FCP vs Avid

[Our friend KRAIG BAILEY recently attended an AVID SYMPHONY NITRIS demo and a FCP VERSION 5 PRODUCTION SUITE demo. Here are his thoughts.]

In the bang-for-your-buck department FCP BLOWS AVID out of the water -- especially if you are a MAC user.

As APPLE transitions to INTEL (sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit) the feature parity between AVID MAC products and WINTEL products will coincide.

AVID is psyched about this as it will be SO much easier to write for the same processor.

With FCP you get a reasonably priced, tightly integrated suite of apps that let you go from shooting to editing to DVD authoring. Very nice.

Here's the rub -- SUPPORT.

No one makes and supports a system.

Oh, sure if you are connecting your deck via FIREWIRE to your MAC you're all set. As soon as you add an I/O card to do uncompressed SD or HD you're screwed. There's no one you can call. If you call the card maker they'll point the finger at APPLE. If you call APPLE you'll be told to call the card maker.

"Uh, but my piece airs in five minutes!" Game over.
You're toast.

As for XSERVE, I'd still take UNITY (flawed as it is) over it any day. There are three levels of communication that have to happen for XSERVE to work. Ouch!

And APPLE is supposed to be the simpler OS?

So, to summarize.

Low end -- FCP.

High end/broadcast -- AVID.

Simple.

So, yeah. I'm putting FCP 5 on my G5.

One last interesting note.

At this seminar there was a guy shooting on P2 in "HD" (although 100 mb/s hardly qualifies as HD in my book -- and yes, I know that's what ESPN is doing).

He was very happy but was just using a couple sets of memory cards. He filled up one set (they hold a whopping EIGHT minutes of footage), swapped it out, loaded the card into a laptop and emptied it so they're good to be used again. A LAPTOP!

Gee, hope you don't drop it or the teeny, fragile hard drive inside doesn't crash! And obviously, totally impractical for ENG -- you'd be spending tens of thousands of dollars to have enough cards for a day's worth of shooting.

Kraig Bailey, thanks for the post.