Flash XDR & Avid Media Composer 4.0

[Mark Job]

Hi Friends:
On September 30th, Avid will officially release Media Composer 4.0. This is a *significant* upgrade to this program. I think Avid has finally woken up to the fact that there is such a thing as Final Cut Pro ;-) This version of MC is *universally media independent.* In other words, it no longer matters if you have an SD or HD project. It no longer matters if you have twelve different clips with all different frame rates and resolutions (Including PAL, ATSC, and NTSC) - just drop them on the timeline and they will play instantly with no rendering. No transcoding for digital cut or DVD output. There is no recompressing of the video data. Whatever you set the project to be on NTSC SD or Pal or HD ATSC or whatever ! It doesn't matter anymore ! Since Avid MC 3.x already worked with Flash XDR files, I'm assuming it will again with version 4.x I will have 4.X soon and will run a test with my XDR to confirm. I will also have FCS 7.0 sooner and test this out as well. Has anyone with an XDR had a chance to test the files with FCS 7.0 yet ?

[Alister Chapman]

NanoFlash .MOV's are just fine in FCS7. I just wish Avid would improve their now somewhat dated and inflexible interface.

[Mark Job]

Originally Posted by Alister Chapman

NanoFlash .MOV's are just fine in FCS7. I just wish Avid would improve their now somewhat dated and inflexible interface.

....Yeah. Avid is still heavily into that Online - OFFline Paradigm. I understand this well and it is essential to approach a film edit this way, because there's no other way to do it unless you want to edit directly with the ultra high Digital Intermediate 4 K files and then spit that out to negative after. I think we're close to this now with Avid and FCP. As soon as the MAC Pro gets to be a little more powerful, then I think we'll be there. The HP z800 PC actually *is* a little more powerful, but not quite enough to deal with 4K DI in realtime (AMC and FCP use the proxy files for DI and Red code). Pretty soon we'll need Convergent D to turn on the Full Uncompressed mode on the XDR so we can shoot 24 F uncompressed to edit and go straight out to film. One thing FCP needs to *not* do is take a lesson from Avid and not *recompress* video in certain editing ops on the timeline. Although FCP 's re-com is fantastic, it is still a video re-com, thus degredation is at hand. However the two new codecs up to 4:4:4:4 at least offers the possibility to work in this mode. Imagine if the Flash XDR or the nanoFlash could capture in the FCP 4 x 4 codec when they go uncompressed ? In uncompressed mode I would think the XDR would be bypassing their Sony MPEG encoding engine, thus freeing them up to wrap their files into other uncompressed codecs, or RAW data capture. RAW data capture would also be really cool, because then we could wrap the XDR RAW files ourselves by importing this data into our FCP or Avid systems.