Re: Avid and FCP

I think a couple of the reasons people are seeing a plethora of FCP users looking for help is because the number of FCP users is growing so there are an increasing number of "newbs" all running into the same problems. One of the great things about FCP is that it is inexpensive enough so almost anyone can afford it. One of the bad things about FCP is that it is inexpensive enough so that almost anyone can afford it. "Back in the day" (and I'm not that old, honest) you had to work your way up at a production or post house before you got to play w/the big toys and in the process of working your way up you learned the right way to do things, proper terminology, how to avoid common problems, etc.,. Thats becoming less and less true. While the dropping prices of tech have removed monetary barriers they have also removed a great learning opportunity.

Both systems are capable editors, IMO, but I wouldn't switch to Avid and expect it to be a complete walk in the part. I've been thru things like the infamous "domain copyin" error (on 3 different gigs no less), bin corruption that spread through a multi-editor TV show like a virus, file-shuffling workarounds to keep the OMFI folders from getting too large, an Adrenaline bug that caused duplicate frames to randomly happen when laying back to tape, bins that refused to "unlock" (not a big deal, but just irritating), one gig where the graphic elements never properly translated from offline which meant we had to always cut them into the online by hand (adding about 10 man hours to the online per show), and other random quirks that can sometimes be solved by trashing the user, site, and project settings files (Avid version of FCP preference files).

As always, YMMV, but speaking in generalities I haven't noticed a large difference in operational up time between Avid and FCP systems that are properly maintained and don't have any malfunctioning hardware.


-A