Avid Media Composer M1 Native

[Ara Kistner]

JasonLevine wrote this piece for PVC and did an excellent video all about it. He explains it way better than me! Jason is an Adobe Evangelist and he is often seen at events promoting Adobe which is where I met him at a FPUG meeting.

ive always loved Fcp, everything is exacly where i want it to be,

but the mercury enginge sounds damn interesting, hate waiting for renders!

And editing direcly out of the camera, what a nice timesaver! especially out in the field!

I have a big feeling that with all these HDDSLRS out and more to come that FCP will have native support as well, maybe fcp8. But even though i would still as mentioned above or below however this works is still convert to a higher format like prores then edit.

Agreed Philip. FCP is a venerable tool but Apple has let it get too far behind the game. Recently, while editing together a reel for a small local film festival, I was working on Macs with only FCP installed. I was stunned at how few choices I had for source footage formats (*nothing* in an AVI or WMV container? Seriously?) and also at how many very basic effects had to be rendered before I could see them on the timeline.

OMG please please please give us as many updates as possible, and any tips you have! Our studio is considering switching to Premiere CS5 for the same reasons. Let us know if the jump is worth the risk! Thx

Unfortunately, the trial version of Premier CS5 does NOT include the codecs required to edit HDDSLR files natively. You will actually have to purchase the software and enter the license KEY, which will then install the necessary codecs. Works fantastic on the new Intel i7-980X machine I just pieced together.

-fast-computer-for-video-editing

Hmm. Maybe we are splitting hairs here. If your Sequence Preset is DV-PAL or any different codec than your HDDSLR format, then I believe Premier will render the timeline to that preset prior to export, as your have set your working workspace to that format. So essentially, your doing 2 conversions, which will add significant time to your export and potentially cause a loss of quality. Although this loss of quality may be insignificant.

Your are right about being able to directly import Canon .mov files directly into Premier, without first trans-coding, but this was my normal workflow with Premiere CS4, and is not new. Of course Premiere CS5, is much more responsive than Premier CS4.

I have cut using Premiere on PC and then Mac for years. Recently I did a major project that had to be FCP, so made the transition. The cutting part of FCP is very similar and once used to the shortcuts was fine. I did however find miss some of the other features of Premiere, such as the quality of the time warp and the flexibility of the titler. I also missed the integration with AfterEffects and photoshop. I am just playing with CS5. Whist my current hardware does not support the GPU acceleration (need to upgrade), I am impressed by the Mercury Playback engine performance.

Editing for a customer on a multicore, memory loaded Mac Pro was a disappointment with FCP, being 32 bit and single threaded limited the resources it could use. CS4 (and now 5) does a much better job of accessing the hardware.

Since you know FCP well, You will not have any problem with working Premiere CS5. Both work almost the same way. I learnt editing in Premiere 6.5

and when I switched to FCP, It did not take any time for me to edit, but for Avid and Vegas, I will be lost.

I do think the new premiere Cs5 will gain a better place in the professional video market this time. The traditional crashing issue with PC and MAC is going away which is bringing back the editor who used to love premiere Many years ago. And believe it or not, this is a result of the new hdslr cameras. Think about it!

Ive been using Premiere ever since version 6.0 (10 years ago). And I must say, that the program peaked with version Premiere Pro 2.0 (about 2003, editing DV footage). Since then the program just got worse and worse. Extremely demanding, and extremely slow startup times. Crashes alot. I just got so bad in CS4, that it was my main reason for switching from PC to MAC, after having tried the smooth workflow of Final Cut Pro at a demo. I still am slow on FCP, because Im so used to the Premiere workflow (buttons and such), but I much prefer the easy flow and no-crash enviroment. Everything just works in FCP.

And the Full-screen-cinema-view is awesome in FCP.

Long time fan, first time writing. One of the creators of Premiere was recruited by Apple to create FCP, hence the similarity in interface between the two to this day. Not for nothing, but have you considered Avid Media Composer 5.0? We use Avid in our department (Communication and Media, State University of New York at New Paltz), and have since DV Xpress 1.0. Personally, I find MC easier than Premiere and FCP (which I both still use on occasion), and the toolset superior to any other offering in other editing software.

I just must say that it is so nice to pull in all sorts of mixed footage from things like P2, Mov, Avi, WMV, and unconverted MOV directly from my 7D without any rendering or transcoding and it is all realtime with multiple filters, titles, transitions, color correctiong and even multi-layers.

So, how do you like it so far? I have Premiere Pro for CS4 but never used it as it always took too long to do anything! I only have an iMac. Curious to see if CS5 would be any easier to work with. I love my FCP!

Well I am surprised! I always thought Adobe Prem was so fiddly, and at that time Canopus Edius was a bit better. Now its FCP with its faults, and then Phil comes along again putting the cat amongst the pigeons. Oh me god!

I do realize that Studio 14 is nowhere in the same league as Premiere Pro CS5, but the apparent ability to quickly drag and drop my footage without any sign of intermediate processing had me wondering.

In an earlier blog, EditShare CTO Stephen Tallamy looked at five top tips for remote editing using Adobe Premiere Pro. Avid Media Composer remains an industry standard and is still hugely popular, so here are five cool takeaways for improving your workflow by using it with EditShare.

Use FLOW for ingest, whether from a delivered file or direct from the camera cards. You can store the raw footage, and at the same time prepare the content in the MXF Op-Atom wrapper that is a native format for Media Composer managed media.

You can set up the bin structure before you get to the Avid workstation too. A core part of the Universal Projects software in FLOW is that it allows you to work from a central view of a project inside of FLOW and then synchronize that project to a range of editing systems, including Media Composer.

Working in a web browser, you can go through all the input material and organize it into logical structures such as folders for rushes, subclips and shot lists. This can be supported by automation when you need it, for example creating rules to create bins per day, to organize by metadata such as tape/scene information or even write a rule to ignore any clip that is less than three seconds long (or whatever duration you think is likely to be unusable).

Assistant editors, directors and producers can work collaboratively to review the dailies and only offer the editor the preferred takes. Once ready, all the work can be automatically synchronized into Media Composer bin files.

The ingest processing, as well as storing the raw footage and transcoding to the house edit format, can also generate proxies, at a maximum bitrate determined by you. Proxies make it practical to view the content, in real-time, from anywhere with a web browser and a reasonable internet connection, on any device.

The producer and director might be on location but can still review dailies in exactly the same way that they used to, as soon as the content is ingested, rather than waiting for large files (or rush prints) to be delivered. The post facility could carry out automated sorting, the director could choose the best takes (on an iPad), and the edit assistant could set up and load the bin structure, all at the same time, from different locations.

Again, the key point here is that editors and edit suites are expensive entities and overheads for production teams. You want as much of their time as possible to be devoted to telling the story, and not wrangling data and waiting for timely transfers. This is a real boost to productivity.

Bin locking is central to the Media Composer way of working, which allows users to share bins and projects, but provides a secure locking mechanism to ensure only one person is working on a file at a time. EditShare EFS supports this locking through AvidStyle spaces, allowing users to work with a familiar workflow whilst taking advantage of the other features of EFS and FLOW.

Once you have completed the edit and rendered the output to the house master format, the next stage involves sending the file back to EditShare FLOW, where it is ingested and given its new identity and metadata.

Once the project has been graded and signed off, you can leave the creation of all the deliverables to the automated processes in FLOW to handle. Again, it saves using an expensive and in-demand edit suite to do vital but uncreative and repetitive transcoding and rendering tasks.

At EditShare, the goal is to help you create amazing everywhere. I hope these tips help you get the best out of your post production resources by using the powerful intelligence in the combination of EFS and FLOW.

Media Composer, Avid's industry-standard non-linear editing platform now has the ability to natively edit clips with higher than HD resolution, as well as numerous other features included in this year-end update.

In the past, Avid projects and timelines have been limited to HD resolution. While this wasn't necessarily restrictive for many editors and post houses, since lower resolution proxy media is generally used in the typical Avid workflow, it did mean that editors looking to work natively with and export 4K media had to look elsewhere for their high-resolution editing kicks. As of yesterday, Media Composer's project window now offers support for a whole range of higher resolution project sizes and frame rates.

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