The Editblog

There’s been a number of new installs of Avid Media Composer 3.0 around the web so I’ll add my entry to the list as well. I actually installed it a couple of weeks ago but have been on a longer Final Cut Pro job so I have only dipped my toes in … until yesterday. First impressions?

Whoa … this thing is fast. Avid says they spent a lot of time just concentrating on making the application more responsive and they weren’t kidding. Moving around the timeline, audio scrubbing, trimming and dragging things via segment mode is lightning fast. It’s by far more responsive during basic timeline editing than any NLE I’ve used. Oh sure some will say “shouldn’t it have been this way all along?” My experience with software, and especially large and complex software, has been that as the life of the application progresses and it get more complex it often slows until it reaches a point where the developers (and often the users) say enough and they concentrate less on fancy new features and more on refining the basics. It happened with Quark Xpress, it’s happening with Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and it’s now happened with Media Composer. The interface is nearly identical to the MC Soft of old, save for some controversial icon changes, but it feels like a brand new application.

The feel of a software application is something that is hard to define. It’s the way the various buttons, sliders and windows interact with your mouse and your keyboard instructions. It’s the way the various windows fit together and the control the app gives the user over how those windows look and fit together. And of course it’s how quickly overall the app responds to user inputs. When you spends hour after hour after hour in the same application a solid feel is very important. So far Media Composer 3.0 has that feel. It’s a feeing it hasn’t had in a long while. Stay tuned … more in-depth reviews of MC Soft 3.0 to come.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 7:24 am and is filed under Avid editing, Mac software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.