Re: Avid and FCP

[Gabe Cotto] "PC's have a well known problem with memory leakage, which can cause your machine to freeze, or starting having seizures if your run multiple programs at once, i.e. Avid, After Effects, or Photo Shop."

There is no such overall problem with Windows or "PC's" - some applications have memory leaks, but there's certainly nothing endemic in the operating system. I very often run Avid and Photoshop together, and After Effects too at times, and very rarely have stability or memory issues (although with some large HD projects there just isn't enough memory for AE which can be very demanding).

[Gabe Cotto] "PC's are more prone to virus's, files becoming corrupted at random, and hardware failure in general"

That is perhaps true, but it's really not hard to avoid. I've not had a virus or trojan on any of my computers for at least 5 or 6 years.

[Gabe Cotto] "Random media files in projects unlinking from their clips. Avid support was UNABLE to diagnose the problem. This is not a chronic problem, but this has happened on two different machines more then once."

In more than 6 years of using Avid constantly and literally thousands of hours of footage, I've never seen anything like that. Even if there were an error like that, Avid robust media management would make it very easy to recover from something like this.

[Gabe Cotto] "While working in projects Avid will loose connection with its Dongle and shut-down. Upon reopening the project everything is fine. But its still a time killer."

Another very weird and definitely atypical error. I've used more that 30 different Avid edit suites and never had any dongle errors (aside from when there wasn't actually a dongle present).

[Gabe Cotto] "(on PC with 4gb of RAM)If you are rendering a project in AE, or have Photoshop open for an extended period of time, plan on Avid not being able to allocate enough memory to continue to buffer video for playback."

AE is a massive memory hog, that's true on Windows and OS X. With a large comp rendering in AE I can barely operate FCP.

[Gabe Cotto] "Avid MC does not allow you to change project formats, or inter-mix SD, HD, 16x9, or 4x4 video in a timeline. Why is this a problem? Try explaining to client why you have to charge them more money so you can have a FCP editor do something they thought you could do."

You might have to enlighten us a little more on this one, because Avid can definitely mix all those things. I've finished HD projects that include 16:9 and 4:3 standard def footage. I've had 4:3 and 16:9 standard definition projects that use HD footage. The only limitation is frame-rate. And while FCP can mix framerates, there seem to be a lot of caveats in doing so (the results can be pretty poor in some cases).

[Gabe Cotto] "Shared media: Simply put unless you have enough money to buy Unity ($40,000+), good look being able to move projects around or allow them to be accessible to more then on editor at a time. Without Unity its a long time consuming process."

There are a number of other options for shared media with Avid (EditShare and MetaLAN string to mind).

In practice we've had very good success with replicated media where media is consolidated to different suites. In one case the ingest process was to capture 1:1 footage on one suite and then make transcode 15:1 versions of that footage onto removable drives. The low-res media was copied to a number of edit suites. All that needed to be shared between the suites was the sequences. It was surprisingly simple really and pretty time-efficient.

[Gabe Cotto] "But if you really want complete creative control of your projects stick with FCP."

The 'creative' angle is one I hear a lot, but I don't really get it. There's very little I can do in FCP that I can't do in Avid really. The real creative aspect of video post is in the actual editing, and really in that case there's not practical difference in terms of what can be achieved.

For the offline/online workflow, or for multiple versioned projects I think Avid's media management alone makes it a better choice.