blog.noetech.com

Avid Media Composer

Avid's product line bothers me like nothing else. It's filled with artificial differences designed to force you to spend more. None bother me more than the Media Composer Adrenaline. It's a fine product that meets the needs of online editors very well. It's their step up from Express Pro w/ Mojo, and it's a huge step up. Besides being significantly more stable, it works with Unity Fibre storage, has much better title tools, and better grouping tools.

All of those improvements are in software, which is what bothers me. It's a big financial jump between MC and AXP, about twice the cost. It seems that mostly this is for the Adrenaline, which you have to have connected to run MC. Now, I don't know many post facilities that need to have all the machines hooked up to an Adrenaline like box. You do not need, especially with shared storage, SDI out on every machine. It's easy enough to make your DigiBeta masters from one or two rooms out of 10 or 15.

So why does Avid limit MC to just Adrenaline now? In my perfect world, Avid would sell a MC w/ Mojo product. It would be a few thousand more than AXP, and I would be more than willing to pay it for all our bays. Then, like now, have two or three Adrenaline systems for master outputs. We could online on any machine, one of the biggest advantages of FCP by the way, and our offline editors could see a project through to the end.

It would make our whole facility that much more flexible. But Avid won't be selling that product. I would imagine that they are be afraid of stealing sales of the Adrenaline, a big money maker. Maybe they would, but not from me. I won't buy Adrenaline systems for offline editing, it just doesn't make sense financially. Sure our editors would prefer MC, but they wouldn't get any paychecks, so they live.