Marcus - You pretty much described my life here.
I keep Avid around for personal projects and because I don't want to loose those skills. There's a high end feature director in my market, and she's Avid only, so it pays to keep it up - but nearly all of my corporate work is on Premiere. There's just to comparison when you have to ingest multiple file formats, and output multiple file formats, or when you need to work with a bunch of graphics. It's just easier.
Right now my Avid is crunching a Canon MXF file over to h.264 though. Premiere wouldn't even recognize it as media and the Avid took it right in using AMA. First time that's happened to me - but it was worth keeping the avid around just for this one project.
Yes, you do have to be very neurotic about keeping your media organized, because Premiere will really let you screw yourself - but I hop from two different windows systems to a Mac system, to my laptop - and the projects open just fine every time.
Mark
Hi All,
Been reading this thread with great interest.
I've been using Avid since the very early days, after I moved on from
D-Vision! But I left the employed post production environment almost
10years ago just when HD was gathering momentum. But in my freelance
roles I continued using Avids. Certainly not broke so no need to fix it.
I twiddled and dipped my toes with Premiere from time to time but it
never really seemed to work right and I got frustrated and just headed
home to Avid where it was safe and warm and everything worked.
But then came the world where getting it onto tape was not the be all
and end all of everything. Suddenly people wanted an 'medja file' or
can I e-mail this 10second clip. I noticed I was having to do the edit,
export a clip in which ever was the nice and quick codec and then re
compress it in media encoder to what the client wanted. Seemed a bit
clunky. One time a client wanted to 'just show' someone something we'd
do so they shot it on their mobile phone and sent it that way.
So I moved on to Premier.. Same client a few months later wanted to do
the same thing, the phone came out.. Hold on I said... Click, click,
tap, queue, export to a youtube preset. Carry on working.. A couple of
minutes later, whilst still working, I get a noise and flick back to
media encoder and pull up the uploaded youtube link.. 1080p unlisted,
send that to your client (I say in the e-mail to their phone.)
It is the ability for me to turn things around so quickly that lost my
patience with Avid and threw me at Premier Pro. Sure it is an A$$ when
discs need moving or when stuff gets lost, but you learn to deal with
that in the ways we learned to deal with 'time of day' camera rolls shot
over multiple days. You get on with it and come out the other side
stronger.
The final death knell for my avid was when I recently completed an 18
camera theatre production using PP CC. Sure it was an uphill struggle
on week 1. Things got lost, drives wouldn't serve up things fast enough
and moving media around and getting PP to find it when it's not where it
left it is tantamount to 'understanding women' (excuse the sexism but I
think it's a good analogy :-) ) But the show has multiple media types,
some of the inserts were shot 'crowd sourced' on mobile phones at daft
frame rates, aspects and codecs. there is 4K material, HD, SD and (aside
from playing all those streams at once) Premiere didn't even let me
notice there were all these variables. It just got on with it.
And now that show is done. Deliverables... Took me about 20minutes to
set going (yeah still takes hours to check when they are done) but it is
just the ease of in and out of things that has made me switch and I am
now a paid up Adobe subscriber. I'm sure there will be problems with
the software upgrading itself mid project (always a no no in my book) or
some other thing to totally F U the day, but keep good daily backups and
you'll only ever loose a day or two if it goes pear shaped.
The only fly in the ointment is I have to keep an old version of CS5 on
another laptop for when I want to digitise from my HDV camcorder :-)
Cheers,
Marcus
Big Ideas Productions
ps. Tp really sink the knife in I actually used Audition to do the 5.1
mix of the audio... What is the world coming to? :-)
-- Director, Owner S.R. Film & Video 195 W. Broad St. Salunga, PA 17543 717-393-5333 Cell: 717-203-0976 www.sr-pro.com
Posted by: Mark Myers <markm@sr-pro.com>
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