Splice Now

End of my first week using Xpress Pro (with Mojo) in a professional setting. First reaction: this product has no fundamental reason to exist. It’s exactly the same as the Media Composer in most major ways, but has a list of minor and frustrating differences that make no sense at all.

• You can’t have two rows of buttons or two rows of info.
• You can’t have a “center duration” display. (Select I/O above your monitors instead.)
• There’s no ability to select black in the source monitor.
• There’s no “center pan” comand. You can’t center pan a group of clips in one step.
• Timewarp is limited to a few presets.
• There’s no effects mode icon under the timeline. You have to assign it to a key.
• There’s no settings panel for confirguring the Fast Forward and Rewind commands. So, for example, you can’t get them to stop at locators.
• You can’t add a film matte to an empty track, for example, to put a 1.85 matte over your entire sequence. (The workaround is to add an edit somewhere in the track first. Then add the matte to the two resulting black clips.)
• The counter above the record monitor resets to timecode every time you start the Media Composer. If you want it in feet and frames you have to set it that way every time you start up.
• You can’t slip or slide a clip by double clicking on it. You have to manually place the rollers at the ends of the clip.
• When you drag a clip in segment mode, you don’t see a footage counter, so you can’t drag numerically.

Yes, I can find workarounds for some of these and I can probably get the job done with it, but it seems downright frustrating to create these tiny differences and yet make Xpress the same as Adrenaline in so many major areas such as HD capabilities, real-time multicam, color correction, script integration.

Of course, the goal is to encourage somebody like me to shell out the dough to move into a real Media Composer, software-only, while still keeping the product competitive with Final Cut in terms of major functionality. But the side effect of this stategy is that it sucks energy out of real R&D and puts it into the effort of differentiation and extra customer support and testing.

Meanwhile, Final Cut bundles groundbreaking auxilliary applications and sells the whole thing for less than Xpress. You don’t get a striped down version, you get the real thing.

Before NAB this year, my top frustration with Avid was how many versions of the software there were to choose from. We had Meridien and Adrenaline, Mac and PC, Xpress and DS and three kinds of hardware. This formed a matrix of choices that were damn near incomprehensible to normal mortals, not to mention many of Avid’s support people. And this does not include the entire Liquid product line or the Pinnacle products. All these versions sap the company’s resources and frustrate customers who keep looking over the fence at how simple the Final Cut folks have it.

Post NAB, Avid’s line is simpler and I applaud the move to a single piece of software, supporting multiple hardware configurations and with the same feature set on Mac and PC.

But there are still too many choices. From one perspective, the company has actually added an application, namely Media Composer Software, which now competes with Xpress Pro. In gearing up for the film I’ll be starting next week, I spent way too many hours trying to understand the difference between Xpress Pro, MCsoftware (or whatever it’s called) Mojo and Adrenaline. In the end, I’m choosing to go with Xpress Pro not because I’m sure it’s going to work, but because this is what my employer already owns. We’ll sort out its limitations as I start working.

Avid wants customers to look at their competitive offerings and decide that choosing Media Composer is a no-brainer. But the choice is still too complicated.