Splice Now

Actually, it’d be much easier to talk about what’s right with it, because the list would be so much shorter: it makes titles that can be supered over picture. Wow. That was an exciting thing a decade ago. Today, we see the same bugs, the same quirks, the same limitations that have been there all along, namely:

• Titles play in realtime, but they’re not realtime. The title master clip must be rendered.
• Changing a title always means creating a new render file and these files tend to proliferate and end up all over the place.
• You can’t matchframe on a title in order to modify it. (The error message says “Precomputes can’t be loaded into monitors.” Of course, that isn’t true — you can load a title into a monitor.)
• Unlike every other kind of clip, modifying an existing title means modifying only that single instance of it, not the title master clip.
• Unlike every other kind of clip, modifying the name of a title master clip doesn’t change the name of the title when it’s edited into a sequence.
• Change the text in a title and you often change the dimensions of the title’s bounding box and cause line breaks to change unpredictably.
• Typography is a mess. Letter spacing is inconsistent and individual letter pairs often have to be kerned by hand. Type can look crude and rough.
• Leading can only be changed for an entire title block, not line by line.
• No lighting effects are possible.
• It’s hard to precisely control title color.
• Animation is crude and difficult to control.
• Soft drop shadows are now possible, but are difficult to control.

And don’t get me started on Marquee, which is, if anything, even worse. Marquee’s typography is much better, but it’s got plenty of quirks of it’s own. For example, you can easily create multiple instances of Marquee, where two copies of the program are running independently — a total no-no in the Mac world. And I challenge anyone reading this, who doesn’t already know the trick, to tell me how to change the leading in a Marquee title. Or modify a Marquis-created title (hint — make your change and then quit Marquee!) Or figure out how to do simple character animation with it, which is supposedly what it’s for.

When are we finally going to get titles that don’t have to be rendered? When are we going to get real title styles, so we can simply change a style and have all the titles that use that style change together? So you could change the font, say, for an entire main title sequence in one step? When are we going to get soft drop shadows that are easy to apply, control and change? When are we going to get easy-to-use character animation?

I suspect that some of the folks in Tewksbury are painfully aware of all this. At one time I had hopes that we might see something new at this year’s NAB, but my intuition is that the challenge of getting the Media Composer onto the Intel-Mac platform has consumed a lot of engineering man-hours.

And so Media Composer users wait. Meanwhile, Final Cut and Motion get more capable, more responsive and more intuitive.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

I’ll be buying a new machine to replace my aging G4 shortly. My goal is to make this my primary computer at home — and I’d also like to be able to do some editing with it. Avid doesn’t make this easy, in at least two ways.

First, the company is always late to the party with operating system compatibility. With an Avid installed on your machine you are well advised to upgrade the OS with great care, lest you make your Avid flaky or nonfunctional. Avid blames this on Apple and I’m sure there’s something to that, but it still feels less and less acceptable these days. I just don’t have other applications that are this fussy. Somehow, virtually every other software manufacturer is able to deal with changes in the OS more quickly than Avid. Even Digi does a better job.

The second problem lies in the way Avid handles non-standard monitor configurations. The Media Composer was designed to work with two monitors, each with a 4:3 aspect ratio. You put your bins on one and the composer (the source/record monitor) and the timeline on the other.

Two 4×3 monitors was state of the art in 1991, but not today. We’ve got much bigger screens available and it ought to be possible to work comfortably with just one of them. Both Avid and Apple allow you to put your windows wherever you like them, so — problem solved, right? Wrong.

The trouble lies in window activation. Apple’s laptops and big monitors all have aspect ratios of about 16×10. But two 4×3 monitors next to each other have, in total, an aspect ratio of 16×6. In other words there’s a lot more width. If you try to jam bins, composer and timeline into 16×10 what you get is overcrowding. Either you make your bins very tall and narrow, or you overlap your windows. Overlapping shouldn’t be any big deal — except when you try double clicking on a clip. Your shot opens in the appropriate monitor, and the composer window comes forward. But the timeline stays where it is, behind the bin, creating the mess you see in the image above. So every single time you put a clip in a monitor, you’ve got to click again on the timeline in order to actually do anything with that clip. This may seem like a small thing, but anybody who has tried to cut on a laptop, and look at their bins in frame view, knows how annoying this can be.

Final Cut works differently, but isn’t much better. In FCP the viewer and the canvas are separate windows. That can be helpful in certain situations. But in this case, it just confuses things. If you double click on a source clip the viewer comes forward — but not the canvas and not the timeline. If you double click on a sequence, you get the canvas and the timeline, but not the viewer. In each case you have to click again to to do something useful.

People who work with their bins in text view are probably okay with this setup — tall and narrow bins are fine when you’re just looking at text. But I don’t work that way and neither do a lot of people I know. It shouldn’t be much of a challenge for the engineers to change this kind of behavior. The question is, as always, “What does the customer want?” This one is easy — just make window activation a preference. That would make it a whole lot simpler to work on diverse displays and it would make it a lot easier for me to buy a new monitor, too.