Running Avid on XP 64bit System
 

Hi,

I'm in the process of specing out a new Avid editing PC. I was wondering if anyone as tried run Avid Xpress DV pro or MC 3.5 on Windows XP pro 64bit verson?

Why XP 64bit - I use Lightwave 3D v9.6 but it's not very stable on vista and I need to increase my rendering times. plus most of my software will not work on vista. So, I'm also getting the Adobe CS4 Production bundle.

The other question is do 32bit programs work fine in the 64bit enviroment (but they will not take full advantage 64bit processing and additional memory?)

If anyone can help that would be cool - willing to post the new PC specs if you need them.

Thanks Mark

I just installed AMC 3.5 onto Win7 RC1 64-bit. It seems to work quite well, no problems yet.

interesting, Is windows 7 ment to be more compatible with old programs? It does sound positive, let us of any issues.

I don’t think XP 64 is supported by Avid, just Vista 64 business. I also just installed 3.13 on Win 7 RC1 64, works fine. Render times with Win 7 64 are faster than with Vista 64.

I was considering working with amc 3 with my I7 920 quad with 6 gigs of Ram, running vista home premimum 64 bit.

I work primarily in HDV, converted to cineform avi for color correcting then out put to blu ray.

Will that be a reasonable work flow for amc on my system?

Dale,

Home Premium may be an issue, but I think it should be okay.

I don't think you'll need Cineform. MC works with native HDV footage quite well, and you can trascode HDV to one of Avid's ten bit color DNxHD formats. This will give you the color correction latitude of ten bits.

Do realize that Avid is very videocard picky. Many nVIDIA GeForce cards will work. But nVIDIA Quadro FX is recommended.

The plus side of this is that MC is an absolute beast when it comes to working w/ HD material. Much faster than I've found Vegas to be.

thanks for the information,

I really have come to appreciate Vegas, however the 64 bit issues are driving me crazy.

alswo I have found it is always good to have more than one editing system to rely upon!! I have adobe 1.5 which I virtually never use any more so no sense of upgrading.

Curiously, how tuff is the transition to Avid??

I ended up going to school to learn Avid. It's a tough UI to learn, but, once you get it, you get it. There's a million, or at least a gazillion, undocumented shortcut keys that I keep discovering. I think the whole editing process can be handled by the keyboard if one sets it up that way. The UI is completely user configurable, more so than any other NLE I know. CC is a snap, as is the cutting/editing process. The biggest drawback I see to Avid is that it's very hardware specific. If the hardware is set up properly, tho', Avid has never let me down.

As much as I've wanted to, I still can't really get comfortable with editing in Vegas. I'll keep on working at it. Avid was more intuititve to me, but it's still taken quite a bit of time to feel even reasonably comfortable with it. Mostly because I had to hunt and peck for training and to get ?'s answered (thanks MUCH Bill and others here for all your help ;)).

MC comes with a very good set of tutorials right in the box. I found the book "Editing with Avid Xpress Pro and Avid Xpress DV" very helpful, even though it for a version from about four years ago. I also very muched liked Steve Hullfish's Class on Demand DVD for Media Composer.

Avid's biggest draw back IMHO is that it user interface's most basic features feel very old, e.g. windows can't be docked. It doesn't handle like other modern Windows apps in many ways b/c it was essentially ported over to Windows, not natively developed in it.

That said, once you get past some of the idoyscracies, it's very fast to use. And performance wise, it just blows Vegas away. It's tools also fee professional. Like Bill said, its CC toolset can do a lot (but not as much a Apple's Color :().

It also comes with over $2K of professional grade effects and 3D motion software free: Boris Continuum and Boris Red, a.k.a. Avid FX. Avid has two titlers. The more advanced one, Marque, is outrageously powerful. It has a voice recognition app, ScriptSync, that can match dialog to a script and allows you to edit from inside the script document; amazing but rarely used, LOL.

Audio is not nearly as good as Vegas's but it's easy to use and good enough for most editing jobs. I tend to revert back to DVD Architect, but Avid DVD is pretty good FWIU. And Sorenson Squeeze for compression to DVD, web, etc. is very highly regarded. (These two progs also come free w/ Media Composer.)

Oh, depending on your camera, firewire capture and deck control can work well or be buggy. A few times I've had to capture in Vegas and then import the files into Avid. I find having both programs helpful.

HTH.

One of Avid's favorite features is the ability to output the timeline to QT Reference. Very much like a frameserver, requires no rendering of output. A very fast way to export to a variety of delivery software like MPEG_Streamclip, DVD Architect, Procoder, Squeeze, TMPGENC, After FX, etc.