Tastes Like Chicken by Dylan Reeve
NAB is on in Las Vegas at the moment, and while I’m still slogging away in an edit suite in Auckland I have been able to keep an eye on some of the coice announcements. The choicest of these, from my perspective was Avid’s announcement of Media Composer 5.0! Continue reading »
Studio Daily Blog by Scott Simmons
As a wrap-up to NAB 2010 I’ve put together a little list of NAB 2010’s winners and losers; a bit from the perspective of the South Hall which is post production. Until next year … Continue reading »
Little Frog in High Def by Shane Ross
Avid just isn’t slowing down. I advised them that they just needed to slow down. But did they listen? Nope. Why slow down? Because just as soon as you get used to one version, another version comes along and has tons more features that you want. And when you JUST CONVINCE a company to upgrade to one version of Media Composer, you might be hard pressed to get them to do it again. Many large facilities don’t upgrade often, so when Avid keeps hitting us with new release after new release, we might not be able to benefit from those as many companies won’t upgrade because they just did. But us independents? We like upgrading, when the new features call for it.
And boy, will the new features of Avid Media Composer 5.0 call for it.
First let me mention hardware. And no, this hardware isn’t something Avid makes. They are now opening up to third party vendors…specifically Matrox. Avid Media Composer 5.0 now works with the Matrox MXO2 Mini. But not for capture, but for monitoring on a large monitor. This is so you can save money on multiple systems. You can have the one or two bays that you use to capture/output, and the rest…say the other 8 – 30 bays… can utilize the MXO2 mini to throw that image on the nice big client monitor. Before, if you wanted this, you’d have to equip each bay with Nitris DX or Mojo DX boxes, and that can be VERY expensive. Especially if you don’t utilize those machines as capture machines. There are many places that have Mojos just for monitoring, and that is a tad much. Add the MXO2 mini for roughly $450 and BAM! There’s your inexpensive monitoring. read more…
Adobe has succesfully generated a hype leading up to the launch of Creative Suite 5. Through various sites fragments were’leaked’. This created the so called buzz that was picked up and redistributed by the social networks.
Exciting and fun for marketing research, but what is do we at Animotion think of CS5? Is it worth to upgrade? And if so, when? At several locations, the new options for After Effects and Premiere Pro get coverage. We’ve tried put pros and cons of upgrading in perspective:
Companies that rely heavily on compositing and motion graphics or working with RED and HD sources, more than likely already meet the system requirements and can easily upgrade. The mere fact that After Effects can use more memory or the GPU acceleration in Premiere will be reason enough for this group.
For companies that do more generally video work and for schools and training-institutes this upgrade will prove problematic. The new system requirements make it an costly story. For small business owners it is the same, replacing a working system that provides the bread and butter, often takes more than just the OS upgrade and adding some memory banks. However, if you where considering replacement or if you still work with CS3 or earlier, then CS5 a good opportunity to upgrade all.
Benefits
64bit: In a 32bit program, the maximum memory (RAM) that can be used is 3 GB. Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects CS5 are 64bit programs and can use all of the memory in your computer. This makes the program more stable and faster, especially with complex projects.
Rewritten: Because the software had to be rewritten for the 64bit platform, programmers have used the opportunity to clean up the code. This has optimized many things. C55 is therefore faster than CS4, even on a laptop with ‘only’ 2 GB of RAM. read more…
