Second day on the Avid and all I can say is that editing on this is a bit frustrating. I have gotten very used to FCP and the ability to drag clips all over the place, and move everything on the timeline down to make room to add footage. I know that the new update adds this functionality, and I will install it on my own machine, but getting it installed on the work machines might not be possible. Up to the Post Super and they tend to be very wary of updates. In the meantime, I am trying to remember how I did this with Avid’s amazing TRIM capabilities, but wasn’t having much luck. Felt like I was fumbling along. I hope to get into the swing of things soon.

My main task today was to flesh out the rough cut and add music…and that brought another level of frustration. In FCP when you open an audio file in the Viewer you can see the waveforms. You can see where the music swells and dips, and where the beats hit. This is VERY useful. In an Avid, you see black. So editing music is a bit tougher, and takes a bit longer.

So far things have been rocky…and I hope that can be attributed to me needing to relearn my Avid skills. Because while the media management rocks, mixing codecs in real time and faster reaction time on the timeline is nice, the basic editing feels rough. This is a great tool, but it feels…heavy. It does so much, but using it can be difficult…while editing on FCP (for me) is fast and fun. But then I know Avid people who get on FCP and complain just as hard that editing on FCP is like slogging thru mud. So I just need to get into my Avid game.

Cool thing is that I have upgraded the home system to 3.0.5 and brought the segment home that I am editing and it opens just fine. Did a few changes to the cut, so I’ll bring the changes in a bin to work and see if it opens and connects. But that is where Avid does excel…you can take projects back and forth in a variety of version without too much trouble. And all you need to do is take the bin (which is a separate file…Avid breaks the project into smaller files…each bin is a separate entity) to another system and open it. Good tool, very powerful. I just need to be able to have fun with it now.