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

Friday, October 16, 2015

Re: [Avid-L2] Walter Murch and NLEs

You bring up the important points to consider. Without all the assistants to handle all the Adobe shortcomings Murch would be singing a different tune for sure. My recent dabble with Adobe projects on a very simple show of 99% cuts and a few dissolves was a cluster flop on every level. ProTools had issues and had to manually resync many of the tracks. I found whacky reel numbers that somehow the offline editor put in. Still don't know how that happened but as a result the EDL that was frame accurate ended up with wrong tape names for many of the clips. All this stuff is the very back bone of Avid's strength.

Also Murch wanting more tracks of audio may have a lot to do with his sound editing background and not be representative of most editor's needs. Of course it would be great to have more tracks available but is that really a huge issue for film editors in general. I would think if it takes more than 24 tracks then it's time to send it to the sound department anyways.

I would speculate that their is a certain incentive or interest in pioneering new editing platforms for Murch. However it he's not the one spending all night re conforming things and having to solve all the issues that come up by going rogue on Adobe I take these kind of editing stunts with a grain of salt.

I'm very curious what made you choose to edit your current Film project on Adobe? Is it the type of media or is it part of a bigger workflow scheme? Why in light of what you've said in this thread are you working in Premiere?

---In avid-l2@yahoogroups.com, <Steve@...> wrote :

I read the Cold Mountain book. I know it was mostly DigitalFilm Tree that assisted, but I'm sure Apple helped in ANY way they could.

The big question is, if you can buy an Avid and stick it on an iMac and cut a major Hollywood film pretty much out of the box with NO support from a 3rd party company and the manufacturer OR you PAY for an entire support team and have the clout to get manufacturer support - WHICH is actually the cheaper, better solution?

I cut a film with NO help from Avid and with NO third party support. Avid's infrastructure in the film industry is strong enough by itself that it doesn't NEED anything else. Murch and others like him on the bleeding edge are bad bad bad examples.

Steve

On Oct 16, 2015, at 3:25 PM, Philip Hodgetts <philip@...> wrote:

A small clarification… During the preperation for Cold Mountain, Apple categorically told him that Final Cut Pro (3) was not ready and they would offer no additional support. It was DigitalFilm Tree that took the risk and made FCP 3 happen for Murch. Although they did seed him with a beta of FCP 4 so they could get multichannel audio out!.

I'm pretty sure Adobe took care of him. :)

Philip

On Oct 16, 2015, at 12:57 PM, Steve Hullfish Steve@... [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

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@... [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

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