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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

GREAT News from NAB w/ Avid

Jason Honeycutt

Jason Honeycutt

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FINALLY, Avid has gotten into the native 4K game -- but within a 1080p project.

When their MC7 or Symphony 7 comes out, the big game-changer is that it'll read the R3D's (and that other company's files, haha) natively... referencing the original size and not a downscaled 1080p version of it. What I mean is that, no longer will you have to 'punch in' to a shot on Redcine, make a DNxHD QT (with no Metadata), if you want to pull a CU from a WS. Within Avid, you can 'crop' your 16x9 box (or their various other sizes), around the area... then you transcode and you have your new media... metadata will still apply to that new shot. Awesome! This is EXACTLY why I went to NAB, to ask Avid if something like this was coming. (Their booth sucked though... it was ONE MC7 display, one Protools display, then a stage area and then Isis drives. What!? Have a number of MC7 betas to play with... but I digress.)

What's also great is that now it'll transcode in the background! That's a huge timesaver.

Wow, Avid finally is stepping up. Their last hurdle is to have 4K "projects," which they don't yet... but the guy hinted strongly that it's coming. But, to me, the 'cropped' or 'punching in' to a 4K is more important as 99% of work is finished in 1080p for air and having access to the full image size is exactly why we shoot in 4K (or 5K).
 
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Hmm, so you still can't really have real 4K?
I was not happy with Avid and I started looking around 6 months ago and decided to test Lightworks after hearing much about it. Now I'm using more Lightworks than MC and am seriously considering dumping MC. I came from FCP7 and was never really happy with MC, but I didn't want to go with Premiere. But the more I use Lightworks the more I like it. Although the $999 price slash for MC is nice. I guess they are feeling the pressure.
 
It's a step up, but we really need a better option for 4k workflows. With ODEMAX and few other coming, we need to be able to finish in 4k even if we are doing 1080p deliveries.

It will be nice if they can incorporate a way for us to go back to a 6.5 project, and up into a 4k version when they get to 4k project files.

If your not happy with MC, you should state if your working in long form stuff? I think MC is still king for series work, and features where you have to manage a lot of material. I have about 60hrs of footage for a series so far, and will likely have 120hrs before I finish. I can't imaging working in another program.
 
Hey Avid finally woke the fuck up!

This brings to the surface something really stupid that has been eating at my subconscious. All of our better debates and discussions about editing platforms conclude with the assertion that we, as editors, should be platform agnostic. We should be facile in multiple cutting tools. It makes sense. I can embrace that... However, shouldn't a really good tool do the heavy lifting for us?

We can all spend countless hours learning three, four or more different tools or a single team of intelligent software engineers could create one tool that is resolution independent and source format agnostic. Imagine the man hours that would save.

This shit has been upside down and backward for too long. I'm relieved to see evidence that things may be turning around. It is about time.
 
Michael Dalton said:
If your not happy with MC, you should state if your working in long form stuff? I think MC is still king for series work, and features where you have to manage a lot of material. I have about 60hrs of footage for a series so far, and will likely have 120hrs before I finish. I can't imaging working in another program.
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Yes, long form here too. Basically I was never happy with it and came to it out of lack of another real alternative to FCP7. But that was before I found out about Lightworks.
First I just don't like the closeness of the program. I was used to the flexibility of FCP. Avid is very closed and they normally take ages to catch up to stuff. Look at 4K for example.
Don't get me wrong, MC has some great features and some of the stuff in version 7.0 seem great. But I can just cut much faster in Lightworks. Stuff takes less clicks and steps too and the whole workflow is faster. It's much easier to use and is just as powerful. Media management is also great and in some aspects better than MC because I find it easier to deal with. It has no problem with long form since this is basically Lightworks main market, Hollywood feature films. But I don't want to make this a Lightworks vs Avid thread. I was just reacting to the workaround offered as a new feature for 4K, instead of just letting people actually work in 4K already. I guess what I'm saying is I'm not sure I'm upgrading to 7.
 
Michael Dalton said:
I
If your not happy with MC, you should state if your working in long form stuff? I think MC is still king for series work, and features where you have to manage a lot of material. I have about 60hrs of footage for a series so far, and will likely have 120hrs before I finish. I can't imaging working in another program.
Click to expand...

60 hours for a series? Hah! We just wrapped dailies processing on a pilot - one, 42 minute show - for which they shot almost 90 hours of footage. Really. I'm not making that up.

And that IS why Avid still reigns in the television series market. And, to some degree, why Alexa/Prores does as well.
 
You can say what you want about Avid. But one thing is for shure: Avid is a stabil supertool that really is reliable. It always delivers. And the new features in MC7 looks great. I´m an Avid fan, just the same way as I am a RED fan. Always will be!
Thanks for sharing the link to the video cliåp from NAB!
 
The biggest project I have seen up close and personal was "Alice in Wonderland" in 3D where the assistant's project had over 5000 bins in it. That's right, five thousand. Each of those bins were pretty full as well. I am sure Lord of the Rings trilogy had some big projects, but that could be managed as three different projects and share common material as needed.

Michael
 
I work in large facilities where Avid is king and have grown to really appreciate it for it's reliability. It's a great product. I'm as much a fan of Avid as I am of RED. I'm glad they are taking these important steps forward.
 
Since some of us are talking about run time...

I have 1,400 cooking recipes on a 32tb server in dnxhd 175x that was was shot tethered to a Scarlet... I can't even imagine the hours, 9 months or so of 50 hour weeks shooting like 8-9 hour days probably on average. I captured, logged, it all, than cut a few hundred offline edits. We have it all running through a few stations with individual projects on the stations. No Unity we just clone stuff from each other... Its pretty amazing how relatively stable it is, though we love to complain about it. I think everyone who cuts there is a Mac user trapped on PCs at work...

I am definitely getting 7 but I worry about 4k output not being viable yet. I guess I need to update my CS suite until Avid really gets their stuff together. So far I haven't needed 4k output but with all the hype at NAB I imagine I'll need it sooner than later... It seems to be the go to thing looking at all the other brands starting to push it
 
M Most said:
60 hours for a series? Hah! We just wrapped dailies processing on a pilot - one, 42 minute show - for which they shot almost 90 hours of footage. Really. I'm not making that up.

And that IS why Avid still reigns in the television series market. And, to some degree, why Alexa/Prores does as well.
Click to expand...

I've been an Avid editor for 18 years and, honestly, I think we're all just used to it and it keeps improving. I think there's a steep learning curve that some people hate but once you're going on it, it's like, well, playing in a Symphony. FCP has some nice functionality, as does Premiere, but Avid is just more fluid on so many levels. I do get frustrated that, at times, Avid seems to be the last one to get up to speed on modern workflows. Like, with RED files, the first time I shot with RED was in 2009 and I had a one week turnaround for the label and I had to spend 2.5 days just transcoding the damn footage in their exterior program... it created the files which I had to import then I had like 1.5 days to edit the thing. I swore off RED at that time but it wasn't RED's fault... it was Avid's for being so lame. It took how many builds to FINALLY read R3D files natively? And they STILL can't get the metadata correct... it's all washed out, never matches the Redcine look.

However, the last thing for Avid will be at least 4K projects but, honestly, that's sooooooo far down on my priority list as I've still never had to finish 4K. I think they only people outputting in 4K is the feature world. The bulk of my work is for the network where I'm in-house and we broadcast in HD, obviously. And then I direct/shoot/edit a number of music videos where it's the same situation, especially with YouTube being the viewing medium these days for music vids.

Alexa, however, is annoying. I like Alexa, I do... but I know why I like it - because of the dynamic range but with Dragon, Epic/Scarlet comes back to the forefront. The problem is that (I've seen it firsthand) you have executives who want to talk the lingo and rehash what their peer told them about the latest fad... "Gotta have Alexa!!! Alexa, Alexa, Alexa." They have not a clue what a makes something look great. I've seen HVX footage with Brevis adapters look better than some Alexa shots I've seen. But, when you start dropping names like Fincher or "House of Cards" then they start going, wait... that was Epic? Um, yeah. We have two shows in production with the identical look... one is Alexa, one is RED. However, for efficiency, they use zoom lenses and the shots tend to look flat... and identical. Nobody, however, can tell if one is RED or the other is Alexa. Alexa is just a trendy buzzword at the moment... Dragon will be the next one :)
 
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