Splice Now

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?

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

It seems to me that software design can spring from two opposing philosophies. One says, “We know what the machine can do. But we don’t really know much about what you want to do with it. We’ll spend our time making sure you have all the options you want.” The other says, “We know exactly what you want to do. We’re going to make the machine do that. We’ll spend our time figuring how to make it do the right thing intuitively, quickly and easily.”

Which brings me to Leopard. I haven’t tried it, and I won’t be able to until the MC works under it. That’s a shame, because after four major upgrades, Apple has demonstrated that the OS can still be markedly improved, to a new level of interface simplicity and intuitiveness. Leopard makes it easier to find stuff, easier to back up, easier to share files, easier to stay organized. And as nice as Tiger looked, Leopard looks better.

To see what I mean, check out Apple’s Leopard guided tour video. It’s a half hour long, but when you’ve watched it, I think you’ll agree that Apple has found plenty of room for innovation in the supposedly staid world of operating system design. What I find so exciting is that many of the improvements make routine tasks, things we’re completely used to, all of a sudden seem old — because the designers found a simpler, more aesthetic, more visual and more intuitive way to do them.

They accomplished this by first deeply understanding what their customers are trying to do, and then by innovating — creating new and more intuitive ways to do those things.

All this begs the question about what Avid’s been doing low these many years. Way too many of the problems I have with the Media Composer have been around for a decade — not just bugs, but features that didn’t work right from the beginning. Yes, we’ve seen many innovations, but most have involved visual effects and color correction. When it comes to basic usability, we’re still working with Media Composer circa 1997. Luckily for Avid, Final Cut’s basic feature set hasn’t evolved much in the last couple of years (innovations have come in the suite instead) and before that, they were playing catch-up. But if Apple starts innovating the Final Cut interface as much as it has OSX, the MC is going to look awfully tired very quickly.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, final cut pro