This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] crowdsourcing an answer

On 15 jul. 2013, at 01:12, Jeff Kreines @ Kinetta <jeff@kinetta.com> wrote:

> Does it matter except to marketers?

I was just trying to help out Steve. He's made a point of wanting to complete this list, rather than having us debate the premise.

Also, I feel there's almost too little debate about what people use and why. NLE's have been developed for some time, then for the past 10 or 12 years, we have seen a lot of changes in workflow, but not a lot of actual editing innovation in the NLE world. By that I mean new ways to sort, track, organize footage and compose sequences. Stuff like ScriptSync, and then preferably developed past its current state (which is a bit cumbersome). We have seen the NLE become a commodity, with an industry focus on jack-of-all-trades products, but no one really seems to care about making changes to the way we work. Save for FCPX, perhaps.

Avid is always slowly catching up. Same goes for Adobe, that have been working really hard, and successfully, to make Premiere less unattractive. Lightworks is being reinvented and rebuilt.

> At this point, it's a tool chosen by the editor.

Not really, not always. Yes, a lot of us have a lot of choice. But when you are not a top-25 editor on a studio feature, you may very well not have a choice. I heard a story of a well-known Oscar-winning British editor who was being told by the producers that he had to cut on Avid, even though he insisted on using Lightworks (he knew how to work both). Turned out that the producers wanted him to work on Avid so that if at any point they wanted to get rid of the editor (shit happens all the time), they could fly in most any other editor and immediately continue the work.

Looking at the various annual ACE equipment survey lists also shows choice not everyone has a choice.

So if you look at Steve's list, it is interesting that there are quite a few shows in there that were cut on Lightworks, by editors that are so well-established that their position is obviously not to be questioned, so they can surely pick their own tool of choice.

On a smaller scale, I'm seeing the same thing happen. Established editors can push for their own tool of choice, whereas less established ones oftentimes will have to fit in a given workflow, without the power to amend that workflow - even if they do know better.

J