Let me start out by saying that I REALLY like that Avid Media Composer has an UNINSTALLER application…something that completely uninstalls the Avid software. Very handy when the application isn’t working properly and you need to, well, reinstall it to get it working again. I have had to do that twice thus far. No biggie…took like 15 minutes to uninstall and reinstall.

Just to be fair, Final Cut Pro has one too…unofficial but it works great.

Now, onto the other thing, backwards compatibility. This is something that FCP is sadly lacking. There were a couple really mini updates that were…like 6.0.3 to 6.0.2…but other than that…nope, no can do. But Avid is pretty good about this…depending on the versions you need to go to. Specifically Media Composer 3.0.5 to MC 2.8.

I was asked to edit a “sizzle reel” for a company, and I was given the option of working there (They are over the hill in Santa Monica, and I live in the Valley…a really long commute) or working on my home system. I opted to edit at home. Now, this is a company that utilizes Avid Media Composer 2.8. But I don’t have MC 2.8…well, I DO…that was the first version Avid sent me. But I don’t have it installed, and that is because it requires Mac OS 10.4.11 (Tiger). All of my machines are running 10.5 (Leopard). I have extra drives in my MacPro, but it is the newest one and it does not allow Tiger to be installed, so there goes that. But then I realize that I don’t have a stand alone Tiger install disk. Ugh. I only have the one for my Powerbook…SO…I could wipe the drive clean and install the older OS (after I clone my current system…so I can revert back to that later).

That is viable, but time consuming. Which is why I am glad that Avid MC 3.0 is backwards compatable to 2.8. But just to be sure, I will just be giving them the bin of my cut, not the entire project. They will create the master project and digitize all the material, and get that to me on a hard drive. I do the cut, then e-mail the bin. Simple.

Viva remote editing!