Anyone using Avid?

[mcmuffy]

I am after real world pro's and con's over Adobe Premier besides price.

[VideoPro]

The biggest platform agnostic hang out for pro video discussion is here: http://www.creativecow.net/

[VideoPro]

Avid bought Pinnacle a couple of years ago Swarf. I think they sold it again though. Some folks on the pro side swear by Pinnacle Liquid, can't stand it myself. Horrible interface and silly shortcuts - for example, F9 does an insert edit on everything else, but Pinnacle? Nooooo.

 

I had the chance to learn Avid in the 90's (Mac 9600s with a custom box of Avid stuff hooked via SCSI) but passed it up for our shiny new Quantel Editbox and HAL systems, they worked in full 1:1 422 digital -none of that compressed Avid AVR 70 rubbish. They are obsolete now, replaced by iQ but it was really buggy at first and hardly anyone bought it. iQ also runs on Windows and not the old custom UNIX, Quantel VPB OS. I moved to Final Cut Studio.

 

Premiere Pro is looking good though, they have gone beyond the constant crashes that happened when you so much as looked at the screen. It's very similar to Final Cut Pro 7 to operate and uses pretty much the same shortcuts. Although to use it to it's full extent and really make rendering a background task, you need a beefy machine and a very expensive Mercury Engine compliant graphics card.

 

Avid, as ever take their own route so people coming from FCP (or the other way round) often complain "Why doesn't it..."? It does. Just differently.

 

Most importantly, does your software of choice work with the video formats you shoot or might be expected to work with over the next couple of years? You can do DV on just about anything, HDV and AVCHD need something better than a cheap laptop. If you work with ProRes HQ, P2 or RED that needs an 8 core i7 or even better, multicore Xeons plus some seriously fast RAID storage and at least 16+ GB of RAM.

[VideoPro]

Mcmuffy, you should also read and post here: https://discussions.apple.com/community/professional_applications/final_cut_studio

 

It's a Final Cut support forum on apple.com but we are open for all kinds of stuff. Lots of the folks there use different solutions to get stuff done and the mods leave us alone because they either don't have a clue what we are talking about or are too busy deleting offensive posts in the iPhone area.

[VideoPro]

Good Avid - Premiere Pro comparison here: http://lfhd.net/

The author is highly respected and established Hollywood editor.

[VideoPro]

Avid Media Composer 6 works entirely in software and if you have a 64 Bit capable Mac or Win7 computer, there's a 30 day trial version: http://apps.avid.com/media-composer-trial/

It will certainly cut all consumer and prosumer formats easily.

 

The cluster based Avids are only really used in film production at 4k resolution but you will just about get away with 4K in MC 6 using a really fast RAID such as those from Burly, CalDigit or G|Tech. Bear in mind that it will cost about £25,000 for enough storage to hold 10 minutes of 4K though!! Then you need a film scanner to go back to celluloid (£150,000 starting price)...