[Steve Clark]

Daniel,
I’m in broadcast & I havn’t worked on a totally stable editor since the Sony BVE910. The BVE9100 had problems, the DNE2000’s had problems, Avid MC Meridian had problems, Newscutter Adrenaline had lots of problems (but got better). Right now I work with PC NC Adrenaline X2, a NC Adrenaline HD and MC Adrenaline HD on Unity. Guess what, every now & then I still run into problems. But I know this, with Avid, there’s never been a job I didn’t think I could do, there’s never been a job that I thought I could do better or faster on another editor (apart from in real time on a 9100), and I’ve never lost more than 20 min of work due to a crash, and nothing that was a show stopper. We used MC Adrenaline X5, Airspeed X2 on Unity with Interplay for the F1 GP this year – worked like a dream. File transferred our cut pieces to EVS Xfile for on-air replay. I don’t even know if a setup like that is possible with FCP. Just finished work on a job where we recorded 12 camera ISO’s on HDCAM. The production company got in a brand new HD FCP system for the project that we heard was dropping frames on capture, a wee bit frustrating for them with all that footage to get in. But to be fair, this comany has turned around some really nice high-end projects on FCP. Neither system is perfect, even with an expensive service contract. Both will bring times of utter frustration. So I think it comes down to what you want to do with it. If you’re mainly working on one system in a small group, then until recently, I would have said maybe FCP has too big a cost advantage to overlook. But for really big scalable shared jobs and live production the choice has never been anything other than Avid. I also look at it this way, now that the competition is heating up, which one has the most to loose if they get it wrong.