A Very Interesting Development

It seems Avid has unveiled yet another makeover. It continues to aggresively go after Apple's Final Cut Pro and Oliver Peters has an excellent blog post about compositing with Avid Media Composer. Looking only at the compositing tools within the two NLE's, Oliver makes the claim that Avid comes out on top. I use both programs and I have to admit that he makes some very valid points. The Collapse tool in AMC is better than nesting in FCP. Nesting in Final Cut creates a seperate timeline for the tracks that it references. Oliver describes a collapsed clip in AMC as a “container” with additional tracks inside it". Also in Avid, effects do not have to be constatntly re-rendered on the time line like in Final Cut. This is probably hands down one of the most un-efficient things about FCP. He also has great screen shots that show how he does rotosplinng in AMC and how he creates graphics from scratch in Photoshop. I have to start doing more of this. But even with all these great tools I wish Avid would enable layer blend modes and paste attributes like Final Cut. I assume this has not happened because a lot of Avid's code would have to be re-written. Would it be worth it for Avid to do this? Maybe. And even though this post looks only at the compositing capabilities of the two competing NLE's it makes me wonder if there has been an in depth comparison of Final Cut Studio and Avid Studio Toolkit. We purchased AST at a facility I used to work for but we weren't able to use it because our facility stopped upgrading our Avid suites. We were stuck at older versions of AMC and QT that wouldn't support AST. So who has used it and how does it compare to Final Cut Studio? It's my dream to run both Avid and Final Cut on the same box. There's a great thread on Creative Cow where Shane Ross talks a user through this process. And along these lines, it was just announced that Avid has now qualified Final Cut media to run on it's Unity and Isis shared storage systems. Up untill now it has been possible to run Final Cut media on Unity but it was never officialy supported and was often buggy. This lead facilities that used both NLE's to try shared storage solutions like Edit Share. I wonder how this announcement will effect Edit Share's market share (pun intended). I assume Apple's pro apps division is quietly monitoring this situation and making adjustments to a hopefully soon to be launched Final Cut Studio 3. The anticipation for a refresh of the FCS line is reaching a frenzy. This announcement was curiously absent at NAB and one could only hope it will be made next month at WWDC. Until then, I'll just keep trying to get the most of the tools I have now.