The DYI Filmmaker?s Guide to an Avid Media Composer to Adobe After Effects Workflow

Devotion to Cinema by Aidan Ryan

If you are serious about filmmaking, you have to consider that no matter how nice (or awful) the camera you use is, how good (or awful) your actors are, editing can make or break your production. From fixing bad acting to perfecting the otherwise imperfect shot, the perfect editing software is required. Since the advent of computers in video editing in the 1990s, Non-Linear Editing Software (NLEs) have become a necessary tool for the use of a filmmaker.

Used by Hollywood and DIY-ers alike, Avid Media Composer (MC) is the most powerful of all the NLEs that are in the market. Why? Avid started in the 1988 by creating a workstation called the Avid, which was the first of the NLE workstations to be used by professional editors in the film industry (for the sake of friendly conversation, we will define them collectively as Hollywood). Today, Avid has grown, with its cross-platform editing software still in use as the major NLE in Hollywood. Avid is the most powerful option for video editing, and the best part is that you can own it on either a permanent license OR a subscription! With Adobe no longer offering a permanent license for anything except an up-marked CS6 ($800 for the outdated version of Premiere and $1000 for the outdated version of After Effects!), Avid is the most cost effective option on the market. Avid also boasts the most powerful NLE on the market. Media Composer is designed for dealing with massive amounts of data simultaneously, and not crashing under the load (something Adobe has struggled with). With Media Composer?s most notably effects-and-data-heavy film of late, Gravity, this has never been made clearer. The massive file sizes used in editing an effect-heavy 4K terror ride through space could only have been edited with Media Composer. MC also boasts Avid Media Access (AMA), which is an Avid exclusive feature, allowing image files to be read right into MC without transcoding, which saves time before editing begins by not requiring that entire shots be transcoded into an AVID DNxHD codec, and allowing you to only have to transcode the segments of the scenes that you need for export. read more...