Avid Media Composer 5.0 Features I’m Excited About

I work from home about 50% of the time. I do all of that work off of a MacBook Pro. I would love to invest in a nice Mac Pro setup, but whenever I do hard core work I get brought into an office with a nice Symphony system or FCP suite. All in all, I am very excited about the new Media Composer software because it gives me a few reasons to tell clients that it would be more efficient to use Avid instead of FCP for once.

Now, I am not going to dive in deep to analyze everything possible, as I was not able to attend NAB and therefore have not tried the software out myself. These are just some thoughts I’ve had over the past couple days.

1) Editing H.264 and ProRes. HDSLR footage, come my way please. I tend to edit 1-2 pieces a week shot on the 7D and this just makes me excited. I can spend more time on the editing and less time on converting the footage to Pro Res before it comes into the system. Good feature for us flat rate payment guys. And then ProRes, really? Great. I’ll take it. I usually use ProRes as something to convert footage that isn’t editing well (H.264) on timelines so I only use it when its HDV or shot on a HDSLR.

2) XDCAM. This is great as a time saver, again. I like the low res proxy editing feature with option to use high quality audio. Good news. I don’t have a super powerful machine at home, but again

3) E-mail me! After a large batch of exports it appears I can get an e-mail on my iPhone when the work is complete. That’s awesome for two reasons; it’s a time punch and the mobile alert factor.

Now of course you could say “What about the AMA features with editing RED?”

Yeah, that’s awesome too. It doesn’t directly effect me yet though, as I usually edit RED stuff on a larger, more complete system anyway. These are the new features that help out the little guys, the one man shops with smaller jobs that pay the bills.

I think that these features give a good shove back to Apple on the competition level of things. Now that Avid is updating for MAC the same time as PC there is no reason you shouldn’t look over to Avid as your new editing solution. They even have a full 30-day trial.

The new version is expected out June 10, but if you buy Media Composer 4 now you get the upgrade to 5 for free.

For a list of the features included in Avid 5, check the list over at Avid.com.

UPDATED APRIL 19, 2010 with correct date of release and correct information about the trail period.

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