Avid added segment mode to the Media Composer long before Final Cut was conceived, and even then, it was apparent then that editing in the timeline was an essential feature in any non-linear editing application. Working from the DS playbook, Final Cut made segment mode its primary editing mode and arguably made the application more intuitive to newbies who grew up with the desktop publishing metaphor — rearranging moving video by dragging little rectangles around on the screen.
I’ve never been a believer in the primacy of that metaphor. I think that the best editorial decisions are made by manipulating the video itself. That’s where the Media Composer excels, and for me, anything else is a shortcut that makes it harder to produce fluid editorial decisions. But there are still plenty of situations where dragging things in the timeline is the best way to quickly arrange a bunch of clips, and in this, Final Cut seems to have the edge.
The question for Avid is how to enhance its segment mode to better compete with FCP’s — without destroying the MC’s slickness and precision.
For me, it comes down to a handful of relatively simple fixes:
1. Don’t make clicking in a time track turn off segment mode. Unlike in the MC, in Xpress Pro stays on until you explicitly turn it off. When I first tried it, I thought this was a disadvantage. So I ended up mapping the red and yellow segment mode buttons to the keyboard. And boy did I like having them there. Now I find that having segment mode switch off every time I drag the cursor pretty frustrating. Allowing segment mode to stay on as long as you want it to would be the best and most flexible compromise with FCP’s “on all the time” approach.
2. Add a feature that lets me select “everything to the right.” This is a big win for FCP because it makes it easy to open up space in the middle of a complex, overlapped timeline. It would be trivially simple to add to the MC — it doesn’t even need its own button. You’d just select a clip while holding down a modifier key, and everything to the right would be highlighted. Do the same thing to each track and then drag to the right to open up space, as needed. I’d kill to have this seemingly small change.
3. In red segment mode, make it possible to select two non-adjacent clips in the same track and move them together without selecting all the clips in between.
4. Make it possible to select and move two audio clips (ie. a stereo pair) up or down one track at a time.
5. Offer a simple way to clone a clip and place it in another track. Great for trying musical alternates, or copying sound effects.
There are a few other minor issues, but for the most part, that’s it. Avid has just about everything else — cut and paste works fine, the four-headed display when dragging a segment is better than FCP’s. Dragging while snapping to the beginning — or the ending — of nearby clips works better, too.
But maybe I’m missing something. So I’ll put this to those of you who are proficient in both programs: What else is missing from Avid’s segment mode?
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