[Avid-L2] And Now a Word About Online Finishing

I have been reading the Smoke on Mac thread with great interest. It makes me think about how poor any Avid Composer based products are at true online finishing. Symphony is no exception. Simply put the tools are STILL NOT THERE to perform anything but the most basic on-lines or finishes.
Things like natively scaling a title or alpha based graphic with acceptable quality. THIS CANNOT BE DONE in 2009 in an Avid product with results which can truly be called PROFESSIONAL. This same limitation applies to many DVE functions. Edge quality or workflow with any sort of matte work garbage or otherwise via Animatte is pretty poor too. The Spectramatte keyer is limited in its usefulness because it is a closed environment not allowing any other operations beyond the very limited Avid DVE  (no soft shadows, no additional matte operations, poor quality etc). The color corrector has not aged well and is limited compared to newer options. 

So lets see, that covers color correction, basic compositing, basic graphics, low level effects, etc. That is online. That is finishing.
Beyond core functionality and quality are many workflow issues like track to track alpha behavior, mixing native and plug in effects and very poor multiple effect stack management. 
Seems to me, for anything beyond cuts, dissolves, moderate color correction and simple non-problem keys you are using Composer/Symphony to really assemble material rendered somewhere else or you can use 3rd party plug ins for some tasks. And you better hope that your material created somewhere else doesn't need little adjustments...you will be making another round trip.  At that point does Avid vs FCP vs anything else matter. 
It is a shame that Avid is blowing it by providing a flexible editing environment with improving frame rate and format support but not closing the deal with the tools necessary for real finishing...at least at a basic level. These are the capabilities which make Smoke attractive to people and to some degree DS. Once you have to leave your core NLE environment to turn the job over to another person or system Smoke vs DS makes little difference. 
But isn't it time that Symphony provides for some of this without having to bailout to other applications or finishing editors. 
For the record, it appears Avid is also blowing it with their DS game plan.
Chris MagidRTVF

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

------------------------------------

Search the offical complete Avid-L archives at: http://archives.bengrosser.com/avid/

Everything you MUST know about Color Correction in one book: http://tinyurl.com/ColorCorectionforvideo Get your copy todayYahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Avid-L2/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Avid-L2/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
Avid-L2-digest@yahoogroups.com
Avid-L2-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
Avid-L2-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/