Saturday, January 14, 2012

From Final Cut to Avid

Hello Kids!

Hope you had a great Holiday Season. I was fortunate enough to fly home Dec 20 until Jan 2nd to visit family and friends for Christmas. Sadly, my sister was sick the entire duration I was home and gave me a cold as well. So I arrived back with a nasty cold... It was snowing as my dad drove me to the airport early in the morning on January 2nd and I arrived in Los Angeles to 85 degree weather. It was incredibly warm. Definitely great to come back to!

When I look back to the year 2011...it was a BIG year for me. I dealt with the most stressful semester of my life, graduated from college, landed my internship, moved to LA, started a new life, got my first real job in the industry AND got promoted once! I say it was a great year. I'm looking forward to 2012!

There are big things happening at Bunim/Murray Productions starting year this year. As most of you know, the professional entertainment industry is pretty upset with Apple for releasing Final Cup Pro X which replaces Final Cut Pro 7. They no longer sell or provide services for FCP 7 which forced my boss, Mark Raudonis, to make a decision on what BMP should do. FCP X is designed for the consumer "amateur" editors which is a MUCH LARGER market. Apple would rather make more money selling to the normal consumer than help lead the way in the professional editing market. SO! Mark has decided to switch to Avid Media Composer 6.

As you can see the editing interface is different. (You can change the interface colors to whatever your heart desires in the AVID interface). The way of editing on these programs are different as well, but easy to adjust. The shortcuts or keystrokes are the main difference between the two. My way of doing my job as a Digitizer will change completely when we switch over to AVID. In the next few weeks I will be re-training and learning how to do everything I do now, but ALL in the AVID. Unlike FCP, I will digitize, and uprez footage in AVID. FCP does not have this ability. I always had to import with XDCAM transfer and then use Compressor to put it in offline format (low rez quality). This all may sound like boring technical stuff for me, but many of us are worried about the switch slowing down Post Production until everyone is adjusted to AVID after a few months.

For those of you film nerds that would be interested in reading some articles about Bunim/Murray Production's switch over to AVID here are 2 links:
We were featured on AVID's website (My boss is quoted): http://www.avid.com/US/press-room/Bunim-Murray-Selects-Avid
My boss did another article (Goofy Pictures included): http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/real-world-editing