This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] Walter Murch and NLEs

Friday, October 16, 2015

Re: [Avid-L2] Walter Murch and NLEs

Murch has hated Avid for a long time. I'd love to know what his beef is. I have a feeling that there was a time when Avid was pretty cocky - like Quantel - and he probably wanted something and they didn't help out or even give the appearance that his input was important.

When you are Walter Murch, you can get Apple and Adobe (and he SHOULD have had Avid) bending over backwards to please him. In retrospect I'm sure Avid wishes they had… Cold Mountain was a HUGE turning point in the Avid/FCP war.

But the assistant editors sway a lot of this stuff, and I think that Adobe has given Murch massive amounts of support. There are plenty of stories of having Adobe and Apple engineers working down the hall from Murch during these productions. If we could all get that kind of support from a Adobe or Apple, we'd all be giving it a try.

Avid definitely needs to address the track issue. Having owned ProTools for maybe two decades now, you'd think they'd move some stuff over, but that's been a request for decades.

My interview with Pietro Scalia and his assistant made it very clear that THEY didn't think that there was any other NLE up to the last of cutting The Martian. Mostly this was because of shared workflow stuff that Avid definitely has down better than anyone.

I am personally cutting a feature right now on Premiere and there are plenty of times I wish I was back on Avid… and a few times when I'm glad to be on Premiere instead. If you throw enough assistant editors at a project, you'll keep the main editor from feeling most of the pain from the system. All he has to do is cut with some pretty basic tools. Everything else is the domain of the assistant.

Steve

On Oct 16, 2015, at 1:59 PM, roberto@puregrain.com [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Excellent interview, thanks for posting.

While I feel very good about switching from FCP7 to Avid back in 2011, and glad Avid gave a discount for it, going forward in the coming era, I'm wondering about switching to PP for cutting features. Murch points out that he and his assistant are currently cutting on PP, and that Avid MC's limit to 25 audio tracks was a "deal killer" for him.

Does anybody know if Avid has plans to expand the limit on audio tracks? I hit that audio ceiling as well.

Is there not an opportunity for Avid to take unfair leverage of ProTools and create an expanded, enriched audio area in MC? One that would allow for better collaboration with sound editors and mixers? That's what I want.

Murch also mentions that he, Joel Coen, and others requested PP features to Adobe, and Adobe implemented them a couple of months later.

Is it still best to think of Avid as "facility level" software? Available to smaller shops, which aren't really listened to?

-Roberto

http://www.puregrain.com
http://www.mandorlamovement.com