Can anyone compare Avid to FCP & PP
 

Years ago in the BetaCam/SD only era, I used to edit on Avid Elite Expess Pro (I think that is what is was called). I got out of the business for a couple of years. When I came back, it was at a more consumer level than pro level. I tried editing with older (cheaper) versions of Premier, Liquid and Vegas. My first version of Premier was a closeout and cost me something like $39. Over the years, I wound up sticking with Premier since I found it easier for me to work with. I have gradually upgraded all of my equipment and have progressed to CS3. But I never felt like I developed the ability to be as creative an editor in PP CS3 as I was on the old Avid. I think subconciously, that I have avoided taking on large projects since I was never fully confident that I would produce something I would be really proud of in Premier Pro. I never felt that way when I was editing on the Avid. For some reason, it just seemed like the Avid knew what I wanted and it seemed easier to get the look I wanted. And I was confident that I could produce a terrific product. I am not that confident now.

Since Pinnacle Systems is killing off Liquid and I had an old version of Liquid, they are offering a deal to buy Avid Media Composer for cheap. So I am intrigued, but I also feel like I am at a crossroads. Do I want to try to take my editing to the next level and start seriously looking for commercial accounts again or just stay where I am now? Most of editors in this area use FCP and it seems to be the system of choice for many. One negative is that another guy who used to work with me on the old Avid went out on his own years ago. Since he was already familiar with Avid, he bought Media Composer with Mojo. But he never seemed to be happy with his system and Media Composer even though he did achieve pretty good success with it. He just recently migrated to FCP and he seems to be happy with the change. So are my good memories of editing on an Avid accurate? Is the Avid really magic? Or should I spend big bucks and go the popular route towards FCP? Or should I just stick with CS3 and spend my money upgrading to CS4 and learn how to get more out of it? If I did get Media Composer, would I be disappointed in the Avid without adding Nitris DX or Mojo DX? Are they really essential for editing HDV and XDCam EX footage? Or footage from anything else I might need to rent?

My current edit computer is a Core 2 quad PC with plenty of memory and storage. So it should be up to the task.

Great deal. I just saw it.

Only you can answer this.

It is. It's cheaper, very full featured, and is the choice of a great many independents. Doesn't necessarily mean it's better, though it certainly is at some things.

Magic? No. Fast? YES! Stable? YES! Avid is still the editor of choice in Hollywood. Especially for big films. And there is good reason for that.


I'll address this more in a second...


Mojo DX is just a box for input/output. Unless you're connecting to tape drives for capture, I wouldn't bother. Nitris adds some horsepower. For HDV and XDCam, I wouldn't bother. No idea what you'd be renting. But if you're renting anything less than $50k, I wouldn't bother.

You're computer is about 3 generations behind current at this point. Adobe is preparing CS5 and your computer won't come close to being ready for it. It's underpowered for the current version of Media Composer as well. And it would be pretty slow for Vegas too.

So to move forward, you are looking at a purchase of a high powered machine (PC or Mac) as well as new editing software. You'll get more mileage for you money with a PC, but that will lock you out of FCP. You could get a Mac, AND use the deal to get the Avid upgrade. And if you totally hated it, you could switch to FCP down the road. Or switch to Premiere.

Honestly, though I prefer PCs, in your position, the Mac offers you the most flexibility in terms of trying to decide your path. Avid MC is a joy to me. I've NEVER cut so fast. Not in Premiere, not in Vegas. It is an industry standard, and support is phenomenal. It is not perfect. Nothing is. If I was standing in your place, I'd take the risk on Avid and the Mac. And maybe give FCP a try later. For $495 for Avid, you can hardly go wrong. That's the deal of the decade right there. Essentially, the Academic bundle price.

Best of luck with your choice. Oh, and Avid offers a 30-day fully functional trial. That's how I got hooked on it. Give it a shot. There are no dongles any more, so you just download, install, and go.

I am in the exact same position as you. You probably never got to a point where you really gave Liquid a chance because once you figure it out, it was an awesome product. Hasn't had an upgrade in a couple of years and still way ahead than most NLE on the market. I've been using it (still am) for the past few years and I hate to see it go.

I have heard good things about MC and FCP systems but I hate Mac. I have been told by some that FCP would be more familiar to what I'm accustomed to. On the other hand, I have heard that once you figure out MC, it's great. I mean they cut movies on it, how bad can it be. If you're planning on working with people that use FCP then maybe you should consider that but right now a Mac Pro G5 is a pretty expensive option plus you have to buy FCS. MC has many tutorials out there to help you along. With the whole Liquid fiasco, I think they're going to bend over backwards to get people on board with the system. NAB is right around the corner. See what Avid does with MC 5. You have until June to make the purchase. You already have the system to handle MC and you're getting a hell of a lot for $500 bucks. I would suggest downloading the MC trial version. It's the full version and you have a 30 day trial. You have nothing to lose but time and you possibly have a lot to gain. Go to the Avid forum and talk to some people. All the Liquid people that went to MC are very helpful. I'm going to try it before I decide. My only problem right now is I don't have too much time. Let me know what you do. I may see you on the Avid forum.

As I finished, I see Perrone posted a similar suggestion. I do think your system is capable of running MC though. At least until you decide whether you want it.

I'm not saying he can't run it, but he'll be short on CPU, won't have a nitris box, and probably doesn't have a quadro card to help out either. For the cost of a hot quadro he's halfway to a solid PC. For the cost of a Nitris, he's paid the same for a hot PC WITH a Quadro.

After seeing what Media Composer did with my Avid spec machine with a Quadro FX 4800, I wouldn't want to cut with anything else.

I hear you. I'm hoping I like the trial. It's a great deal and I don't want to go to a Mac.

I am going to download the trial version and see how it feels. I hope it brings back those old good feelings I had with the other Avid, where I felt I was more of an artist and less of a mechanic.

I'm in the exact same boat
Love Liquid but have to think to the future.
Media Composer seems like a completely different beast. So it should be.
Liquid was developed by Fast and then Pinnacle. It was Avid that killed it off. They can take no credit for a brilliant NLE.
I'd rather be an artist too. I hope I can find an NLE that's nearly as good as Liquid.
There was supposed to be a 'NextGen' successor to Liquid. Presumably that has now been binned.
I had not idea about this deal. I will check it out. Hopefully it's good for us Europeans too.

AMC won't enable you to deliver a terrific product in a better way then FCP or Premiere can, it's mostly up to the editor behind the software. With adobe products the sky could be the limit in regard to being creative if you use their combined strength with premiere, photoshop, encore and aftereffects. (But premiere is not that stable with HD, especially with larger projects)
I don't know AMC but I guess that eventhough it's a solid editing tool you still need to invest into separate software to deliver more ceative stuff.
I have been able to do a multi-cam edit on a Canopus edius pro system two weeks ago and I thought I died and went to heaven, that must have been the easiest mulitcam edit I ever did, running several hdv streams on top of eachother converted with the canopus hq codec and with several color-corrections all in real-time on an older q6600 machine. Only their audio capabilities are not that good but it was rock solid during the edit.
I think Canopus edius pro is also a NLE that you could consider, a straightforward and very stable editor you could edit as fast as you think, once you get to know the most important keyboard shortcuts.
Maybe one more to consider but hard to sell as they don't offer a demo, that's Newtek's speededit, I would love to get my hands on a trial version to see if it delivers as they promise, especially because the software has a storyboard that's a big bonus. But Newtek is not that smart refusing to provide a trial, who would pay almost 1000 dollar if you can't play with it first?

Here is a link if anyone is interested in Avid. Liquid Update - A response from Kirk at Avid - Avid Video Community

Noa, Premiere is not even in the same category as MC & FCP. I have the Adobe Master collection and do not even use Premiere. It's not that good. I've heard good things about Edius but it's not as good as my current editor (Liquid) and they haven't had updates in a few years. Of course it is now declared EOL. I edit HDV without a problem, multi-cam is a snap, background rendering...I don't know what Avid was thinking. No matter what your using to edit you need plug-ins and different programs to make things better and be more artistic. For $500 you're getting MC, Boris Continuum, Sorenson Squeeze, etc. I don't know if that's the way I'm going but it is an awesome deal, especially if you're already PC based. Also, I heard Grass Valley was looking to sell. I don't want to plant my roots in another product that might go away.

Richard, at this point Nextgen will not be a Liquid replacement. I now feel it will be a Studio replacement. We've been spoiled with Liquid. While MC is a completely different animal, as a Liquid user, you have a great advantage. First, the $500 deal. Second, someone that had used Liquid, and moved to MC, has made tutorials that help with the transition over. Avid also has some tutorials. Go to the Liquid and Avid forum and people will be more than happy to help get you going. There are going to be a lot of newbies.

I was only referring to it's strength in regard to other product integration like encore, photoshop and after effects, That it's not the same category as MC as an NLE I agree but compared to FCP, especially if you take the integration possibilities of adobe products into account, I don't see FCP being in another category.

Agreed. Great integration with both products.

OMG. This has got me really worried. It's the first I have heard about. I haven't had any notification from Avid and I see that the deadline for registration has passed.
I do have the paid-for, full version of Liquid 7.2 with a validation number so the fact that I've heard nothing from Avid makes me wonder if I have fallen off their radar.
It's my problem. I'll try to sort it out.
But it makes me feel a bit sick that I've stuck with Liquid awaiting news of 'nextgen' and I only find out by chancing across this posting on DV Info that 'nextgen' is not going to happen and that Liquid is being completely dumped.

Richard, I think they're dealing with the U.S. registrations first. I would keep checking the Avid site.

As far as Nextgen goes, that's a sore subject with a lot of us. I'm highly pissed off but I have to move on. Good luck. I'll let you know if I see anything you may need to do. Go to the Liquid site frequently.

Thanks Rob. I've logged on, checked the box to 'receive email from Avid' and have sent an email to Marianna, who seems to be co-ordinating this project. Fingers crossed.

Perrone, I understand what you're saying. But the OP may not realize that MC really is quite fast on even under-CPU'd machines using GeForce cards.

It's kind of odd that Avid is known for needing hardware acceleration and yet is (in my experience) the fastest software-only NLE by a wide margin. I actually think there is a pretty good chance his computer is up to the task.

One need only look at the fact that Avatar was edited on hardware purchased in 2007 to understand what Media Composer can do. And they were running old versions of Media Composer... 3.1.2 if I remember right. How funny is it that Avatar was edited on a version of Media Composer that was not 3D! They didn't want to upgrade in the middle of editing.

I think after all of my time editing I have finally come to the conclusion that one needs to edit with what works for the edit task. I know that has been said over and over and is stating the obvious.

At my job here at NASA/JSC/Jacobs, we have five editing platforms. Avid MC 4.04, Edius NEO for quick turn AVCHD testing footage, Vegas for importing strange cell-phone and consumer formats that come in the door (it will import anything) , FCP for when the Avid is busy, and Premiere, which a few IT guys use to edit down productions for flash presentations. All legit and different.

What I realized recently is that most media pros, for example 3D animators or flash programmers aren't needing to do what I call "advanced editing". 90% of the time they just need to trim a few clips, convert to a format, or slam together a presentation. Not much narrative or commercial style editing going on with them.

Most of the them can't comprehend or could care less about 3 point editing, or tracking hours and hours of footage. Trimming? They would tease me about trimming 3 frames.

So, after trying to train a couple of guys here on Avid, and expecting them to have a "eureka" moment on Avid media management, i got a ho hum. They finally said, oh we hired you to do the "long form" edit jobs and hard stuff, so we don't need Avid, you need Avid. Yes, I do.

Now I hilariously have experience with five platforms but use Avid for 70% of my work.

BTW, I agree with Peter that Avid's performance since version 3 is much faster and robust, even without hardware acceleration.

Sorry for the long post.

David - I think you're assessment is fairly good. I work in a small TV production situation. I have AVID at home, work with FCP and Vegas at work. Different NLE's have their strengths and weaknesses. The key is to figure out what your MAIN workflow will entail. Short clips, compressed for web? Mixed media reformated and transfered to web? LONG FORM documentary or feature work? Figure out what you need by figuring out what the bulk of your deliverables will be.

I agree, David - a pretty accurate assessment.

I've been an FCP editor predominantly for 11 years and at my former 9 - 5 (at a teaching hospital) most of the stuff WE shot got edited in an FCP bay but every now and again, clients would come in with some bizarre consumer/web footage that FCP just didn't like so I'd boot up an aging seat of Premiere and hobble through it (due to MY inexperience with Premiere).

And no need to apologize for "a long post" when the signal-to-noise ratio is that high!

Along these lines:

I moved from PP to Vegas as I moved to HD. I intend to stay with Vegas but have found it has a little trouble on long projects. Last one was a 2hr 20 minute Hd.

I have always felt one needs two systems. I am considering AMC and Edius.

I have looked at tutorials for both.

On a long project I would like to preview from the timeline in real time. Mostly hdv, a few composites, color correcting.

I use a I7 920 quad, 10 gigs of ram, vista 64 bit.

Am I capable of doing this stabely (without hardware) with MC or edius for that matter.

Intend to make this move in the next month.


Does MC do a good job rendering down to SD too?



Dale

MC is picky about videocards. nVIDIA is usually a good match. Avid recommends the Quadro FX series, but many people use GeForce cards just fine.

I don't know what videocard you're using, but otherwise, your system looks plenty fast for MC w/o any additional hardware.

Agree. The nice thing about Avid is that it seems to be able to take a look at whatever you've got... CPU, RAM, Video Card, external hardware, and use it ALL to help itself. Run of the mill quadros are all THAT expensive any more. Of course you can spend $3k on one if you want, but you can get into one for a few hundred dollars. But if I wasn't doing a lot of 3d effects, I don't know that I'd plunk down so much money on one.

Video cards
 

I confess that I am not a tweek. About a week before I received the EOL notice, my NVidia card in my edit computer died. I took it into a friends shop who does computer repairs. He said he had seen more failures with NVidia video cards than any other brand. He sent me to Best Buy to get whatever I wanted but he advised against NVidia. So I bought an ATI Radeon HD 4650. It has 1GB of GDDR2 memory and it does seem to perform better than my old NVidia ever did. Will this video card work with Avid or did I just waste my money?

1. If you can display video, you did not waste your money. But that money would have likely been better spent on an Nvidia card.

2. I've had Nvidia cards forever in many machines. None have failed. EVER. But, I don't make a habit of buying the cheapest card on the market either. And lots of manufacturers use NVidia chipsets. Some are certainly better than others.

3. I don't know that I'd be taking advice on a video editing workstation's hardware from "a guy down the street". If you want to spec a machine to run Avid well, call Avid. They can tell you what works well. I've read more horror stories about ATI drivers and issues than I can shake a stick at. I wouldn't take one for free. Not on a PC. On the Mac they appear to be the card of choice. Avid specifies NVidia. Adobe's new software specifies NVidia. RED's tools for the PC specify NVidia. Edius does it's magic with NVidia. Nearly the entire video market on the PC is specifying Nvidia cards because of the CUDA processor many of them have. It's quickly becoming a standard with people developing graphics and video acceleration around it.

I'd see if I could do an exchange personally. Comparing the speed of a brand new ATI card to and old video card... well I sure HOPE its lots faster.

Perrone, thanks for the info. However, I never said the advice was "from a guy down the street". Actually, my friend's primary business is repairing computers. His business processes something like 100 repairs a day. He has maintanance agreements for several large corporations. Including some Fortune 500 companies. Ironically, his true passion is video. But I guess he can make more money with his computer repair business. He has directed, shot and edited several videos including a recent music video shot on Red. When he diagnosed the problem with my computer, I was surprised that he recommended getting something besides NVidia since all of my previous experiences had been good.

You did not indicate at any time that your friend had any experience in video. Merely fixing computers. Just because the guys down the street can change the tires on my Ferrari, doesn't mean that I would expect them to know how to race one. You see what I'm saying?

And if your friend has RED experience, then he should be well familiar with the need for Nvidia cards in some markets, though if you had leanings toward Avid and he was unfamiliar with Avid, that might not have been on his mind.

In any event, your video card might work with Avid, but it will not offer any acceleration.

Well,

my I7 has a 3450hd ATI card.

It appears I will need to change that, obviously with one with morre ram on it.

Without spending a fortune, what invidia cards would you recommend?

What's "a fortune"? My card was $1500, I consider that expensive. Some people consider $200 expensive. So you'll have to clarify a bit more.


Is that too much?


Maybe this one?




What are you going to hook to this thing? 2 flatpanels? Do you need HDMI? Is displayport ok or do you need DVI?

And for the really cheap card, people have been using GeForce 6800's. Sometimes you have try to force the computer to use the Quadro drivers w/ a GeForce and sometimes you don't.

Like Perrone said, an ATI might work, so give it a shot. If not, install the nVIDIA driver that Avid recommends for the version of MC you'll be running and connect the video card you want to try to use. Using a recommended Quadro, even a low-end one, does eliminate the videocard from the equation when troubleshooting. But a lot of people do use nVIDIA gaming cards just fine.

My personal opinion is that if a cheap Quadro cost only a few $100 more than go for it. There are better ways to save $200, JMHO.

P.S. What do I use? Both, LOL! I have a Quadro and a GeForce for a second card all running off of the Quadro drivers, so I have a four monitor setup, which is kind of cool.

Video Card
 

At B&H the nvida fx 580 is just $170. Its better for the purpose than any lower end card.

rm