and the hardware it runs on for around the same price I’ve paid Adobe over the years.

I’ll still be sticking with After Effects and Photoshop so I’m not knocking Adobe. It’s just a case of using the most suitable tool for the job.

[Rhewitt]

Hi Renato,

A lot depends on your workflow and the video formats used. Could you let us know:

1. What VTR?
2. What video format is the original tape?
3. What video editor are you using?
4. What video format are you editing in?
5. What video format do you need for your finished tape?

There are many folks here who can help but we just need a little more information.

Best Regards,

Richard.

[Rhewitt]

You may be able to get this to work using a Matrox MXO box:

Matrox MXO

No guarantee though.

The Dell M70 used to be supported by Avid. I’m not sure of the Dell M90 has been qualified as yet. More info can be found on the Avid website.

[Rhewitt]

Take a look at the following link and you’ll find the most likely reason you’re getting this error:

Error : ADM_DSOUND_MIXER_OPEN_ERROR

Remember the specs of your machine must meet the Avid specs to be guaranteed to work.

[Rhewitt]

You’re quite right Steven. Every business is in the market to make a profit and the easiest route to profit will be the one taken by any sensible board. While it’s great that we as customers, whether professional or serious amateur, get to use some great software that helps us do our job, the company are in it only to make money.

However, their market is limited in the video field. Sure After Effects is used by broadasters around the world and that also includes many of the animation and FX houses – the reason? It is the market leading product with good reason and has a long pedigree.

Take Premier Pro, it has a pedigree of sorts but it isn’t the market leader as far as broadcast and serious professional users are concerned. By far the dominant video editor is Avid’s Media Composer and Express Pro products. It started as a MAC product because at the time it was the most suitable platform. It’s available again on the Mac Intel platform in addition to the dominant Windows base.

Avid is a major player in the film and broadcast world due in part to their class leading product but also by its long, long pedigree. Media Composer was produced to enable film editors to work in a non-linear process, dramatically reducing the time to complete editing and saving a packet in the process. The big production houses saw the benefit and bought into it big time. History of a reliable, stable, cost-saving product is what made Avid’s name. 98 of the most recent 100 feature films released were edited with Avid’s products. The high-end systems that use hardware in addition to software to speed the realtime edit process cost money. Again it’s a limited market but like any company it has to recover development and professional support costs AND make a profit.

Due largely to the way Premier Pro handles audio (stereo or stereo), it has not been taken up by those companies with big budgets and the ability to give a product a truely professional name. Stereo audio is an output format only and always has been. It is now too late for Adobe to get this product into a higher-end market because after several iterations of the product, it still does not handle audio in the way that the market needs.

Now take Final Cut, it runs on a variant of Linux – a good move on the part of Apple as it allows a distinction between a Windows PC and a MAC – great for marketing. They control the hardware, again a good move for compatability. They control the price and for ANY company that has this level of control you pay a premium price. Final Cut is being used by many serious and professional editors. Why? Because it is being marketed as a lower price entry point into professional editing. It doesn’t have a long pedigree yet. The BBC have dabled with it, infact some documentaries are being produced using it. But, and a big but at that, it has failed to date in the broadcast market because it is not designed as a true workgroup product. Sure you can stick a large SAN in front of it but reports back from those that have tried this method have realised that it just doesn’t work properly. You cannot share media in the way that the broadcasters need – media is locked whenever it is being accessed. All other broadcast grade systems allow access to the media in both read AND write simultaneously. The whole point of non-linear editing systems designed for multiple users is the sharing of media in realtime and by many people at the same time.

Final Cut will most likely stay in the market that most Premier Pro users sit in. That is the competition for Adobe and it is a Linux derivative.

So Adobe needs to take stock. They have a real competitor on the editing front on a platform they haven’t supported for a long while. Only now are the Adobe apps coming back to the MAC after the move to the Intel platform.

Is it native code for the MAC? I would hope so after the disaster of the first couple of releases of GoLive, which were an appaling port from a MAC code base to Win32.

If Adobe see their Prem Pro competition as being Final Cut then that is what they’ll go for especially as they can once again develop a common code base and port in either direction.

Will Adobe fully grasp the Linux platform. I very much doubt it – Linux on a PC has far too many variables to support reliably. As for a set and controlled platform? Yes and that is the Intel MAC.

[Rhewitt]

Mmm, you’re between a rock and a hard place with Linux. Yes it’s stable, quick and free – unless you want real support and for most professional companies, support is critical used or not. Few companies will sign-off a large purchase order for anything unless a support contract is in place. Take a broadcaster for example, sure some will go for the cheap as possible option but many, many others prefer a fully supported route.

Red Hat provide that support for the OS but little else? Who would anyone turn to with problems with Adobe Apps? They can’t even support their exiting buyers for the Win platform and are very rarely upfront when there are issues. No company can sit around with kit not working while there’s staff to be paid and clients hovering over their shoulders.

Yes, some and I say SOME, animation and FX companies have moved to Unix/Linux but the majority are simply for render farms. Imagine having 2,000 workstations crunching away at renders – think of how many Windows licenses that would require! Cost again is the reason.

Many higher order FX routines are written in ‘C’ and that sits well with Unix and Linux – much of the same running on a Windows platform requires use of the Windows APIs for the GUI or access to memory or files – it’s just easier on a Unix/Linux box.

For Linux to be taken more seriously by the PC using population who have mostly grown-up on Windows, it needs to shed its geeky image, drop the dumb names for applications and move into the same world that the potential customer moves in. When that happens it’ll make the big application houses sit up and listen.

Am I a Windows user? Sure I am – that’s what my applications run on. And Linux? Yes I use that too for the apps and server applications I use everyday for my job, but then it’s a specialist job in the Feature Film & Broadcast TV industry and even then most of our client applications run on Windows.

[Rhewitt]

The only real way of removing the wind noise is to filter it out. Most wind noise is low frequency rumble and a higher frequency component, which is often around the same range as vocals. This is the reason professional mics (shotguns) used for vocal recordings are very directional and held in a shock absorbing mount with a wind shield. Most wind shields that touch the mic itself are a waste of time.

You could use the parametric equaliser in PPro and adjust the filter response to eliminate as much of the noise at both ends of the scale as you can.