Tastes Like Chicken by Dylan Reeve

NAB is on in Las Vegas at the moment, and while I’m still slogging away in an edit suite in Auckland I have been able to keep an eye on some of the coice announcements. The choicest of these, from my perspective was Avid’s announcement of Media Composer 5.0!

Media Composer 5 introduces a few major updates, the most significant of which is direct access to Quicktime and R3D media files without import or transcode.

In Media Composer 3.5 Avid introduced AMA (Avid Media Access) for some file-based acquisition formats – this meant that to access files shot on P2 or XDCAM cameras all you needed to do was point Avid at the files and it would index them and put them in a bin – seconds of processing to access hours of footage. It didn’t offer quite the same level of performances as the import and transcode method, where Avid manages the media itself, but it was quick and it worked well and, possibly best of all, it retained most of Avid’s core media management functionality.

Media Composer takes that AMA functionality and pushes it further, allowing direct AMA access to Quicktime and R3D files. This means Avid editors will now be able to ‘import’ and edit with any Quicktime MOV file at the click of a mouse in only seconds. In practice this means H.264 from the popular Canon DLSR cameras, and ProRes Quicktime files from Final Cut Pro are now easy to work with. The performance will presumably be variable depending on processor power and the codecs in use, but it should work well enough for basic edits, and selects could be compiled and consolidated for more complex edits. read more...