Switching from Final Cut Pro to Avid

R

robotsound

Well-known member
In light of the recent FCP X release, it seems that a lot of people are going to be switching to Avid or Premiere Pro.

Can anyone here who is experienced with both Avid and Final Cut Pro list off some tips for recent Avid converts? Maybe it could become a sticky or something if there were enough responses.
 
There are too many to count. Avid handles media and organization in a COMPLETELY different way. It is organized inside the project, not on the finder level. Avid can use AMA to access many media types natively, but it is better to transcode to Avid media for better performance. Work native until you go home for the night, then transcode. The black in between the clips isn't empty space, it is BLACK media called FILLER. So you can add filters to it that will effect everything below it. And you must grab it as well when moving clips.

So so so much...
 
Fun stuff:

1. The trimmer is really awesome. Those purple rollers rock. It's great being able to just play around your edit and hammer < and > keys on the keyboard to tweak the cut by a frame. And it just keeps rolling smoothly. When you like your edit, commit.

2. Effects in Avid are more like adjustment layers in After Effects. They effect everything underneath. This is handy for many things. For example if you want to glow over a dissolve or add a blur to a push transition to make it look more like a whip pan, you just put the transition on V1 and the effect on V2. Whereas with FCP you'd have to add the effect to both clips separately and try match keyframes, etc.

3. There is built in Twixtor-like time remapping in the Fluid Motion tab.

4. Animatte and paint functions have interfaces like they're out of 1990 but are powerful. You can paint feathered masks, etc. Way ahead of 4-point garbage mask IMHO.

5. Avid can read timecode even if it's recorded to an analog audio track. This means you can make a DSLR without timecode function like a timecode device if you feed it audio from a timecode box (you can buy these cheaply). Or if folks aren't that organized, use the Avid version of PluralEyes.

6. If you load a sequence into the source window, you can hit a little button on the bottom left corner of the timeline and then that sequence pops up. Then hit the button again and you're back in the main timeline. When you edit in, it doesn't nest like FCP. It patches everything straight through. If you ever want to reset the patching, there is a menu option to reset the sequence patching. I have that mapped to a keyboard.

7. When learning, check out all of those little hamburger-like icons. They contain lots of fun stuff.

8. Pop up the command palette and you'll get a bunch of buttons you can press in "Active Palette" mode. You can later assign these to the keyboard or to empty spaces in the interface. Also you can assign any menu operation to a button or keyboard command.

9. Autosave occurs to Avid Attic (in the Library -> Shared -> Avid or something like that).

10. Each project is a folder. Each individual bin is its own file. This is so that multiple users can work on a project at the same time (they have write access to their own bins, but can read the other folks' bins).

11. When tweaking an effect value, left and right keys nudge it by 1.

12. You really CAN mix clips of different resolutions and frame rates in the timeline. Works better than any other editor

13. ...but when you're importing clips, for now it's best to make a project with the same framerate as the clips you want to import. So if you're bringing in some 50i PAL media, make a 50i PAL project... import the footage. Then open up your 24p project and import the bin of 50i footage from the other project. Avid will now make that 50i footage work inside your 24p project, as fluidly as possible.

Umm, I'll edit this and add more. What are your main questions?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
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I don't have any specific questions at the moment. I was more curious to learn what I don't even know that I don't know. Plus, I thought this would be a good thread to have generally as I feel there will be a wave of Final Cut Pro refugees coming this way soon.

Here's an article I found called "Avid for Final Cut Pro users" that I thought seemed pretty informative: http://alex4d.wordpress.com/avid-for-final-cut-pro-users/

One thing I have heard about Avid and AMA is that it had some unexpected gotchas.

I was working on a project with a (good, experienced) editor a while back and she was trying out AMA for the first time. On this project I was doing post production sound. Apparently exporting OMF turned out to be a major chore, and when she went to an editor's get together (in LA, populated with mostly professional editors) they were all complaining about AMA. This was a few months back.

Is it better to just do things the old fashioned way if you don't mind waiting for the transcode operation to happen?

From my research, it seems that DNxHD 115 roughly corresponds to ProRes 422, and DNxHD 175 roughly corresponds to ProRes 422 HQ. Is that roughly correct?

Should DSLR footage be imported using RGB 709 mode with full values from 0-255?

Final Cut Pro had notorious gamma shift issues with QuickTime. Does Avid have anything like that lurking in there?

Thanks so much for the replies!
 
Shane Ross said:
There are too many to count. Avid handles media and organization in a COMPLETELY different way. It is organized inside the project, not on the finder level. Avid can use AMA to access many media types natively, but it is better to transcode to Avid media for better performance. Work native until you go home for the night, then transcode. The black in between the clips isn't empty space, it is BLACK media called FILLER. So you can add filters to it that will effect everything below it. And you must grab it as well when moving clips.

So so so much...
Click to expand...

100% agree. BTW have you guys noticed that FCP X kinda treats filler the same way? Don't want to derail... but the feeling of the timeline being a solid tapestry - with filler as a tangible entity - just seems like a step forward to me and it's one of the things where Apple and Avid seem to agree (now)!

robotsound said:
I don't have any specific questions at the moment. I was more curious to learn what I don't even know that I don't know. Plus, I thought this would be a good thread to have generally as I feel there will be a wave of Final Cut Pro refugees coming this way soon.

Here's an article I found called "Avid for Final Cut Pro users" that I thought seemed pretty informative: http://alex4d.wordpress.com/avid-for-final-cut-pro-users/

One thing I have heard about Avid and AMA is that it had some unexpected gotchas.

I was working on a project with a (good, experienced) editor a while back and she was trying out AMA for the first time. On this project I was doing post production sound. Apparently exporting OMF turned out to be a major chore, and when she went to an editor's get together (in LA, populated with mostly professional editors) they were all complaining about AMA. This was a few months back.

Is it better to just do things the old fashioned way if you don't mind waiting for the transcode operation to happen?
Click to expand...

Yes, AMA is fine for quick cuts (and also you can use it to transcode to DNxHD - eg import everything as AMA, make quick cuts, then do a transcode to DNxHD for the serious editing).

But for now, if you value rock solid stability and performance, just use the old DNxHD workflow as it is tried and true, doesn't take up that much disk space, and looks great.

Maybe by version 6.0 of Media Composer (Q4 this year according to Wikipedia) AMA will be 100% but I say skip it for now.

robotsound said:
From my research, it seems that DNxHD 115 roughly corresponds to ProRes 422, and DNxHD 175 roughly corresponds to ProRes 422 HQ. Is that roughly correct?
Click to expand...

Yes. One advantage is that you can have alpha with both of those formats.

robotsound said:
Should DSLR footage be imported using RGB 709 mode with full values from 0-255?
Click to expand...

I generally tell Avid that the source footage is RGB full range. What this does is tell Avid that it needs to take the blacks (with value = 0) and make them legal black (value = 16).

After that, when sending to graphics, etc, you have the option of sending colors out as-is (blacks = 16), or converting back again (make blacks = 0 in the quicktime output). What you choose depends on how savvy your graphics guy is.

Main thing is: if you send footage to the GFX guy with blacks = 16, and the gfx guy works with blacks at 16, don't import the things with the RGB full range option. Because then that puts your blacks at 32.

Generally what we do is make a rule that GFX always sends out with legal black set to 0... and Avid always converts it back to legal value 16 on input.

But we do a ton of stuff for broadcast output. If you're doing web stuff, heck, just set blacks to 0 and run with it?

robotsound said:
Final Cut Pro had notorious gamma shift issues with QuickTime. Does Avid have anything like that lurking in there?
Click to expand...

Avid has none of those issues. One of the primary reasons I moved to Avid :)

For example, you can just render from After Effects -> Animation codec quicktimes or DNxHD quicktimes and they import with no gamma shift, yaaay.

Also, FXPHD has an Avid course. I like their Nuke stuff, so maybe the Avid one is good too?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
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kwoff said:
In the course of starting to learn Avid over the past few days, I have been reading Avid Agility, the book Matt recommends, and am finding it very helpful. I am also considering the official Avid curriculum book, although I've only read a Kindle sample. Here is a link to the second book:

http://www.amazon.com/Editing-Avid-Media-Composer-Curriculum/dp/032173467X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b

Matt, any opinion on the official Avid book?

Also, thanks for the tips, Bruce.
Click to expand...


The official Avid book is good too.
 
I put in my order for Media Composer 5.5 and Pro Tools. I might need to get that book too, even though I hate reading tech books.
 
It's true that AMA has some "gotchas", but they're not that difficult to overcome. In the case of exporting an AAF for your Protools session, all an editor needs to do is transcode the sequence from the linked AMA media to another codec such as DNxHD (this includes transcoding the audio), then Avid will be able to properly export the session. It's not a long procedure, but for some reason it blows certain editors minds and a 20-minute process turns into a three-day battle with the computer. It's important to remember to check the avid.com forums whenever you run into a problem. That's where I always go first and I have yet to walk away without a solution to my editing problems.
 
Pave1 said:
http://www.avid.com/US/resources/media-composer-5-getting-started-training

Nice videotutorials for easy start.

If you drag an clip in timeline (segment mode), try ..+ CTRL or ...+ALT+CTRL (snap start/end of clips, cursor, etc) or ..+CTRL+SHIFT (only vertical drag, horizontal drag is freeze).
Click to expand...

I went through these same tutorials in 2 days and it's really helpful. Even though I'm not editing at my FCP speed, I'm beginning to get the hang of MC5, and I just might make the switch to it.
 
As a recent FCP > Avid person, I found the most difficult thing about learning Avid (MC 5.0) was all the bugginess.

AMA crashed the system every time I used it, and I was never sure if I was doing something wrong, or if it was just Avid. Also, Opening the "Media Tool" will 5 times out of 10 crash the system. I never knew if I was missing something or if it was just Avid instability.

So be wary. And if something doesn't seem right, google it -- chances are there are 50 other editors who have had the same bizarre issue.

That said, maybe 5.5 has resolved some of these issues.
 
There's something wrong with your system. Avid isn't that unstable. Post your system specs, OS version, Quicktime version, graphics card, media type, storage system, etc...and we may be able to pin down your problem.
 
Avid is VERY specific about what the system specs need to be in order to run Media Composer. From the OS version, QT version and graphics card. You must be SPOT ON in order to get proper performance. This is why Avid sold fully integrated systems in the past...they only sold what worked, and told people "DO NOT UPDATE ANYTHING...this system is working." And if you did, it was on you.

Make sure you fully meet all of Avid's requirements for everything. If you don't, then you will have issues.
 
tbob said:
As a recent FCP > Avid person, I found the most difficult thing about learning Avid (MC 5.0) was all the bugginess.

AMA crashed the system every time I used it, and I was never sure if I was doing something wrong, or if it was just Avid. Also, Opening the "Media Tool" will 5 times out of 10 crash the system. I never knew if I was missing something or if it was just Avid instability.

So be wary. And if something doesn't seem right, google it -- chances are there are 50 other editors who have had the same bizarre issue.

That said, maybe 5.5 has resolved some of these issues.
Click to expand...

I also found that MC 5.0 was more buggy on OSX. MC5.5 is much, much more stable. Well except for avid filmscribe... they seem to have broken the ability to make thumbnails of your assemble list... bah! :P
 
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