You knew it was coming, but it seems that subscription is going to be the way going forward for most software companies

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 on Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro CC and Avid Media Composer

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.

Sony adding a paid upgrade to ProRES and DNxHD for the F5 and F55

NonLinear Post has the news.This is so exciting as Sony has always loved their proprietary formats, even proprietary media, and for them to be opening up their amazing cameras to ProRES and DNxHD even with a paid upgrade is huge. Especially with the F55 which has a Global Electronic Shutter, which gets rid of the rolling shutter problem of CMOS image sensors!And it has beautiful image quality.

AVID Media Composer and Apple Mavericks

From AVID themselves, they do not support Mavericks with Media Composer 7, though they are working on it.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!

Over 150 New Features being added to Adobe Creative Cloud Video

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!

Decompose broken with Imported Media in Media Composer?!?!?

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.I tried Consolidating the media to make smaller clips and then Decomposing, but AVID only imports black clips this way. So with all imported Media, you have to import the whole clips and at 1 to 1 that can take a very large amount of hard drive space and time! This is insanity!This makes the argument to use AMA if you can, but AMA is not working on either Media Composer 5.0.3 box I have access to right now with this copied P2 media. And if it wasn't working at some point I don't see how they initially managed to get the Media as DNxHD 36!So frustrated right now!

PVC Posts 25 New Features of AVID Media Composer 7

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.