Digidesign Releases ProTools HD Update for Tiger

I've been a video cutter for about 4 years now, mainly just for fun with the small indie films I've been making. I recently have had a few jobs come in, and FCP has truly been a godsend. My father is also a video editor of 40 years, and he has used everything from film to Avid to Final Cut, and he and his coworkers now love Final Cut above all else. It helps them to get their jobs done in time and get them looking better than ever. I've used avid once, and absolutely hated it. Final Cut, although in it's infancy, has much more refinement than I would ever expect from an editing program. It just seems to let the edits flow out of you, without you having to sit there and think technically about everything you're doing. Not to mention the fact that it never crashes. I think that Final Cut is a masterful product, but it really is a choice of what makes the editor happy. For me that's FCP.

I think Ashley is right about Avid overlooking a rather large segment of the editing market by only paying attention to the professional market. They were assuming it was the only place to make money. Apple came in, saw what Avid was ignoring, and introduced not only Final Cut Pro, but also Final Cut Express, and the 'gateway drug' of editing, iMovie. To be fair, until about 1999 there wasn't a cheap Mac that had enough power to do DV quality editing right out of the box. Avid was slow to react, and even when they did, it took them too long to come out with a cheaper version, and even then it was/is still more expensive than FCP. The upshot of this new war between Apple/Avid? More choices for editing on the Mac. That's good. The bad? Avid in reaction to this is cutting back on R and D for their Mac based Media Composer. It's not as full featured as the Window XP version. Drag. This means that the next movie I cut will be on Windows. For the first time ever. Makes this Mac user sad...

John, you are right. Avid has some very compelling tools for editors, especially those who work in larger shops (and collaborate). Having used Premiere for years I made the switch to FCE when they ran a promo to switch for free. I like Final Cut, but agree that it's just difficult to compete with a product line with so many years of fine-tuning under the hood. Still, FCE surprised me with it's polish for such a young app. The gap is narrowing, and bringing Avid (and Adobe for that matter) down a notch benefits everyone!

I think Ashley is right about Avid overlooking a rather large segment of the editing market by only paying attention to the professional market. They were assuming it was the only place to make money. Apple came in, saw what Avid was ignoring, and introduced not only Final Cut Pro, but also Final Cut Express, and the 'gateway drug' of editing, iMovie. To be fair, until about 1999 there wasn't a cheap Mac that had enough power to do DV quality editing right out of the box. Avid was slow to react, and even when they did, it took them too long to come out with a cheaper version, and even then it was/is still more expensive than FCP. The upshot of this new war between Apple/Avid? More choices for editing on the Mac. That's good. The bad? Avid in reaction to this is cutting back on R and D for their Mac based Media Composer. It's not as full featured as the Window XP version. Drag. This means that the next movie I cut will be on Windows. For the first time ever. Makes this Mac user sad...

I know the point of the post is really about the audio software but I just had ot respond to John Venzon's comment above. It seems to me that Apple have open this sort of software up to people that before they came along would have been stuc with a third parties inferior consumer products. Avid used to be real video snobs, selling incredibly 'high end' stuff to people in the business. But for people not in the business you had to put up with whatever consumer offering was out there, well not anymore. I think this taught Avid a lesson that they had been ignoring a whole market sector.

Well, not to turn this into a Pro-Tools bash, but I work at a studio in Dallas, Texas. We used to have 3 Pro-Tools suites. We now have 2 Logic Pro 7 suites (Suites A & B), and 1 remaining Pro-Tools suite (our edit suite). Having used Pro-Tools for years, I've come up with a better analogy. Pro-Tools is to a Hammer what Logic Pro 7 is to a Paintbrush. Logic Pro 7 comes with everything that you would need to create a song or album (82 pro Plug-ins if you count them). Pro-Tools comes with very little other than the program itself, and has to have it's own hardware (or m-audio's hardware) to run. Logic can run off of anything that is Core-Audio compatible which is alot. But, I confess, hard core editing, especially for Film & Video is much easier in Pro-Tools. But that's about it. Just thought some of you guys might like to know. Thanks!!

I'd have to agree that Pro Tools is much better when it comes to audio editing. But as far as video (I am a graphic designer, so audio isn't that important to my job 85% of the time) Final Cut Pro is much easier to work with.

While I agree that Final Cut Pro is a great piece of software, having used the Avid Media Composer since the early 90's on feature films, FCP isn't quite ready for 'prime time', as it were. True that Walter Murch used it to edit "Cold Mountain" he had the full attention of Apple and a great tech support team behind him to change things to his liking. This is something that most editor won't have when they cut their films. Since Avid has had over 10+ years to refine the interface for cutting, it's a bit smoother. Now ask me again after a few years of Apple's refinements... FWIW, John Venzon Editor