The Basics of Avid Media Composer for a Final Cut Pro Editor

The Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

What follows in this article is not a debate of Avid vs. Final Cut Pro or a conversion document that says you should move from Final Cut Pro to Avid Media Composer, but rather a step-by-step guide for anyone new to Avid (or curious about the software in general) to launch the software and perform a few basic functions. It will be geared more toward the FCP editor, but a lot of the basic functionality is the same in many non-linear editors. I won’t compare and contrast various Avid and FCP features as that’s not the focus of the article though I will point out the Avid equivalent of a number of FCP tools. And if you’ve never edited with a NLE application before then consider this primer a way to get your feet wet in Avid Media Composer 3.5.

The trial version of Avid Media Composer is free with “full functionality for 14 days following installation” and includes electronic documentation so a lot can be learned about the software if you have the time to spare. I think the most important thing for a Final Cut Pro editor trying out Media Composer for the first time is to throw away any preconceptions that you may have heard or read about how Media Composer differs from FCP and realize that as a tool it is really ... no better or no worse. They are different applications that do some very basic things in very different ways. With that in mind I hope this tour through some of those very basic functions will be a good introduction to Avid Media Composer. Read More...