There has been a lot of discussion on the Internet over the last few months in regards to Avid vs FCP. People have been blogging about it. Scott Simmons from The Editblog has written many entries over the years discussing this topic, as has Shane Ross on his blog Little Frog in High Def. There has been several sometimes heated podcast discussions about it – although when That Post Show got stuck into the topic at length (almost two train rides long!), the panel of experts remained surprisingly level headed.  Although, I think it’s fair to say that John Flowers, the host of the show is very much an Avid man, and tends to show his Avid bias on nearly every episode. As Final Cut Users wait for the long awaited major update – Twitter has been flooded with discussions about what users love about Final Cut Pro and Avid, and what users really hate about both products.

Up until the end of February this year, I have been a Final Cut Pro man. But just to give you some background, as a young child, well before NLEs were available cheaply on personal computers, I did editing the old fashion way between two VHS domestic recorders. Sound mixing was done “on the fly” using a cool four channel Realistic microphone mixer.  It was a horrible system – but it worked. Many a Star Wars fan movie was thrown together in my grandparents back yard. As I grew older, and progressed through Primary School, I moved away from film making temporarly becoming more interested in electric guitars, amplifiers and concert lighting. Towards middle years of high school I had another bash at making films – this time I did all the editing on Premiere on a PC. We recorded everything using Panasonic handycams with VHS-C tapes, and then using one of those cool VHS tape adapters, we captured everything using a normal domestic VHS deck. Once again, I drifted away from films, becoming more interested in live productions.

For my brothers final year of high school, he decided to do Studio Arts, and produce two short films. As he’d never really done any film-making before, and I was working full time as a lighting designer (so I had money!), I decided to go on a bit of a spending spree and purchase some things. So one day we had nothing apart from a little Sony MiniDV camera – the next we had a portable green screen, boom pole, ME66 microphone, some basic tungsten lighting, makeshift steadicam, a few Lacie drivers, and a copy of Final Cut Express 2 and DVD Studio Pro (standalone) to put on a new eMac.

So, over the next couple of weeks, as my brother was in preproduction for his two films – I quickly got my head around both the Mac platform (as up until now we’d grown up with PCs) and Final Cut Express. To be perfectly honest, I feel instantly in love, with not only Final Cut, but also with Macs in general. They just… well, worked!

As so, with the help of Final Cut Express, my brother got his two films, God’s Handiwork and Hello Sunshine. With those now finished, and high school completed, my brother then also moved away from film-making heading to univeristy to study Arts/Science. But we now had all this gear, and the inventory was continuing to grow (we purchased a Sony Z1P as soon as it came out). And so, after working for two years as a lighting designer for live events – an amazing job which took me all over the country and many times overseas – I decided to head back to school, studying Film & Television at university.

The film school I went to was a Final Cut Pro facility, and so I upgraded from Final Cut Express to Final Cut Studio – and because I already owned a copy of DVD Studio Pro – the upgrade was incredibly cheap!

And so, for the past five years I’ve been using Final Cut Pro extensively. I’ve thrown all kinds of footage at it from DV to HDV,  XDCAM to DVCProHD, 10-Bit Uncompressed Telecine Transfers to RED. I love Final Cut Pro. It’s powerful, flexible, fast, and cheap. Plus, everyone knows how to use it.

Final Cut Pro has served me extremely well. However, when I took up an editing assistant job earlier this year, I discovered that I’d have to learn Avid. And so, for the past 12 weeks or so, I’ve been using Avid on a daily basis. And guess what… I love it just as much as I love Final Cut Pro.

And so, when my ex-film school peers ask me which is better, I reply… “I love them both, equally”. I hate to be the kind of guy that sits on the fence, but the reality is they’re pretty much exactly the same in my opinion. They both do the same things – just a bit differently.

Just for the record – I’ve used Vegas and Premiere in the past as well – but only for individual projects. I haven’t played with the latest version of either. I also haven’t played with the latest version of Avid – although I’m really looking forward to testing out the new AMA architecture within the next few weeks.

Ok… so, one of the most common things I hear is, “Final Cut crashes all the time… but Avid is bullet proof…”. Well, although I’ve had my fair share of Final Cut Pro crashes over the years, I have to say, from my experiences, Avid is far from perfect! Admittedly I’m using 3.0.5 at work – so it’s not the latest version, but that’s really no excuse.

Generally speaking, I think that Avid crashes just as much as Final Cut Pro – when you’re not doing “normal” stuff. For example, if I’m just doing a rough cut of DV-PAL footage on Final Cut Pro, with just simple cuts and simple dissolves, then everything will just work. No crashes, no stalls, no bizarre error messages. Everything will just work. Same as with Avid. However, as soon as you start pushing the boundaries a bit – things start going wrong. For example, in Final Cut Pro, if you’re working with heaps of different formats on your timeline, with thousands of hours of footage in your project file, and a bunch of image sequences, PSD files, etc. you’re bound to have problems. Things will go wrong. The project will take a long time to open. Obviously there are work arounds (such as splitting up your project into multiple projects, etc.) but they’re not ideal. Avid is the same. I’ve been doing some temporary visual effects compositions  in Avid for an offline for a television commercial. The reason they were done in Avid was so that when we hand the EDL over to the effects company – they know what footage they need to use. Avid is FANTASTIC for this kind of thing. I love the AniMatte effect – it’s far better than anything Final Cut has. However, once you have twelve tracks of video all with a colour correction and a couple of mattes – Avid starts to panic a bit. Strange errors start popping up. Things stop working normally. Having said that though – I’ve never had Avid crash (i.e. the program close) on me before. It’s crashed a couple of times on load due to a dodgy file in the OMFI folder – but it’s never died whilst I’ve been doing something important. It’s given me lots of cryptic error messages – but so has Final Cut.

Having said all that – Avid does seem a lot more stable. The timeline responsiveness is incredible. Final Cut Pro is generally pretty good when you wizz around the timeline, but at times it seems to slow down for no particular reason. Avid is fast. Always fast. I like that. I like that a lot.

Another thing that people generally always say is that the media management in Final Cut Pro sucks. Everyone seems to agree that this is the case – from film school students, to random people on Twitter to professionals. Everyone, except me. Personally, I think that the way Avid and Final Cut Pro handle files is pretty much the same – and yes, I know this is going to cause all kinds of arguments. When I set up a new Final Cut Pro project, I set up a new folder structure on an external hard drive (on an unrelated topic – I name all my external drives after pet dogs I’ve come across in the past):

For every single project I work on, I have a Final Cut workspace folder. This contains everything to do with the project – render files, caches, stills, graphics, audio, etc. The advantage of this is that when I open up the project on another Mac, everything is there, and ready to go. No need to re-render. No need to reconnect. Everything just works. The disadvantage is that I need to change the Capture Scratch and Cache paths every time I open a project. However, this only takes about 7 seconds, so it’s not that much of a pain. I very rarely open two project files at once unless it’s a massive film I’m working on such as a feature (and almost never open two different films at the same time, so I don’t get any nasty problems like render files being saved to the wrong project workspace).

Unless you’re working with a Unity – Avid pretty much works the same way. For each project you had a OMFI Media files folder (if you’re working with OMF files) or an Avid MediaFiles folder (if you’re working in MXF files). Sure you can store content for multiple projects in the same media folder, just like you can in Final Cut Pro – but that just makes life more confusing when the time comes to moving projects around. So, I much prefer to have a new OMFI folder for each project.

So in that sense – for my workflow – both Avid and Final Cut Pro work the same way. I keep the media in one place and never have any reconnection issues. Of course if I just drag a file from the desktop into Final Cut Pro without first moving it into my workplace – then I’m going to have reconnection issues if I move to another Mac. But I’m a fairly organised person, so I always put stuff in the right place. For those people who are too lazy or forgetful, then do yourself a favour an purchase a copy of Loader from Digital Heaven.

In terms of actual editing (i.e. the creative stuff) Avid and Final Cut are very different. It took me a while to get out of the habit of being able to quickly drag and drop like you can in Final Cut Pro, but within two or three days, I’ve quickly adapted to the new way of thinking. I really like the way Avid works and can see why editors love it (especially the more old school editors from the days were you had to physically “cut and paste” film). Avid seems hard core and industrial – whereas Final Cut seems more like a sexy new toy. That said though, I personally think a good Final Cut Pro editor can be just as quick as a really good Avid editor. I don’t think one method of working is better than the other – just different.

One thing that Avid wins hand down on is the default keyboard mapping. I’ve grown up with Final Cut Pro, so I’ve never really thought too much about it. Until I started working with Avid. The default Avid layout isn’t perfect – but it’s so much better than Final Cut! Make sure you check out the Keyboard Manifesto on the ProVideo Coalition site. Scott allows you to download a great “Avid-like” keyboard layout to “fix up” Final Cut Pro. However, that said, I can see why Apple have mapped the keyboard the way they have. It’s logical. Sure, it may not be fast. But film students can literally walk up to a Final Cut Pro workstation and have a fair idea of what everything does. When they walk up to an Avid – they have no idea. Avid makes the most sense once you’ve been shown once what everything is – but Final Cut Pro makes sense from the onset.

So what do I like about Avid much more than I do about Final Cut?

The colour corrector in Avid is amazing. It’s so powerful and so easy to use. Apple’s 3-way Colour Corrector is a toy in comparison. However, that said, Final Cut Studio comes with Color – which despite what some people may tell you, is amazing. Sure it has some bugs in it – but they’ll be worked out in time. In the meantime there is always workarounds. Most people hate the interface – but I think it makes sense. Sure it’s not very Apple – but who really cares. As long as it creates amazing looks – which it does.

The effects in Avid are a lot better than Final Cut. I love the AniMatte. It reminds me of After Effects. I wish Final Cut Pro had something like this without having to install some expensive 3rd party plugin.

I love the way Avid handles users and preferences. The fact that when you boot up Avid you’re presented with an option to select a project you wish to open, plus select a user preference is fantastic. It’s so simple, so logical, yet so incredible. Why oh why can’t Final Cut Pro introduce this? The only thing that I don’t like about Avid is the one thing that may people love about it! Whenever I change projects, I need to also change the OMFI folders around. It would be great if when you opened a project you could also select which “media folder” you wanted to use.

By far my FAVOURITE thing about Avid is the way it handles project files. The fact that you can simply copy and paste a bin on the finder level is so much better than the way Final Cut Pro handles things. Sure you can export out an XML file in Final Cut Pro – but it’s so much easier to just be able to copy and paste a bin. From an assistants point of view – this is invaluable! I can just copy and paste bins to the editor and the new bins magically appear in his project. Amazing!

My second favourite thing about Avid is the way it handles settings. You can easily copy and paste settings and rename them. For example, you might have a couple of different configurations for deck setups. Instead of having to change all the settings around each time you change decks, you can just uncheck one configuration and check the other. You can have multiple keyboard configurations in the one user profile. The Avid is amazingly customisable. You can basically change EVERYTHING to suit your needs.

So… if Avid has all these amazing features, why don’t I just change? Well, originally it was just a matter of price. Final Cut Pro is DEAD cheap whereas Avid WAS incredibly expensive. This is changing. But, personally, I think I’m going to be one of those annoying people who is constantly switching between Avid and Final Cut Pro. Why? Because they are both fantastic tools – and they basically do exactly the same thing – it’s just that they are both better at different things.

Final Cut Pro is like a Swiss army knife. You can basically throw anything at it and do things quickly. It can basically tackle any Quicktime file you throw at it, and within minutes you can get from the Final Cut Pro timeline to an exported DVD. It’s quick and sometimes nasty. Everyone knows how to use it (and even if they don’t know, they can learn the basics within hours) – so if you get sick someone else can take over the project with ease. As long as the project is set up correctly from the get-go, and you have some kind of self control in terms of managing files, then you shouldn’t run into too many (if any!) reconnection issues. Final Cut Pro is GREAT for short projects. It’s the perfect short film tool. However for longer projects it dies. It doesn’t handle masses of footage well at all. If you have 40 or so hours of footage in the project, it can take up to 15 minutes to boot up even on the fastest Mac. If you have hundreds of sequences within a project, you can run into all kinds of “Out of Memory” problems. Sure there are workaround – such as using a different project for each scene. But that’s a pain.

Avid on the other hand is a workhorse. It can handle feature films with ease. The boot up time is almost instant in most cases. It’s not bullet proof – but I’ve never lost media, render files, or work because of a random bug or error – in comparison to Final Cut Pro where I’ve lost whole projects temporarily (thank goodness for the Autosave vault!). If I know I’m going to be working with a lot of media, then Avid will always be my first preference.

Although the new AMA changes everything – as of Avid 3.0.5 and Final Cut Pro 6.0.5, both NLEs have the same limitation – although it doesn’t bother me that much. Avid converts everything to MXFs of OMFs whereas Final Cut Pro converts everything to Quicktimes. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest. People complain about the transcode times. Do it while you’re sleeping. People complain about requiring so much hard drive space. Hard drives are cheap now. I don’t think this is really a limitation at all.

Finally, I still stand by my prediction that the next version of Final Cut Studio will change EVERYTHING. I’m sorry, but there is no way in hell Apple is going to watch Avid dramatically improve their packages, lower the prices dramatically, and just do nothing. I’m extremely confident that Apple has something new and amazing hidden away in some dark and smelly room somewhere. But, that said, Avid is now a completely different company. They’ve changed. For the better. They are actually listening to their customers, and seriously improving their software.

One thing for certain is that I think Avid will eventually get rid of the EDL Manager and DigiTranslator, and put this functionality directly into the Avid application. I think integration between ProTools and Avid will also become almost transparent. But I also think that the integration between Final Cut Pro and ProTools will become better.  I finally think Avid has decided to stop fighting Apple and start working out ways to get their software in front of the eyes of Final Cut Pro fanatics.

So in conclusion… both Avid and Final Cut Pro are great tools that both can help achieve amazing works of art. Both are far from perfect. Both have bugs. Both needs improving. But I think every editor should have both on their system.

If you’re doing a long form project – unless you have an amazing assistant editor who’s extremely technically proficient and patient – I’d stick with Avid. It’s got an unchallenge amazing track record.

If you’re doing a short film – then maybe Final Cut Pro is the go.

If you’re working with lots of different editors, or if it’s a big project, then Avid is the winner, although you can do these kinds of projects with Final Cut Pro. Personally I prefer the ability to easily copy and paste bins than using XML files.

Either way, I know it’s cliche, but as every editor will tell you, it’s not the tools that make a great film – it’s the talented editor who’s TELLING A STORY. It’s easy to get bogged down in technology, and Final Cut vs Avid discussions – but at the end of the day use the tool that works.

Happy Editing! Feel free to leave your comments, suggestions, abuse, ideas, etc. below! I’d love to hear from you!

Best Regards, Chris!

Kaltura has just released it’s brand new Developers Community website, and I’ve actually been fortunate enough to feature in the developers spotlight! Below is a quick little video of all the people featured in the developers spotlight (powered by the Kaltura player) – you’ll have to skip forward a couple of people to see me…

For those that don’t know, Kaltura has developed the first open source video platform for video management, creation, interaction and collaboration. Kaltura’s platform enables any site to seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate advanced interactive rich-media functionalities, such as searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, and sharing of video, audio, and photo files. The platform also includes unique collaboration functionalities that allow groups of users to create together, and enables publishers to access and syndicate reusable content across the Kaltura Network of content and to enjoy aggregated hosted video services such as video advertising, professional editing, and DVD printing. Kaltura’s free open source code is available for web developers in the form of an extensive Software Development Kit, and as self-serve packages for publishers in the form of automatic extensions and plugins for leading content management, blogging and collaboration platforms such as WordPress, and MediaWiki.

We have been working with Kaltura to develop a site that allows you to cut together your very own version of the SAKOOZ trailer. Unfortunately this is still very much a work in progress – but we hope to have this online sometime soon. Once we’ve nailed down the SAKOOZ trailer, we may even allow users to remix some of our other projects, such as Happy Sundaes and Superb Menura – so stay tuned!

A month or so ago, whilst doing some research for the “cut your own trailer” SAKOOZ site, we came across a film called Two Fists One Heart. This is a contemporary story set in Perth Western Australia, about Anthony Argo – a young Italian/Australian boxer played by Daniel Amalm – being pushed to the limit by his Sicilian father and trainer, Joe (Ennio Fantastichini). Joe wants Anthony to achieve the success in the ring that he was denied as a young man. When Anthony meets Kate (played by the stunning Jessica Marais – from the television series Packed to the Rafters), he begins to see his life – and the role violence – in a different light. He loses focus on boxing and, in a confrontation with his father, learns about Joe’s painful past. Joe turns his back on his son. Anthony leaves the ring spending time with Kate in their blossoming romance. He earns his living as a nightclub bouncer . When Anthony becomes involved in a street fight at a public event Kate dumps him. Anthony reflects on who he is and all that he has recently lost. Tom (played by the amazingly talented Tim Minchin – who I had no idea actually did screen acting!), Kate’s comedian brother helps Anthony see the world and his life from a different perspective Joe is betrayed by Nico (played by Rai Fazio – who also wrote the screenplay), another boxer of Sicilian decent. Anthony, now mature enough to make his own decisions, decides to honour his father and his family and re enters the ring to fight his nemesis Nico.

Directed by Sydney-based Shawn Seet – who traditionally has mainly done television directing and editing as well as being awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen’s New Years Honours Lis for his services to Australian society and to Australian film production – this film is sure to be a hit, especially given that At the Movies gave it some a positive review. It will be very interesting to see how this film goes at the box office…

Ignoring the actual film for a minute – the thing that really caught our attention was their online presence. As well as the official movie site, they also had two other promotional sites. One of them teaches you how to throw a punch, and the other features a Cut Your Own Scene competition. It’s the latter that really got us interested.

On the site, you can download five scenes, and some sound effects and temp score and basically do what you want with it (under the condition that you link back to their site if you display it online). The footage is in “rushes” form – meaning the footage has a logo on it, isn’t colour graded and has timecode burnt into it. Although they don’t give you all the footage for each scene (and if they actually do, then they really shot VERY little coverage for each scene), and the “rushes” have been edited together to look like rushes (i.e. slates have been added in for the hell of it, random footage has been added, useful footage has been removed) – you’re still provided with some useful footage, and it’s great to play around with.

Although the competition has now closed – the general idea was that the public can cut together their own scene, and submit it for review.The best five scenes will be posted on Disney’s promotional site for the film (obviously this is a great opportunity for some exposure to high-profile people in the film industry). These five best scene cuts will be selected by Bill Russo head of Editing at the AFTRS and the creative team from the film. Interestingly, Director Shawn Seet, Editor Milena Romanin and Cinematogropher Hugh Miller are all graduates from AFTRS, Australia’s premiere Film and Television school.

If you haven’t already downloaded the rushes and had a play – I highly recommend you do! They’re great for practising your craft, and would also make a terrific training tool.

I downloaded the rushes a few months ago now, and used them to really get to grips with Avid (as I’ve done most of my cutting in Final Cut Pro in the past). Trying to cut together a real scene (as opposed to some dodgy video footage supplied with most books and tutorials), was really handy. Just getting on with the job, and learning as I went, was extremely beneficial.

For your viewing pleasure, here are some of the edits I threw together:

Scene A (Rough Cut 001)

Scene B (Rough Cut 001)

Scene C (Rough Cut 005)

Scene E (Rough Cut 001)

None of these edits are particularly amazing – although I did spend a fair bit of time on Scene C to try and get it flowing a lot nicer. The lack of coverage was a bit tricky – and really added to the challenge. I didn’t have time to really fix up the audio or grade the footage either – so you’re really seeing a first pass of an offline edit.

You can download my Avid Project for the scene here if you like. You’ll need to download all the media yourself though and re-link it. Originally I planned to log all the clips in Final Cut Pro as well – but never got around to it. If you edited the scenes in Final Cut and want to offer your project file on this site, let me know!

Overall – I think this campaign was a really good idea, and I’d love to see some statistics on how many people actually downloaded the rushes and submitted entries for the competition. Looking at YouTube search results, there doesn’t seem to be that many people that got into it which is a real shame. Although the fact that the site moved their rushes over to Amazon Web Services probably means that at least a lot of people were downloading the files. I guess at the end of the day any publicity is good publicity, and the most people that talk about the film the better.

It’s really interesting watching what other people have done. For example, I just watched this version – although it’s cut together OK, it seems a bit all over the place, and doesn’t really have a nice flow to it. Also, you don’t really get an insight into the characters at all. This version of another scene is a lot better – but it seems really fast. I also don’t really like the dissolve at the start. This version of the fight scene however works HEAPS better than mine. At the time of playing with this scene, I was too afraid to use jump cuts, and I really tried to make it flow naturally – but it never really worked. I used far too many instances of the one cutaway (the young worker looking through the window). In retrospect, I think the use of fast jump cuts and really making the action zip past would have worked a lot better. I’ve also been told you should never have characters both enter and exit a sense – you should either have one or the other. This is hard when you’re only cutting one scene, with no overall context – but I think the rule is still a good one, and may have helped me with some of the other scenes.

As we’re in the process of trying to build a similar campaign for the SAKOOZ trailer, this was a really great project to study. The fact that you could download the rushes (as opposed to editing the trailer online) is something that really interests us. However, I think by making people download large files and edit them on their own system (whether they use Mac or PC, Avid or FCP, Premiere or Vegas, Windows Movie Maker or iMovie…) as opposed to just being able to cut something together in the comfort of a web browser, means that the campaign attracts more to geeks and professionals, as opposed to just general movie goers. As a lot of geeks and professionals will probably go see the movie regardless, I’m not sure if this kind of thing will actually attract more audience numbers to the cinemas. What I’m now considering for the SAKOOZ site (and for future “cutting your own version” sites), it having the option – you can either edit online (we are currently working very closely with the team at Kaltura), or download and cut it together using your own tools.

Regardless of all this – we highly recommend you go and see the film at the movies and support Australian films! And when it comes out on DVD – buy that as well! I’m sure there’ll be some great special feature on that one…

Finally – if you edited your own version of the scenes, feel free to let us know via the comments system at the bottom of this page! We’d love to see your interpretation of the scenes!

Happy editing!

Best Regards, Chris!

Apologies for keeping you all out of the loop last month. It was certainly never my intention – we’ve just been flat out as always! However, those that have been following us on twitter at least know we’re alive, as we’ve been regularly posting cool things we come across.

I’m going to make this brief – as we’ve got lots happening at the moment. Here’s what’s been going on:

1. We are still busily working with the team at Pocket Bonfire productions on their exciting Hippo film. Nothing major to report as of yet, apart from the fact that not only are we handling the hippo, but we’re also in the process of putting together their new website. Busy! Busy! As always, if you’re interested in helping out on this one, please let us know! We’re still on the look out for animatronics gurus and puppet makers who are interested in bringing a hippo to life!

2. We recently threw together a last minute entry for the Dortios Competition. You can check it out here. OK, so it’s hardly a masterpiece, but considering how quickly we put it together from concept to upload, we think we did pretty well!

3. Nick has moved to Sydney temporarily. We’ll be setting up a new blog for him and his adventures shortly. Stay tuned!

4. We are in the process of doing the sound design for several MAFMAD entries.

5. We are currently working with a Melbourne-based director/producer team on two exciting online web show series. More details to follow.

6. As always we have a lot of cool film ideas in development – both short films and feature length productions. A few of them are really starting to take shape, so we may have some more projects in the pre-production stages shortly.

7. The SAKOOZ website is STILL under construction. No idea when we’re going to get it up and running. Hopefully soon!

8. We are going to be releasing Happy Sundaes and Superb Menura online for FREE shortly! Stay tuned!

Plus lots more…!

So as you can see, things are happening. We also have three blog entries sitting in the Draft folder just waiting to be finished – all of them discussing new technology, Avid vs FCP, etc. There’s just not enough time these days!

As always, thanks for reading, and for keeping an eye out on what we’re up to.

See you in the soup!

Best Regards, Chris!