My Avid experience

I've been forced to work with Avid Xpress Professional for quite some time now because of two factors: 1) Education, and 2) Avid's popularity.

Sure, the local television network I worked for has probably never heard of Avid before so it was nice to work with Adobe Première on a professional level for a change, but the entire national public broadcast studios use Avid Xpress for their editing needs. The evidence presents itself when rushjob broadcasts occasionally show us this shot with the text "Media Offline" on a dark background. It's like a falling star; a keen eye can spot them anywhere, occasionally. But I'd say you're the luckiest watching BNN's 101 TV. They appear to have no quality control; they don't master sound levels amongst different shows equally, they prefer to swap fields from interlaced footage the wrong way and finish it with random "Media Offline" messages.

Is it Avid? Is it the editors?

I do know since Avid is so popular, not only for TV but also for big movies like The Matrix Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Da Vinci Code and King Kong, I'm a cooler guy when I'm using Avid. For comparison, my video teacher called Première Pro "toys" compared to Avid Xpress. I don't agree though. And if that makes me stupid, keep in mind that I'm a student with much to learn.

For the educational part, school makes us use it. Either for the above reason, or because students using familiar software are prone to judge the education quality.

Avid rules, sais the pro's

One of the Avid experts who works at school told me:



I am no big fan of Première. But since Première was Adobe's smart move to make easy money where Final Cut was Apple only and Avid sucked, I like to compare things to Première because this "toy" actually does stuff that Avid lacks. I cannot say it ever crashed on me when doing something perfectly normal (read: without having 12 major apps open). Avid, on the other hand, not only crashes at least once a (full working) day, the messages are usually not very easy to understand.















And ofcourse the many issues of:



...with me being sure I was the only one on the network (which was working because I could edit files through explorer). Ofcourse the latter is fixed by manually removing the .lck files, but hey, unnecessary manual labour.




I refuse to count that as a positive argument. If you want to make a quality product, you're a fool to use DivX anyhow. But if you manage to find some exclusive piece of DivX that's required for your masterpiece in some way, 'normal' NLEs let you try to import it. With Avid, you're gonna have to be a whizkid that knows to handle AviSynth and VirtualDub in order to poop out a bullshit Huffy or Laggy intermediate file. I agree, frameserving would be clever at this point. Avid transcodes everything to it's own untransparent format anyway. However, Avid is specifically programmed not to be 'fooled' by any frameserver or AVIwrapper. I tried AviSynth, DebugMode FrameServer, VFAPI and VirtualDub. At best, the sound would come through, but the video is either black or white.

Other stuff that just sucks

I hate QuickTime. I won't bitch about it, but it's a bitch. Luckily QT is for Mac owners, and Windows has got this perfectly fine .avi container format. Avid claims to support both, but what do you know? Back in 1992 when .avi was invented, the container could not span more data than somewhere between 1 and 2 gigabytes. Even though most of us were playing Epic Pinball back then and movies were spread amongst multiple CD's anyway, videofanatics soon found out how this limitation sucked and they invented 'AVI 2.0' in 1996. No more size limitations. However, even up to the current version no one in the Avid team decided to include this world standard in the €1200 software package!

Here's another oldskool inheritance; during playback, ANYTHING you do STOPS the playback. You cannot watch your montage while checking some bin info.

Avid group clips (multicam) cannot color correct pieces WHITHIN the group. That makes group clips useless for all cases where your footage is not perfectly color graded and equalized to begin with. And something similar; timelines cannot be nested! Première can do these things. About multicam, since humans are known not to be pixel precise, they tend to click wrong every once in a while. This increases when available time on a job decreases. And the fun thing about the multicam selector is: Multicam gets disabled if you JUST miss the drop down camera selector! Same for trimming a non-video track. You'll have to manually switch back to multicam.

One thing I like about Première is that it won't nag when I update footage externally with newer exports. Nor will it nag when I use low resolution proxy files for editing and just swap 'em with HD versions. It's perfect. Have you tried something similar in Avid? You probably won't ever get the altered version in, have to recapture the tape from which all the original subclips were made, and be scared all your life.

One more rusty editors inheritance: Empty pieces of timeline get chopped in pieces when cutting across the timeline with the sole intention of being annoying. Grey bearded old people claim this is very intuitive because that's how it works when cutting real film roll. And you can add effects to empty clips! Woohoo! Admittedly, you can accomplish some goals this way, but it doesn't have to be like this. Other packages offer similar functionality in a non-weird way. Somewhat related I've had empty undeletable pieces of clip at the end of my montage. Sometimes a message "Cannot delete zero-length clips" popped up, providing me with a mandatory game of "Trim and Conquer".

In random cases, simple shit like a fade from black is near-impossible to do. For example, when a handleless clip ends where the other begins. You're gonna have to move the layers, place dissolve, move back.. this can become annoying and shouldn't be happening.

You'll have to 'Save All Bins' frequently in order to beat a possible random crash. But you cannot have a bin selected. You must click the timeline to enable that option.

Première will change footage interpretation with a click (fields, framerate, aspect). Avid requires you to timeconsumingly re-import the entire footage and won't even replace the subclips in your sequence for you. A LOT of work has to be done, so make your initial choices wisely!

And finally - something you cannot possibly trivialize - what's the deal with importing perfectly normal MPEG footage? Importing an MPEG2 Transport Stream structurally loses 22 frames at the end! The last frame is identical to the second-last frame, so actually it loses 23 frames. Nearly a second. Talking about poor programming.

Conclusio

Avid Xpress pisses me off. But it's also my weapon of choice. It's like loving the girl that's not good for you. I must admit that while writing this, the Avid version we use at school is not up to date so they could have fixed some stupid mistakes already. But since the AVI update from 11 years back wasn't implemented, I won't get my hopes up.

Because Avid decided to preserve the intuitive way of working with ancient film rolls and video on weird pre-PC Avid-only computerlike machines, Avid actually appears to be unintuitive to a modern computer user. Because of that, combined with the error-avoidance game you'll have to play during an editing session, the learning curve is quite steep compared to other NLEs.

However, once you master editing in Avid Xpress, I dare to compare the interaction with sex. Replace the host with something else and see how you like it. Although I cannot imagine a project I could not do with another major NLE and Avid has some drawbacks, I still prefer Avid for the job. It's sick.

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