Splice Now

What a difference a couple of years makes. Avid (and Media Composer 5) picked up several awards at NAB, including a Videography Vidy award, a Pick Hit from Broadcast Engineering, and a Star Award from TV Technology. Not bad for a company that a lot of people thought was moribund a few years ago. Apple, of course, was a no-show at NAB, and the Final Cut community seems to be taking notice. Here’s a quote from the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group forum: “I hope Apple takes this as a wake up call. Because Avid is making FCP seem like the Media Composer of five years ago…”

Oliver Peters offers a great summary of post production-related NAB news on his blog here. I was intrigued to see that some of the new digital cinema cameras generate both raw files and either DNX or ProRes simultaneously. We thought the lab would end up in the editing room. Maybe it’s actually going to end up in the camera. And later this year, it looks like Lightworks is going to have a new life as a free download, with the code released to the open source community. The modern Lightworks has plenty of useful features, not the least of which is background saves. And it can edit both ProRes and DNX without transcoding. Don’t count them out yet. Meanwhile, as I’ve mentioned  previously (here and here), Premiere might be morphing into a legitimate contender.

Not long ago it looked like the editing software wars were nearly over. Today, the playing field is a whole lot more level — and exciting.  This is how it’s supposed to work. Competition drives innovation — in economics, and in evolution. And we, the editors, win.

This entry was posted on April 19, 2010 at 7:17 am and is filed under Adobe Premiere, Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Lightworks, Workflow. 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.