Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1197261
53 by James Delhauer Avid's DNxHD and DNxHR codecs—a series of proprietary lossy capture codecs. In spite of this optimization, the software's render engine can decode a wide variety of for- mats beyond these. All of these changes have made Media Composer much more accessible, allowing nearly anyone with a personal computer and an internet connection to explore Hollywood's industry-standard editing software. Avid currently distributes this application in three dis- tinct versions, meaning that users can license separate portions of the software so as to save money on unneces- sary features. Media Composer | First is their entry-level edition, which users can download and use for free. Intended for new editors and those looking to explore the Avid ecosystem for the first time, Media Composer | First provides users Nonlinear Editing Platforms: AVID TECHNOLOGY W hat was introduced as the Avid/1 in 1989 is now known as Media Composer and no piece of software has been used more to edit Hollywood productions. For the fi rst two decades of its product life, the Avid system was developed as a turnkey platform—a self-contained hardware platform designed for the single purpose of running its software as effi ciently as possible. These units were costly to acquire and made the Avid workfl ow inaccessible to many. However, in recent years, this approach has been dropped in favor of standalone modular software distribution. The current iteration of Media Composer is a series of exclusively of 64-bit applications that are engineered for real-time playback and decoding of footage by assigning different tasks to different computer hardware compo- nents. The platform has been optimized for work with For almost a century, the process of editing film was an entirely mechanical process. The first editors were required to hand-cut reels of celluloid film and stitch them back together in order to create sequences of images. Though this process evolved and became more sophisticated throughout the twentieth century, the advent of modern computers and user interfaces created the opportunity for something new. In 1989, an up-and-coming company known as Avid Technology introduced the Avid/1—the first iteration of their digital nonlinear editing platform. This product represented a paradigm shift for the world of filmmakers and, in less than a decade, it had all but replaced the traditional flatbed editing systems that had preceded it by generations. Today, Avid products are the industry standard in their fields. And while film editing remains the jurisdiction of our brothers and sisters in Local 700, these tools are also of the utmost importance to Local 695 video engineers, whose responsibilities include media playback, on-set chroma keying, off- camera recording, copying files from camera media to external storage devices, backup and redundancy creation, transcoding with or without previously created LUT's, quality control, and syncing and recording copies for the purpose of dailies creation.