Some advice for Avid

For the past month I’ve been editing a series for WGBH. I’ve lived dangerously, opting to cut a multicamera program on Media Composer 2.7 beta software. That’s how much I love Media Composer. It’s in public beta, so I guess I can go public.

The software’s been phenomenal. A couple of bugs here and there, but nothing has slowed me down for more than a few minutes a week. I’d always been luke warm towards Xpress Pro, and remain so. It’s a nice editor, like that girl mom wanted you to date is nice. Editing’s a sexy profession. We want sexy, not nice. Final Cut Pro’s sexy. (It started out sexy in that cheap way, but now it’s respectable enough to marry.)

I cut my teeth on Media Composer, and I’ve always disliked where Xpress Pro cut corners – no center duration, no clip colors, only a single line of data above the source and edit monitors, and the list goes on.

I’m really late to my editor with my review of Media Composer software, so I won’t steal the magazine’s thunder here, but I will say my reunion with Media Composer has been a lot more successful than, say, Simon and Garfunkel’s attempts.

It’s true. I really love Media Composer, and that’s why I’m so peeved. Avid, it’s time to retire Xpress Pro. It’s a dud. Do like Apple. The Final Cut Pro interface is the same everywhere I go. I can be on a tricked out AJA system doing 2K work, or I can be on a DV-only laptop – and the interface is the same. No painful relearning of eccentricities and working around software limitations.

It’s 2007. The age of the $5,000 NLE is gone – a dinosaur like the Hummer H1. Kill Xpress Pro, sell Media Composer software-only for about $1,500, and recapture some of that market share.