[Avid-L2] Media Composer 5 Demo at VET today

Today VET ran some Media Composer feature workshops and we had Avid down showing some of the new features of MC 5 (sorry if you missed it)
It was only a beta version but very impressive.
I know some will have seen this at NAB but for those that didn't the highlights for me were:

The improved AMA. Native QT support and not a botched version. If QT can see it and play it MC can AMA open it and play it in real-time (subject to playback drives speed)
AMA developers kit already out allowing products to come to market from 3rd parties that are already AMA compatible. So we should
see Avid access to new formats as soon as they hit the streets.

Stereo audio tracks (no surround yet) And the ability to flag audio as stereo or mono.

The Protools RTSA track-based real-time audio plug-ins look amazing.

The increased use of meta-data to allow the flagging of content. So media clips can be modified to indicate how that clip should be treated in the time line (so 16:9 content dropped into a 4:3 timeline can be flagged to be treated by letter-boxing or cropping or whatever)

The native Red support looks great with the need for Metafuze done away with. The whole red thing looked very impressive and with Red Rocket support being worked on it's a very viable tool.

The Matrox MX02 for HDMI HD monitoring

And of course the changes to the GUI and editing tools. Drag and drop and the smart tools set. Somebody commented that it looked a lot like FCP but if you've been around longer than that you'll notice a lot comes from Protools!

With a DV Mojo you get full RGB 4:4:4 support (but only at uncompressed currently so demanding on storage)

Some of the questions I'm curious to see the answer to:

How will MC5 projects, bins and sequences get back to previous releases?

Will digital cut require rendering to a supported format before it can be done (as we know real-time playback isn't digital cut)

How will the new stereo tracks relate to the audio mixer and tool

No mention of 3D (gasp)

and more I'm sure.

A very interesting demo and an exciting time ahead it looks like.
Windows 7 support and the advantage of 63bit memory space and work happening on the 64bit executable.

Just a tip from what I saw... Any plans to buy new hardware I'd think very carefully first. To get the most from what MC5 can offer you'll want some serious computing power!

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