The Pro Video Coalition has the coverage of AVID’s Sunday night event. And AVID has a video at their web site, and you can sign up to get more info when it arrives.
Instead of 4K they have Flex Frame which lets you edit in either 720 or 1080, but have up to a 4k or 5k frame that you can pan and scan within (pretty lame since you can do 4K in FCP 7!). I am sure it will be a nice pan and scan, but still not very impressive.
And you can now treat any AMA folder as if is an AVID Media Folder, so it will automatically process, and can now transcode in the background (though I still prefer Premiere where you don’t need to transcode). And AMA is promised to work better. Background transcoding is great (though I would be happier with not having to transcode) and watch folders are a good idea, but nothing revolutionary.
Faster Audio waveforms is a much needed feature, as it always seemed slow and unresponsive. Still have to look at the waveform in the timeline for the viewer clips though, which is slow.
The price drop is a good idea, and is what it should have been since their $999 Final Cut Pro Crossgrade offer. $999 for Media Composer 7, and $1499 for Symphony and upgrades from 6.5 for $299 and $399 for earlier programs. I hate how 7.5 will be a paid update too, maybe they need something like creative cloud for $50 a month?
I hope there is more as this doesn’t seem like the revolution that will put AVID back in the black. I hope AVID manages to stick around, but I would think they need to start really making impressive additions to Media Composer and not just ho hum features.
