Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1151096
BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 4 POST JULY/AUG 2019 FIRST LOOK: AVID MEDIA COMPOSER 2019 BURLINGTON, MA — Avid (www.avid.com) shook things up earlier this year when it announced a re- designed and reimagined Media Composer 2019 at the start of the NAB Show in Las Vegas, during its own Avid Connect 2019 conference. The new release, which was demonstrated at the company's booth on the show floor throughout NAB, is focused on four main areas: A new user experience, a new and more powerful "next-gen- eration" media engine, new finishing and delivery workflows, and a customizable toolset built for large production teams. According to Jeff Rosica, CEO and president at Avid, the reimagined Media Composer was based on insight of where the industry is headed, as well as "input from hundreds of editors and teams across the media industry." Just prior to the release of Media Composer 2019, we had a chance to catch up with one of those ed- itors, Chris Bove, an industry veteran who has been editing for 25 years and was one of the early beta testers and post professionals who had a first look at the new system. Here, Bove speaks with Post about his experience as a beta tester and his initial thoughts on Avid reimagining its flagship system. What was your initial reaction when you first heard that there would be a significant update to the company's flagship product? "Most of us who have been around for nearly the same length of time that Avid has been around, and have used its products all through that time, could remember every single 'implementation' or 'rede- sign' or 'new UI' that they've gone through, so our initial reaction was not very good. We expected it to be yet another instance where the engineers and map designers went behind closed doors and made it the way they wanted to make it. But then I was invited into the beta program and I realized that they were letting the users themselves dictate how things should look and interact." What were your early impressions? "It was a dramatic arch. When I first got into it, I couldn't operate within the software for more than five minutes without getting furious and turning off the entire computer. But it was also because it was my first time in the alpha program and that means you can't go into the software and actually edit videos. They give you only small portions of the interface to look at and give comments on, and so I wasn't used to that. But what I saw when I was in there, I didn't like at all. It was all going in the wrong direction for me, who has a slightly differ- ent workflow from Hollywood editors and other editors. I do long-format documentary. But one of the things that I've been pleasantly surprised about is, when I gave that initial feedback and when I saw in the private forum we have for alpha testers and beta testers, that other people were having the exact same reactions. The speed at which Avid's app designers and engineers were able to work to counteract what they were initially doing was amazing. I was expecting something like this to take two or three years, and months and months of time to back pedal something that they were working on, but instead, they would email us a week or two weeks later and it was already finished. In some cas- es, after posting on the forum, the actual engineer who was working on that specific thing would reply and say, 'I know exactly where you're going, this is just step one, we have exactly what you're talking about in the works. It's not going to be until a beta version that's coming out in a few weeks, but don't worry, it will be there. You're comment has affirmed that we are going in the right direction.' So that was very pleasant." Can you discuss the new engine? "I had a number of conversations with the app designers and engineers both in Media Composer and the folks who are actually working on the en- gine, and it used to be very segregated. It used to be that Media Composer was something that rode on top of the engine and that was it. Within the past few years, it's really been integrated into one another, and so the folks at Avid are all commu- nicating with each other at the same time about overall playback, overall efficiency of the software, so when they release the new user interface, it won't just be a refresh. It won't just be a pretty paint job on top of the same old car. There's going to be a lot of things working inside the engine Chris Boye, Randall Rike and Bill Warner