Now this is just showing how long it has been since I have worked in offline resolutions in AVID Media composer, but I didn’t realize that basically Decompose doesn’t work with imported clips. It leaves the clips their whole length, not subclipping anything to consolidate space. So if you were to re-import you are taking entire clips.

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has posted 25 new features of AVID Media Composer 7.

Let’s hope the cached waveform redraw is great, as this has been a sore point with AVID forever!

Spanned Markers is a cool idea for sure.

Masks on output monitor is awesome, especially for center cut shows done in widescreen, which I often have to do!

Changing audio gain in timeline is a great addition.

AVID has released Media Composer 7. And it is now $999.00 and the upgrade from 6.5 is $299 and the upgrade from Previous version is $399.

I would love to give it a run as I have 6.5, but can’t afford it right now. And honestly AVID never changes that much that most post houses that use it won’t be upgrading, so it isn’t as important to learn as say Premiere Pro that many people are now considering and most editors don’t have much experience with.

Josh Short at Screenlight on 8 AVID Media Composer Default Settings you should change now.

All are good and smart changes that you should make. And remember the more recent versions of AVID now use XML for your user, so you will need to make new user settings for them anyway.

Michael Kammes on AVID Media Composer 7 and what it means for you.

His thoughts do seem to jive with mine, that this version is somewhat disappointing. Yes you don’t often need to finish above HD, but it would be great to be able to, especially for future proofing (and how often do you see a new version of Media Composer being used in an edit bay, places tend to stick with a version for a long time), and especially when Final Cut Pro 7 could do it so long ago. I guess they want you to buy DS to finish with true resolution independence.

LUT support is great, and it is good that it is finally included.

And instead of background rendering we get watch folders? Useful, but not all that useful!

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.

Cinescophilia has the news that AVID has been notified that they may be delisted from NASDAQ because they are so behind on some of their forms.

Wow, further proof that AVID is doing incredibly badly right now.

I think AVID needs to innovate but I don’t want to see them go under.

Creative Cow has a short article on the dire straights of AVID. I didn’t realize that they were hemorrhaging money that much for that long, or just how much they lost on their consumer editing programs!

While AVID does have it’s place, I do think it is a dinosaur that needs a lot of updating, and a price drop to be really competitive. I don’t think FCP X is a competitor though. A 64 Bit FCP 7 could still take back over from the whole left by it’s passing, but FCP X just has too many things wrong with it to really take over for all professional applications.