We love to hate Avid.
Media Composer is great when you are working on a movie with a budget, and a decent post team. For anything else, I stay away. Outside of the cinema niche, the need for speed and the mixed media reality makes Media Composer a nonsensical choice. Media Composer is too slow and too temperamental for smaller projects that need to move at speed.
You cannot throw any media at Media Composer. Example: link a 4K h264 mp4 file, drop it into a HD timeline and watch Media Composer fail and hang miserably! So you have to first convert heteroclite media to something Media Composer likes. Already you are losing momentum.
If you are a film students working on your short film, by all means learn and use Media Composer. It's a great learning experience, you must understand formats and codecs, you have to think and prepare your media in advance, you can afford getting stuck and last minute surprises.
Producers and directors working on your feature narrative or documentary with a decent budget and a normal schedule, please hire me to edit on Avid Media Composer. We will hire assistants and the staff needed to keep the Avid running smoothly.
Everybody else, please stay away! Use Final Cut Pro, Premiere, or Resolve. Any of these NLEs run much more smoothly compared to Media Composer. Spend less money, less time editing, avoid daily aggravations, keep your hair and your sanity. Trust me.
With that said, Avid needs new customers and is reviving the free version of Avid Media Composer First, version 2023, with limited features in the hopes to woo new users to the platform. Again, for most projects you will be better served with the aforementioned NLEs.
What's the experience like? My impressions and comments will follow in a series of posts. Read on!
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