Splice Now

Right now I’m working with Xpress Pro (with Mojo) at work, and I’ve been playing with the new software-only Media Composer on a laptop at home. One thing I’m loving about MC software is how fast it puts frames on the screen.

One of my biggest gripes about Adrenaline has been how slow it felt when dragging through the timeline. Every frame hung on the screen for too long. You could drag through a reel and miss entire sequences. This is hard to explain in words, but it can make you feel like you’re dragging through molasses.

In the past, and to my surprise, I found Xpress faster than Adrenaline in this regard, but the comparison wasn’t totally fair since the Adrenaline system was connected to Unity and the Xpress machine wasn’t.

So far I’m finding that the new Media Composer, at least with local storage, is a real rocket ship in this regard. It feels so responsive when dragging that it’s actually sort of fun to just play with it.

In other respects, MC software feels pretty sluggish on the laptop: when scrubbing audio, opening big bins or working on long sequences with a lot of tracks. But I think it’ll work a lot better on a faster machine. I’m eager to see what it’s like with Unity.

Bottom line, I think there’s no longer any reason to hesitate about Adrenaline, and I’m talking about on the Mac. I would choose it every time, if for no other reason than that it lets you have 16 tracks of audio and does real-time audio dissolves. Get a fast machine with ample RAM. And consider using Mojo hardware rather than Adrenaline, or even software only. You may find that you like a lighter, simpler setup. I do.

Finally, don’t rule out Xpress. There are half a dozen things you’ll have to work around, but none were show stoppers for me. And it’s fast and stable on the Mac.

This entry was posted on October 25, 2006 at 7:18 am and is filed under Avid. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.