Avid Version 10

A First Year Status Report

by Steven J. Cohen

It’s been just over a year since Avid introduced Media Composer Version 10 for the Macintosh. After a period during which it seemed that the company was pushing editors toward new versions on Windows NT, management reversed course and committed to simultaneous releases on both platforms with “feature parity” (meaning that you could have your Avid on either Windows or Mac, and they’d both do the same things and work the same way). At that point, most of us cutting features and television had been without a significant upgrade for years, and rental houses had been waiting on the sidelines. Most editors weren’t interested in learning Windows NT, and the upgrades to Versions 8 and 9, with film features available only on NT, were almost universally ignored here. Version 10 was supposed to change all that and bring modern Avid capabilities to those of us at the top of the post-production pyramid.

The Version 10 Source/Record Monitors and Timeline are cosmetically different from previous versions but most functions haven’t changed.

Avid did some well-attended demos and began offering the upgrade to rental houses and owners. But a year later, as the company releases Version 10.5, many editors still don’t know what they’re missing. One problem with the new system, often known as “Meridian,” Avid’s name for the video board that drives it, is cost. When it was first released, the upgrade was the most expensive in the company’s history. The price has since come down somewhat, but cost remains a barrier, partly because the upgrade won’t work with MediaShare, Avid’s old media sharing technology. Instead, the company offers its industrial-strength networking technology, Unity MediaNet, which entails a Windows NT server, a per-seat charge for each shared system and fast, expensive, Avid-branded drives. The result is that the cost to upgrade two shared machines from Version 7 with MediaShare to Version 10 with Unity can still be very high, and few machines have been upgraded. In September, Avid announced a lower-cost version of Unity, called “LANshare,” slated to be available by the end of the year. This may help lower the price barrier for some shows.

Another key question is whether the upgrade offers enough in the way of new features and capabilities. At early demonstrations of Version 5, editors cheered and applauded when some of the new features were shown. Version 10 hasn’t generated that kind of enthusiasm. Though there is much that is new in this version, none of it seems to have captured the imagination of the community, and some people who saw the Avid demos were notably

Producers want to know why they should spend extra money for the new version and many editors can't offer a compelling reason.

underwhelmed by what was presented. The result is that most editors and assistants are only peripherally aware of the upgrade. Whether that is a problem with Avid marketing or whether it accurately represents the usefulness of the upgrade is one of the questions I hope to answer in the following pages.

For this article, I interviewed over twenty editors, assistants, technical support people and facility managers, all of whom are using or have considerable experience with Version 10. Based on that unscientific sample, my best guess (and it’s only a guess) is that perhaps 25 percent of the systems in LA are running it. Some houses have upgraded more machines but others have no Version 10 systems at all. Many rental companies are waiting for demand to materialize before spending the money to upgrade, and they are charging higher rental fees for Version 10 systems. Most editors and assistants are working on our old standbys, Version 7.1 or 7.2.

The most common exception is in high-budget feature environments. Several new reality shows are also using it, as well as a few prime-time series. Some productions have switched to get the robust, bullet-proof networking that Unity provides. Others have upgraded for the improved picture quality that Meridian offers. Many of these productions can afford the best, and, as a result, a majority of the editors and assistants that I interviewed were working on high-budget shows.

Our conversations ranged over a wide variety of issues. In the end, though each person focused on particular features, there was general agreement about many aspects of the new system.

Picture Quality

The Meridian video hardware does away with the old AVR compression scheme and instead opts for numerical compression ratios. Many shows were working at “14:1” compression and were extremely happy with the way it looks. Because you can mix compression ratios within a sequence, some teams were also using “28:1” for certain scenes or shots in order to save space. Most people I spoke to pointed to Meridian picture quality as a key reason to make the upgrade, but some editors didn’t agree and thought that the new resolutions offered little in the way of improvement. Those who praised the new image quality pointed out that problems editors once had with dark scenes or with reading facial expressions in wide shots were finally gone. Wayne Wahrman, cutting Time Machine, thought that 14:1 looked as good as the image on a KEM. Zach Staenberg, cutting Matrix Reloaded, summed it up by saying, “The 14:1 compression is roughly equivalent to AVR 9s at roughly 60 percent of the storage. That alone, to me as an editor, makes a huge difference. The better the image quality, the easier it is to do the work.”

But better image quality means less compression and that means more drives. The 14:1 resolution demands roughly double the storage of AVR 6. And to get the full effect of the Meridian video system, good quality input tapes are essential — Beta, DV or better.

Speed

The other key reason to make the upgrade, one that I heard again and again, is speed. Most Version 7 systems are running on old Mac 9600s. Version 10 uses the G4 and is much faster. Responsiveness is impressive, especially when starting up the system and when saving and opening bins. Bert Glatstein, cutting Jag, indicated that it’s much easier to make changes in long sequences.

Version 10 appears to create larger bins and projects than Version 7. Many of the people I spoke with were working on effects-heavy shows where large bins are to be expected, and

Unity MediaNet offers industrial strength networking and allows for shared projects and bins.

with Version 10 they were sometimes seeing 20- or 30-megabyte bins, and projects as large as one and a half gigabytes. With bins this size, there is still a pause during saves, but the wait didn’t seem to be a problem for the people I spoke with. With smaller projects, speeds are dramatically improved. Patrick Ready, Director of Operations at Pivotal Post said, “The speed outweighs any bugginess that people might experience. It’s much faster doing all kinds of routine things: opening and closing bins, scrolling the timeline, etc. The G4 makes a big difference. It’s faster and more reliable.”

When used with an Avid, the G4 requires an expansion chassis. (The latest G4 systems contain an extra slot and only require the chassis in a shared storage configuration.) One problem with the expansion chassis is noise. Several people I talked to indicated that the machine’s fan noise made their work difficult. They found it necessary to put the CPU and chassis in another room and run long cables to their monitors, keyboard and mixer.

Media Sharing

Version 10 makes Avid MediaShare obsolete and thus forces people in shared-media environments to make some difficult choices. Avid’s replacement technology, Unity MediaNet, offers some valuable new features and provides a great deal of control, but it’s expensive — beyond the resources of many shows. There are several alternatives, including Transoft FibreNet and a new system from Archion. I found that the editors and assistants using each system were generally quite satisfied with their experiences. Unity users seemed particularly pleased with its stability and almost maintenance-free performance. Patrick Gallagher, Avid assistant on Spiderman, echoed the feeling of most Unity users, “The greatest selling point for me is Unity. It’s versatile, dynamic and stable.”

Compared to MediaShare, Unity allows many more systems to be connected to the same media, and it permits multiple editors to have simultaneous write access to the same drive. Virtual partitions of any size can be created, and on-the-fly partition size adjustments are possible. But FibreNet and Archion offer a feature that Unity doesn’t: they allow you to set up a redundant RAID 3 system, which will transparently back up your media and automatically restore it if a drive crashes. To get this level of comfort, you sacrifice about 20 percent of your storage. Unity offers only “drive mirroring,” which simply copies all data onto another set of drives. Since that doubles your storage needs, it’s a big added expense. But some form of backup seems increasingly necessary when a typical configuration, regardless of vendor, stripes media across several large-capacity drives. The result is that a single drive crash can destroy a great deal of media.

FilmScribe’s change list settings sport new button shapes and allow for more timecode formats, but most functions are unchanged.

Version 10, when combined with Unity, also allows for shared projects. This means that an editor and assistant can work with the same set of bins or with specific shared bins (but only one person at a time can open a bin with write privileges). Despite its flexibility and power, this feature is not in wide use. Many teams are familiar with the routine of passing bins back and forth over shared drives, and they like the safety that comes with duplication. Some TV shows were using shared bins for sound effects and stock footage. Zach Staenberg, who is sharing a project with his assistant Craig Alpert, found the shared project useful, but Alpert indicated that write privileges are sometimes not released when a bin is closed.

As a sign of what’s now possible with robust media sharing, two Sony shows are using Unity and fiber optic connections to share media over long distances (this is theoretically possible with the other fibre channel systems, as well). The picture editing room is connected to an Avid that’s been set up at the Sony Pictures Imageworks facility, over a mile from the lot. The effects department can load material into their Avid and it will appear immediately on the editors’ machines. Sony has also tested a connection between the Spiderman crew and one of their sound team’s Pro Tools. The picture department was able to transfer sequences via OMF and, after a quick conversion, they could be viewed on the Pro Tools using media in the picture editing room. To do this, the Pro Tools must be upgraded with the “AV XL” option, and it can only look at one track of video, so picture assistants may need to do a video mixdown, which can sometimes take nearly as long as an output.

Though pricing varies depending on the options installed, Transoft customers believed they were paying less for storage than were Unity customers, and Archion appears to be even less expensive. Avid’s new Unity LANshare (aka “Unity Lite”) was announced just before we went to press. Unlike the other competitors, which employ Fibre Channel connections, it is based on Ethernet and is designed to support only six systems at offline resolutions. Final pricing was not available, but it will be less expensive than Unity. (For another perspective on Avid media networking, see Avid Shared Storage on page 20.)

Visual Effects

Version 10 includes Avid’s “AniMatte” feature, which permits editors to create free-form mattes (complete with Bezier control points) and then animate them with keyframes. Some assistants raved about this feature, indicating that for temp comps with unruly green-screens, it’s sometimes easier to create your own hand-drawn mattes than to use Avid’s chroma key functionality. AniMattes must be rendered, while chroma keys work in real-time, but render times are faster on the new machines. Sean Valla, first assistant on Spiderman, was particularly happy with the new visual effects functionality and also praised the system’s “intraframe” painting tools. He also liked Version 10’s new “SmartRender” function, which allows one to stop a render and resume it later, or to modify effects without re-rendering areas that weren’t changed.

Lists

Version 10 marks a big change in Avid’s list software. The change list and cut list tools have vanished, and in their place, Avid has bundled its new stand-alone list tool, FilmScribe. Unlike EDL manager, which was stripped out of the system several years ago, FilmScribe cannot receive sequences directly from the Avid. Instead, you must save a bin containing the sequence and then open that bin in FilmScribe. This allows assistants to make lists on

Few assistants that I spoke to had used FilmScribe extensiveluy, but those who had were not happy.

standalone Macs or PCs, and Avid contends that it permits the company to improve the software more rapidly.

Few assistants that I spoke to had used FilmScribe extensively, but those who had were not happy. In early impressions, the software seems to offer little that is new and still has some of the same problems that have been part of the system for years. There also appears to be at least one new bug with lists for ordinary dissolves. Bronwyn Waddington, Avid assistant on The Time Machine, was particularly frustrated by the extra steps needed when lists didn’t come out the way she wanted the first time. “If you make a change in a sequence, you have to resave the bin in the Avid, and then both clear the sequence and close the bin in FilmScribe before you can pull a new list. You can’t drag and drop your sequences into the cut or change list tool. It’s like pulling teeth.”

Effects-heavy sequences are still a problem, as well. Patrick Gallagher on Spiderman indicated that he gets frequent “sequence too complicated” error messages, and the system aborts without producing a list or offering any indication of which clip caused the problem. To get around this, he has to laboriously break the sequence into parts and produce lists for each section until he finds the offending clip. This is made all the more difficult by the repeated saving and opening that’s necessary with FilmScribe.

Input and Output

Version 10 will work with uncompressed, full-resolution NTSC video. And it allows for direct output to a PAL deck from an NTSC project. Combined with the machine’s included pan-and-scan effects, this makes it a usable tool for standard-definition, multi-format onlines. But the film world won’t be able to make the best use of this capability because the system only offers full-resolution media in video projects. To online or master 24-fps material one must export an EDL via matchback, import it into a 30-fps project and recreate whatever effects

The Digital Cut window now offers control over output pulldown and timecode.

didn’t make it through the EDL. Direct mastering of a 24-fps sequence is still only possible with a Symphony.

The system also allows for timecode outputs. This means that other devices, such as a Pro Tools or even a dubbing stage, can finally be slaved to it.

In Version 7 environments, Avid’s Media Recorder allowed many video facilities to digitize in telecine and provide dailies on transportable drives. But until recently there was no Media Recorder for Version 10. That changed in September, when Avid released Media Station XL. The new version was beta tested at Sony, and Eric Rigney, Manager of Digital Picture Editorial, indicated that they have been very satisfied with its performance and stability.

Version 10 allows for Serial Digital Interface (SDI) connections. That means that if you have an appropriate deck, you can load the Avid and make outputs with no loss in picture quality due to analog conversions. But these decks tend to be expensive. And though SDI works well for ouputs, it isn’t always the best way to digitize on shows that telecine from workprint because it offers no way to adjust color or gain.

Finally, there is no Media Reader for Version 10. This box, which allows accurate footage and timecode information to be burned in on an output, never achieved widespread use in the Hollywood editing community. Many facilities that received them with their systems literally didn’t know what they were for and in some cases never found out. To make an output for sound turnover in Version 10 you can digitize a “counter tape” which contains only running footage and time counters over black, and then luma key this over your cut sequence. But effects under the luma key must be rendered, and though this method will produce correct footage information, timecode is only accurate to ±1 frame.

Training

For many editors and assistants, the switch to Version 10 entails a significant learning curve. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that it is so new and so few people are using it. A few teams received special help from Avid, but most solved problems on their own. One source of information is Version 10’s built in help system, which is much improved and now works via a web browser. It includes a useful “What’s New” section.

Other Features

Though Version 10 offers some cosmetic changes, including new button shapes and window designs, Avid has primarily focused on big issues like picture quality and speed and has left the editing “toolset” alone. Many editors I spoke with could not name a single new editing feature that they found useful. Some were happy with this stability. Others found it surprising that after so many years, so little has changed and so many quirks remain.

Wayne Wahrman praised the system’s ability to work with a Yamaha flying-fader mixer. He also noted that because of the speed improvements, waveforms update faster and he can leave them on when cutting short sequences.

One new feature that most assistants commented on is the ability to color-code clips in the timeline. This allows you visually identify various kinds of material: ADR, temp dubs, visual effects, etc., and it can make it much easier to find things in a sequence. As a side-effect of the clip-coloring technology, the system can automatically color-code all off-line clips, a feature some assistants found invaluable.

The locator window has also been modified and now allows more text to be added for each locator. But some assistants were not happy with the change, because it makes adding text awkward.

The Replace function has finally been modified so that it doesn’t delete effects on the replaced clips. And it’s now possible to drag and drop audio from a CD directly into a project.

The Digital Cut tool now allows you to add black at the tail of an output (but you still can’t cut black onto the tail of a sequence in the timeline). You can also preview an insert edit

Interface settings allow the look of buttons and windows to be adjusted to taste.

before making it. And Version 10.5 preserves source VITC in cut sequences, which may become important for negative cutting.

Finally, the new system eliminates our old friend the pulldown switch and brings pull-down speed adjustments into the software itself. Assistants were generally happy with this and felt that the interface offered better on-screen explanations of pull-down settings.

Bugs and Problems

As the pioneers of the new system, many of the editors and assistants I spoke with felt that they had endured their share of slings and arrows. Most indicated that Version 10 was moderately buggy, but that in the end, most bugs were annoyances rather than show-stoppers. Eric Rigney at Sony felt that some of the later 7.1 releases were Avid’s most refined and that Version 10 still has a few rough edges. Mark Goldblatt, cutting Bad Company, was frustrated by a series of minor and difficult-to-repeat annoyances where marks would disappear, trims wouldn’t be executed as he expected and audio levels would change. Lisa Churgin, cutting Goodbye Hello, indicated that the system crashed often. But Wayne Wahrman, (working with Transoft storage) had experienced almost no crashes in several months.

The most aggravating bug I heard about, and the only work-stopper, was introduced in Version 10.1. It caused all audio “rubber band” level adjustments to be ignored when a cut was played in trim mode. For editors who had done temp mixes in their Avid and used the audio rubber-banding feature, to hear levels go to 100% every time a cut was trimmed threw them right out of their chairs and sent directors running from the room. Lisa Churgin said, “I had to train myself to hit the mute button every time I went into trim mode. It drove me insane.” Though this bug was vigorously reported to Avid by some of the people I spoke

Version 10 requires that the right-side screen be set to a higher resolution. Many editors were unhappy with the change, which results in smaller icons and text.

with, it is only partially fixed in Version 10.5. If one selects “Dual Image Play” in the trim settings the problem remains. (This feature plays both sides of a cut together when they are trimmed simultaneously using the JKL keys.)

Version 10 requires that the right-side screen (the one with the timeline and source/record monitors) be set to a higher resolution than did Version 7, and this results in smaller icons. Many editors I spoke with were quite unhappy with this and found text harder to read and the system more difficult to use because mouse clicks need to be more precise. Others liked the change, which produces more screen real estate.

User settings in Version 10 offer more control than before but they are also more complicated and appear to be buggier. Bronwyn Waddington said, “you can really get yourself in trouble if you’re not careful.” She found that her user settings became corrupted and had to be replaced roughly every week.

And the Avid Calculator appears to produce incorrect timecode totals, at least through Version 10.1.

Conclusion

Version 10 represents a combination of incremental improvements, not a revolution. But if it were more reasonably priced, there would be no question of the need to upgrade. Except for the problems with trim audio, frustration with smaller on-screen icons and text, and some residual instability, most of the people I spoke with were generally happy with it and wouldn’t want to return to Version 7. Wayne Wahrman felt that Version 10 was “the best Avid I’ve ever worked with.” But cost is a key factor. For high-budget shows with heavy visual effects requirements and the need to share media over many machines, the upgrade seems essential. But for lower-budget productions or environments that do not need industrial-strength media networking, Version 7 may still be the Avid system of choice.

That’s unfortunate. Avid now supports Version 10 on both the Mac and Windows NT. That takes far more work than a single-platform release. They can’t be happy to also support software that’s over three years old, especially when it’s used widely in their most prestigious market. The longer we continue to use outdated technology, the more marginalized we will be when it comes to bug fixes and feature requests. But as long as the price remains high, the Version 10 adoption rate seems destined to remain slow. Unity LANshare may help to change the price/performance equation. In addition, Avid has hinted several times recently that a lower-cost, film-capable system, known as “Avid Improv,” is in the works. If LANshare is priced right, and system prices continue to come down, a majority of Guild editors and assistants might find themselves using Avid’s latest technology.