Avid announces new product: Avid Studio

[Dan Asseff]

Originally Posted by Richard Gooderick

Interesting to learn that Liquid may have survived in some form at least.
I had to migrate to Media Composer when Avid discontinued Liquid.
But Liquid was a hugely elegant, intuitive and efficient example of great software design. I miss it badly.
If the Liquid team have designed this it is well worth checking out.

Richard,

I too, took the upgrade to MC5 but I am having the hardest time learning it. I have the NX5 and a PD170 and am shooting HD and SD 4:3 with the NX5 so I can still edit with liquid. How are you and others learning MC5?

Dan
Forever Moments Video Productions

[Philip Howells]

Originally Posted by David Parks

I doubt that multicam will be offered at $169.00 price point. That would be too good to be true.

I tend to agree with David's logic, on the other hand I wonder if anybody knows if there's the possibility of a third party plug in that will offer a multicam operation - I seem to recall that early versions of Premiere had such an option.

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Dan Asseff

Richard,

I too, took the upgrade to MC5 but I am having the hardest time learning it. I have the NX5 and a PD170 and am shooting HD and SD 4:3 with the NX5 so I can still edit with liquid. How are you and others learning MC5?

Dan
Forever Moments Video Productions

I've had to make a clean break from Liquid as much as possible and force myself to learn MC. Liquid was certainly much easier to learn than MC. I have found that learning the keyboard shortcuts and using them is the key to efficiency in MC (for your basic cutting). I'm still learning my way around the effects editors.

The one thing I've had to get reasonably proficient at is figuring out how to get different format media in the same project. Where you could injest any resolution directly into any project in Liquid you can't do that with MC. You can only injest video into a project that matches the project setup resolution/framerate. After you have the media in a BIN you can open that BIN in the main project. Not exactly a streamlined workflow.

I'll be interested to see what is going to happen with the new Avid Studio product. I was a member of a team of users that was working on the Liquid replacement project before Jan left Avid and the organization of the project changed. We weren't exactly beta testers but more like focus group participants. We got to see NextGen while it was being written and looks like the UI being shown is the same as what we were shown. It was a radical departure from Liquid and more like Studio. They did say the new version would complete the merger of the underlying engine between Studio and Liquid.

One of the features they teased us with at the last meeting we had was the speech recognition. You could search your media library for phrases from a text search box. I see that is now an option in MC 5.5. Curious to see how much of what they showed us will make into the released version.

If some of what we were shown makes it into Avid Studio it will be really nice. Not having multicam editing would be a big negative in my book. They were also not going to support so called "professional" camera workflows like P2 and XDCam. The group lobbied heavily for those to be included. They seemed to soften to the idea. I hope they decided to not exclude those camera options.