Re: A Cautionary Tale for the FCP Switcher

Thanks for the excellent article, Walter (and for the recent ATL Cutters event). I, too, tried going back to Avid 5.5 a year ago... at the time, it was a welcome relief from a few years dominated by FCP, whose UI I never enjoyed. Unfortunately, I immediately ran into massive gamma problems (possibly related to other codecs on the machine, but I'll never know, since I got such lackluster (dis)interest from Avid Support. Their attitude boiled down to, "We've never seen this before, so we're not going to worry about you."

I finally gave up and essentially threw away the cost of a 5.5 license, a 6 upgrade and an AvidPhrase license, never having gotten it to work, and bought CS6 instead. It's a shame, since I go back 20 years with Avid, and they have numerous features/functions that Adobe still lacks. But Avid really needs to scrap their now-ancient legacy code and write a modern piece of software instead of applying patch after patch (and poorly-integrated third-party apps) to 20-year-old code. Whether they'll ever have the money to support that effort is a big question mark. It's clear that Adobe does, and is willing to spend what it will take (IMO).