It is called AVID Media Composer FIRST, and will be heavily feature limited. Including only being able to save a limited number of saves and those saves can only be made to the cloud, and you can pay for more space.
It is a good idea for AVID to do for sure, and I would like to see Adobe do it with Premiere Elements at least.
Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has the story. 4K, resolution independence, a new compression format DNxHR, LUTs as timeline effects, and the ability export projects as DPX Also coming soon is Background Rendering, Favorite Bins and Search Across Bins for Markers.
The funny part being you need a third party video card to do 2K or 4K, since no AVID hardware can do that (and honestly they should move software only and work more with AJA, BlackMagic and Matrox)
And it is a good thing too. With Adobe offering up Updates in their Creative Cloud very quickly, and it is great to see AVID finally getting on that bandwagon, which they should since they are now subscription based as well.
AVID Blogs has the news on AVID releasing the 8.1 update to Media Composer. This is the first update since releasing their subscription model, and has come fairly quickly. Lets hope AVID keeps moving this quickly with updates. This was what I was worried about as AVID usually has a fairly slow update cycle.
This is made mainly for the subscription model that AVID has moved to, but as a bonus they are letting existing users sign up for $299 a year for the support version which includes updates, and you can sign up for a year to get the latest versions at least through 2014, then it goes up to $1299 a year for the subscription with support.
This means for $299 you can get a year of updates for your current version, and hopefully get the next version of the software as well.
It all started with Adobe and Creative Cloud which is $49.99 a month with a yearly subscription, and $79.99 for a per month basis. And with no other versions available, it means you need it if you need the latest and greatest.
Now they have been great with rapid upgrades, and with the full suite so necessary for most video post work this is basically a necessity.
Not sure how it will work for Media Composer with the same pricing. Most places buy a version and keep them on non-upgraded machines so they can just stick with the same version. Not only that, with Creative Cloud you get the full suite of apps, including Premiere Pro, and with Media Composer you just get Media Composer. Sure you get more options, like Symphony, NewBlue Titler Pro 2, Sorenson Squeeze Lite, and Boris Continuum Complete Lite, but it is still basically just an editing and finishing system, so seems like buying it is a better idea (at least while they still offer the ability to purchase) at least unless you just need it on a month to month basis and can bill a client for it.
And now Smoke 2015 is getting it, though it is a $3500 program that is $195 a month or $1750 a year. Or $3500 every 2 years, which makes sense if they continue to do an upgrade every 2 years, which they have done once now.
Still it is depressing for us independent post guys, as more monthly expenses does not seem like a good thing overall.
Chris Hocking at Late Nite Films has an awesome article, where he goes into not only the best things about AVID and Premiere Pro, but also his first attempt at using FCP X. And his is the first article that makes me interested in taking a look again at FCP X, though maybe once they fix audio issues.
And I still say that for graphics heavy projects, even longform (at least 28:30 Direct Response), I think Premiere Pro with a proper video card can easily outdo AVID, which is still archaic in how it deals with Alphas (and importing them) even if it is the king of media management. And those same projects would be a mess in FCP X without the ability to have tracks for organization.
I mean my current sequence has 18 tracks of video going all organized into different layers.
I know Apple must have purposely made Mavericks work with Final Cut Pro 7, but it still works and Premiere Pro CC and CS6 work just fine, so AVID had better get on the ball here.
Of course they have till December with the new MacPro (which will likely coincide with a new version of Mavericks), but that means no new Macs will run AVID until they update!
Wim Van den Broeck at AVID Blogs has a post on the new features, which all sound good. I love that it finally will export names longer than 27 characters! Took long enough!
Yes, just 4 months after their last upgrade, Adobe is good to it’s word and is turning around much faster upgrades with creative cloud, and in October are upgrading Premiere Pro, After Effects, Speed Grade, Prelude, Media Encoder, Story and are adding the iOS app Prelude Live Logger. Awesome! You can check out the upgrades at Adobe.
Steve Forde at the Adobe After Effects Blog has a post on the new After Effects Features.
The Adobe Premiere Pro Work area Blog has more on Premiere Pro, Media Encoder (which now has GPU enabled rendering!) and Prelude and Prelude Live Logger.
The Adobe Moving Colors blog has more on the SpeedGrade Upgrade which includes direct link (an improvement over Dynamic Linking which you can see more about here) and GPU acceleration.
Thank you Adobe, looking forward to it! And here’s to hoping that Adobe permanently keeps up this rapid pace of development, except it will certainly keep us editors on our toes, as I have just scratched the surface of CC by now! Ha!