AVID Media Composer 3.0

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Interview with Patrick McLean, Avid Technology; Christel Jaekel, Avid Technology

Avid Media Composer remains the standard package for the higher end of professional digital video editing. In the past, even the software-only version came with an astronomical price to match its professional image. This has prevented the application from filtering down to smaller independent videomakers, and Apple’s Final Cut Pro has been nipping at its heels.

Following a recent change of senior management, Avid has changed its policy. As part of the company’s new strategy, the latest version of Media Composer arrives at around half the price of its predecessor, and includes a whole lot more in the box, too.

In particular, two applications formerly sold separately in the Avid Studio Toolkit are now bundled – Avid DVD, which uses Sonic’s technology, and Avid FX, which is essentially Boris Red. So now you get a huge suite spread across ten discs. Aside from Media Composer itself, from Avid there are Log Exchange, EDL Manager, FilmScribe, MediaLog, and MetaSync.

A further pack includes SmartSound SonicFire Pro 4 with Core Foundations and Core Sessions libraries, the Sorensen Squeeze 5 encoder, and the excellent Boris FX Continuum Complete plug-in collection.

This takes Media Composer 3 from being a great video-editing tool to being a complete end-to-end option, able to handle footage from most sources all the way from acquisition to disc or any other output format, with powerful compositing capabilities thrown in along the way. Version 3 adds support for Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard, bringing it up to date with the latest operating systems.

Native codec compatibility now includes some of the latest additions, too, in particular Sony XDCAM EX, which is starting to make inroads in news and filmmaking circles, plus Panasonic’s AVC-Intra H.264 codec and JVC’s 23.976p and 25p flavours of HDV.