Splice Here by Steve Cohen

Avid unveiled Media Composer version 4.0 today (press release). The headline feature is what Avid is calling Mix and Match — the ability to combine different frame rates in the timeline and play them without rendering. The demos I’ve seen are impressive. It’s so simple that there is almost no user interface. You just bring the clips in and play them. When you cut them into a sequence the mismatched clips get tagged with a frame rate in parentheses (similar to motion effects) and you see a tiny green realtime dot in the middle of the clip. And that’s all. The clips just play, and for the most part they look quite smooth. If you want to get fancy, you can change the interpolation method, and you can render. But generally, you don’t have to.

AMA got a few tweaks and stereo video editing got some improvements, as well. Neither of these will affect the majority of users, so I’ll leave them to others to discuss. read more...

An Introduction to Transition Preservation

Media Composer 4 introduces Transition Preservation, Avid’s term for a group of enhancements that improve the handling of dissolves during editing. It’s one of those features that’s so intuitive that it immediately feels like you’ve been using it for years — and then you wonder how you did without it for so long. It’s all about timeline dynamics, and that makes it difficult to explain in words. So I’ve posted a video that explains it.

As mentioned in a comment from Grant yesterday, Transition Preservation might be all the reason you need to move to 4.0. Watch the video below on blip.tv

Click Here for Blip Version — Bigger and Easier to Follow