Just over a year ago, I moved the weekly tv show I edit from Premiere to Avid. Premiere's unreliable rendering and constant crashes were the reason I stopped using it for long form edits, not to mention Adobe's absolutely horrid tech support. But I continued to use Premiere for short form editing because it was so much more fluid to edit with.
Since switching to Avid I really wasn't that happy with it and looked to switch to another editing program. Edius, FCPx or maybe Vegas, anything to get me away from what I considered to be 3 fatal flaws in MC 8.4 and earlier:
1. Sluggish and inconsitant AMA behavior in the source monitor and on the timeline. In no other current editing program have I had such trouble playing back mixed formats on the timeline. And I know transcode, transcode, transcode. Well transcoding isn't free, it costs time and with a weekly show and a staff of just me and my assistant, things absolutely need to take as little time as possible. And considering I can take the exact same clips, drop them on a Premiere timeline without any hitch in playback, always had me thinking I needed to switch the show back to Premiere and deal with its quirks. Creative editing is a delicate work. It's a combination of intuition, curiosity and trial and error that leads to insteresting edits. When you start to think twice about throwing a new bit of b-roll on the timeline because it's a different frame rate, creativity is handicapped. And whenever this happened I wrote a note to self, I need to quit using Avid.
2. Delay while moving clips on the timeline. When moving a clip on the timeline with an arrow, there'd be a little delay. This seems like a small thing, and it is. But editing is all about moving clips. So multiply this little delay times the hundred to thousands of times clips get moved on a timeline before I finish a show and it becomes a big deal.
3. (EDIT: Thx to Mondo, It Looks like this was just a problem with my system at the time cause just tried now and it works.) Having to render a mixdown to get real time playback of lower thirds. I couldn't wrap my head around how anyone edits this way. If I move a lower third a frame and want to see how it looks in real time, I have to break rhythm to render a mix down, find the mixdown in a bin, load it into a source monitor and lay it back on the timeline. (In Premiere I could render an area and get real time playback but in Avid rendered sections with lower thirds still stuttered during playback.)
Anyway, I bring this up to say that in MC 8.5, the Avid team has pretty much fixed all 3 issues.
Now it's only been two nights of using MC 8.5. But I've been editing on Avid just about every day over the past 14 months and 8.5 feels like a brand new program. Here's why:
A. The video cache feature. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! This is the best implementation of timeline rendering I've seen yet in an editing application. FCPx is a freaking pain in the ass constantly rendering in the background to some god knows where location that fills up drive after drive. Premiere's video cache requires you to mark in and outs and manually render and you watch a bar while it does it. Now in Avid, you can watch the stuttery video try it's best to play in realtime and maybe that's all you need to see for the moment, but if not just replay the section and it plays back in realtime even with lowerthirds and mixed frame rates. The fact that it's being written to RAM (right?) means I don't have to monitor video cache folders that are constantly filling up my drive. I can't overstate how important an improvement this is. To me it's the best feature added to Avid since AMA. And it solved problems 1. and most of 2. (since if a Linked video with a different frame rate stutters on playback, after it's cached it plays smoothly.)
B. The second best or maybe tied for first best improvement in 8.5 is the fluid movement of clips in the timeline. The movement of clips in the timeline is as fluid as it is in Premiere now if not more so. For the first time using a 8.x release there's no delay in moving clips around with the arrow in the timeline. Even the timeline bar seems to be more responsive now. Also, seeing clips while you're moving them is a nice touch.
Then there were small pet peeves 8.5 cured:
4. Not being able to search for effects in the effects bin. (Now there's a search box in the effects window)
5. Not being able to rotate in frame flex. (Unfortunately you still can't rotate in Avid Pan & Zoom or Resize but now you can in FrameFlex.)
6. Having to scroll through all the settings to get to the one you're looking for. (Now you can just activate the settings window and hit the first letter of the key you're looking for i.e. k for keyboard.)
There's still some things I'd like to see:
1. Top of my list would be a Render queue in Avid to load up several sequences to render so I can walk away from my computer.
2. Add rotation to Avid Pan & Zoom and resize
3. Keyboard map a way to toggle between sequences
4. Fix audio plug in window so it doesn't randomly disappear.
5. Don't treat pre-computes like second class citizens. Allow them to be match framed to source without using the subsys command.
6. Media Mover style project tool incorporated into Avid so I don't dread moving projects between computers. (Although now that I work with mostly Linked footage, it's not so hard anymore.)
7. More important things that I can't think of right now :)
But all in all I feel like 8.5 is the release that fixes problems I've had with Media Composer since I first started seriously using it in 2008. I remember bitching on these forums all those years ago for a more Premiere/Final Cut like experience in Avid and I was beaten back by the hordes of Avid stalwarts that felt Avid was just fine as it is. Ingest everything. Mixdown everything. Use a 3 year old version of MC on a four year old computer.
Well it seems like those days are finally gone. Because Avid is looking at what's good about other editing programs and not only incorporating their best features but surpassing them. And that has led to what I now think is the editing program that's most conducive to creative editing. I feel free to throw anything on the timeline now that it renders on the fly.
Standing ovation for Media Composer 8.5, good work everyone @ Avid keep it up!
P.S. uh oh, one caveat looks like video cache doesn't help get real time 4k playback of linked 4k footage. I just tried with 4k footage on a 4k timeline and 4k footage on a 1080p timeline and in both cases video playback remained laggy on playback. This feature would go near the top of my wish list and let me never have to edit in FCPx again.