I try to cover the basics about what tools are present in the Avid Symphony colour correction toolset and demonstrate exactly how the relational colour correction tools can work and improve efficiency when grading within the Avid NLE, and even how they might offer advantages against traditionally more powerful grading applications like Resolve or Apple’s Color.

This is a pretty brief introduction, and obviously exactly how useful the features will be is going to depend a lot on the type and structure of your projects. If you have any questions, please let me know.

As a reminder – Avid is offering a very competitive crossgrade/upgrade offer on Symphony at the moment, if these features are something that might benefit your work then I’ve covered that offer and some other considerations in more detail in What is Avid Symphony?

Only five or six years ago an Avid Symphony system would have cost nearly US$100,000. So, what is Symphony? Why was it so expensive? Why is it so much cheaper at the moment? What’s different? And, crucially, should you buy it?

Avid’s Media Composer product is kind of split in three. There is the main product, Media Composer – most people just call it Avid - this is the editing tool that we’re used to and what Avid promotes most heavily. It also has two cousins (actually more like fraternal twins), NewsCutter and Symphony.

These two products are developed from the same source code as Media Composer – when there’s a new version of Media Composer there is usually a new version of Symphony and NewsCutter too.

NewsCutter, as the name suggests, is mainly intended for use in a broadcast news environment, it has tight integration with Avid’s Interplay and iNews products to allow for more efficient editing within an Avid newsroom environment (you may not realise, but Avid makes a lot of products really targeted at TV news production).

Symphony is Media Composer’s big brother. Originally in the days of Offline/Online editing the Symphony was a very specific finishing tool. It had support for uncompressed media, better effects, colour correction and also had HD support before Media Composer. However over time many (all but one and a half, in fact) of Symphony’s features made it into Media Composer. But the one (and a half) features that truly set Symphony apart from Media Composer now are very significant for some users and continue to justify the differentiation in products.

Why was it so expensive?
Until very recently (v6.0 in fact) Symphony required very specific Avid hardware to function. The Avid Nitris box – while Media Composer has been available for sometime as software only (and with lower cost Mojo and Mojo SDI hardware before that) the Symphony continued to rely on the features of the specific Avid hardware. So the cost included that hardware, and because not many people needed all that it offered it was higher cost (also because it offered more, they could charge more).

Once Symphony became able to operate in software-only mode, as well as with third-party hardware then the cost no longer included specific hardware and in came down to reflect the changes. However Avid obviously feels that the few extra features in Symphony are significant enough to justify a higher price than Media Composer.

Why is it so much cheaper at the moment?
Only Avid knows the specific thinking behind their promotion, but there are a couple of theories I’ve seen – these are just theories, mind you. Idle guesses really.

It’s a fire sale! Avid are planning to kill Symphony and want to milk us for cash – In a previous version I suggested and shot down that it was inventory they wanted to get rid of.  Someone clarified for me that they felt it was more about juicing Symphony for all the money they could by getting people to buy it before it was killed. I don’t think this is true either – firstly I don’t think Avid are deceptive in that way, and secondly it would cause a backlash that would cause far more damage than whatever they managed to earn.

They are going to kill Media Composer and are giving people a step up - I don’t buy this either. Firstly Avid have spent ages branding Media Composer (to stop people saying, generically, Avid) and it’s by far their most well known video product.

They knew Smoke was coming - This is the one that sounds most likely to me. Autodesk have drastically rebuilt and repriced their NLE/finishing product Smoke (see: Have Autodesk Smoked the Competition) and are very clearly targeting it at professional editors who’re looking for the next step after Apple’s FCP re-invention. This is a promotion aimed at getting those FCP users on to Avid’s top end product, and it couldn’t be offered to FCP switchers without including existing Avid customers too.

What’s different?
Good question! I’m glad you asked. It’s fairly easy to answer… Colour Correction.

Not quite true, but that’s the main thing. And it’s only half different. The colour correction toolset in Media Composer is a subset of the Symphony colour correction tools. In Symphony there are more controls and, crucially,  a much more advanced way of applying colour correction.

The obvious difference is that Symphony’s colour correction tool has a lot more tabs, and the one people focus most on is the Secondaries one. In my opinion this is one of the least interesting aspects of Symphony advanced colour correction. The secondaries in Symphony are more accurately vectors (rather than RGB or HSL qualifiers like Resolve, Baselight, Colorista, etc) – they can be very useful, but also quite limited.

There are lots of good things about Symphony’s colour correction, including on of my favourites, the ability to modify Setup, Gamma and Gain separately for shadows, midtones and hightlights. It also has a master HSL colour control, full channel mixer and per-channel levels control.

But all that that is somewhat insignificant compared to the really good bit – the relational colour correction model. In Media Composer when you apply a correction you are applying an effect on a per-clip basis. If you’re grading a conversation scene between two people you usually end up apply grade A to one shot, grade B to the next shot, grade A to the next shot, etc etc etc. But then if there is another take used for some lines you might have to make a new grade for that, then figure out which of a few grades for Jim’s close single you need to apply each time you get to it.

With Symphony’s relational model you can correct based on source information… The tape name, or source clip name, or the Avid Master Clip, or sub clip. You can also apply a grade to an entire track (on top of the source grades) and you can still use the CC effect too.

The relational grading abilities can save a LOT of time. Often an entire scene can be graded in just one or two steps. Then in any cases where the source grade doesn’t apply you can either apply an additional master grade over the top of that clip, or switch it to a segment grade and make changes to the source grade it inherited from related clips.

So that’s the half difference, it’s by far the biggest and for anyone doing colour correction in Avid Media Composer currently it is a massive productivity boost.

The other difference is something called Universal Mastering. Essentially it allows you to make outputs in multiple formats from a single sequence, in realtime, to tape. Effectively you create a 24p master sequence. You can then choose to output that to tape as any normal video standard – it will speed up audio and vision to create a 25fps master, or add pulldown to create 29.97fps versions. This is a huge deal for people doing mastering of video for DVD film releases etc, but much less important for most other people. It’s also not available without Avid’s Nitris DX hardware, so isn’t relevant to most people looking to make the switch to Symphony.

Should I buy it?
YES. Or no. It depends…

There is one other point of difference I haven’t mentioned – it’s not about Symphony as such, but an inclusion with the Symphony purchase. As well as the Avid FX, Avid DVD and Sorenson Squeeze add-ons that come with Media Composer you also get the full Boris Continuum Compete 8 plugin package. That in itself is worth about US1,600 yet is included with this offer.

So there’s a few cases to consider…

If you’re currently using any version of Avid Media Composer to grade and finish video then it’s very possible that the improved control and the relational grading abilities in Symphony would make it worth the money.

If you’re already running the latest Media Composer but don’t have BCC8 and have been looking to buy it then this is a cheaper way to get it, and better colour correction.

If you’ve got an old (even Xpress DV from 2002) version of Avid sitting around and want a cheap way to get up to date then this is ideal.

If you’ve been using Final Cut Pro 7 (or earlier) up until now and are looking to get into Avid’s tools then this is a great deal.

If you’ve already got a full up-to-date Media Composer (or Symphony) system but also have an FCP license then this is a great way to get a second system up and going.

If you’ve got Media Composer 6, and BCC8 and don’t really do a lot of color correction, then this is probably not a useful offer for you.

Will it cost me more in the long run?
Given that Symphony is a more costly product usually, will the upgrades cost more also? No idea – we can only guess and look to the past. Previously the answer was “yes, absolutely” – the Symphony upgrade costs were much higher. However the most recent upgrade (to 6.0) was available at the same price as the Media Composer upgrade. So it could go either way, but I think Avid will be aware of the fact they are gaining new customers with this offer and will realise that they’ll react negatively if they’re looking at a more costly upgrade in the future.

It was clear going into NAB 2012 that the big buzz this year was going to be 4K. Canon, Sony and Panasonic all had 4K camera announcements, but the surprise stand out from the show was a less-than-4K camera from an established company with no history in cameras – Blackmagic’s “2.5K” camera possibly became the most talked about announcement at NAB. Why – why was is the big standout, and why did it come from Blackmagic?

Amazingly it seems this camera was a complete surprise – I saw no leaks about it ahead of time, and heard no rumours. I guess no one was looking at Blackmagic for a camera. They are a company that deals mostly with post-production. It started with a range of I/O cards and has grown, both by development and acquisition, ever since. Now Blackmagic offer products to address various demands in all stages of production. They support acquisition with their HyperDeck recorders and ATEM camera converters, they support engineering with their routers and converters, they support production with their vision mixers and recorders, and they support post-production with their large range of I/O products and more recently as the company behind DaVinci.

Blackmagic are also a disruptive company who are clearly focused on low cost high volume products rather than high cost low volume products as has been the norm in professional video production in the past. A Decklink I/O card can cost as little as $300 yet support HD-SDI connections, and DaVinci Resolve, previously tens-of-thousands, is now available in a very functional free version, or only $1,000 for a full version.

And now this new camera takes them right to the beginning of the chain by directly tackling the acquisition. It should be no surprise also that the pricing destroys established expectations. The headline is 2.5K raw video for $3,000. It’s a camera that meets price points and demands that have been established by recently empowered DSLR users while also accounting for the specific needs of video production.

It’s not the perfect camera, of course – there is no such thing – but it ticks of many boxes for a large number of users. Interchangeable lenses, raw recording (or compressed edit-ready recording), large sensor, professional connections, metadata…. It’s all there. There are also some things that are not there – a larger sensor and higher framerates would be high on many people’s lists, while genlock and timecode in are important for others. There’s also the ergonomics to consider.

But regardless of all that this camera is one thing above all others – a sign. It’s a sign that Blackmagic now sees cameras as an area of interest, so even if this camera doesn’t suit us now, it seems likely to be just the beginning.

Blackmagic is one of the companies I’m watching most closely. They are clearly committed to continuing to innovate and push the industry and it’s just about impossible to predict what might be next.

I am not in Las Vegas, I am at home in New Zealand reading about the show, as I have for years, on the internet. However I want to go to the show next year, and I’m hoping you can help me (and hopefully I can help you in turn). I am attempting to crowd-fund my trip to NAB 2013.

I told a couple of people about this idea ahead of time. A few were supportive, but others were dismissive – something along the lines of “you want people to pay for your holiday?”

The answer to that is yes, and no. Sure, I’d love to visit Vegas, meet up with American friends and colleagues and trash hotel rooms, but it’s more than that. My interest in NAB is professional – it’s part of my personal professional development, if that makes sense. I work professionally in television post-production, but I also have a passion for the industry and the technology it’s built on. My employer can’t really justify sending staff to NAB, so I’m on my own.

However what I am planning to do is more than just idly wander around looking at shiny gadgets and hunting out corporate hospitality. I want to learn, and I want to share. A large part of my involvement with technology has always been as a translator – I take in technical information and I translate it into terms and concepts that can (hopefully) be easily understood by others.

This is something I’ve done as a part of almost every job I’ve ever had, and also something I’ve done for a wider audience. I’ve written for a broad audience on technical subjects for a number of publications and websites, I’ve actively contributed thousands of posts to a variety of online communities and I’ve even hosted a talkback radio show about computers and technology. It is something I enjoy doing and that I believe I’m good at.

So that is what I hope to be doing in Las Vegas in April 2013. I want to serve as a technical conduit for any interested parties. For businesses with an interest in a specific technology or market segment I’m happy to learn as much as I can and provide direct and relevant consultation about the options specific to their needs. For individuals observing NAB from home I’ll make myself available to seek direct answers about new products or services.

I’m also entirely willing to make myself available to vendors in any way I can. I’m not a big-name speaker or post-production mover-and-shaker but I have been using many products in many ways on high-profile and demanding projects for years.

So I want you (or people you know) to send me to NAB 2013 to work – for you. To learn more, please check out my Indiegogo project page: Dylan Does NAB or contact me directly via email (nab @ dylanreeve.com), Twitter (@dylanreeve) or directly on this site.

Smoke is an established product from Autodesk. Initially it was a high-end system running only on expensive turnkey Linux systems, then in 2009 they released Smoke for Mac – able to run on a fairly standard MacPro and at the new affordable price of only US$15,000. Of course that price seems crazy now compared to Apple Final Cut Pro X at only $300, Avid Media Composer at $2,500 and Adobe Production Premium at $1,700.  Also, while Smoke has a timeline and editing tools it was really a finishing suite, few people would choose to actually cut on the software. So Autodesk decided to go back to the drawing board…

I’m not going to try and re-hash the new Smoke 2013 product for you here, I haven’t used it first hand and others know a lot more about it than I do, so here are some great links:

That Post Show – Smoke This Podcast (in-depth interview with Autodesk’s Mark-André Ferguson)
Walter Biscardi: Yes, Autodesk Smoke 2013 Changes Everything
NAB 2012: Autodesk Unveils a New Smoke

What I will do though is try to understand what sort of impact this makes on the Post landscape and what we might expect to see from the competition.

Listening to That Post Show (link above – highly recommended) I couldn’t help but thinking that many of the new features in Smoke sounded both very sensible and very familiar. It sounds like Autodesk have really taken time to understand the professional post production market, from small one-man-bands all the way up to large post facilities – Smoke’s features sound well thought out to address the needs of those users and at a price that’s easily within reach while not devaluing the product or the skill of it’s users.

The features sounded familiar to me because I’ve used (although not extensively) Avid’s DS system. Now, if you asked a lot of working editors to play a product association game it’s unlikely many would come up with ‘DS’ when you say Avid, but it is one of their key professional video tools. DS it a very powerful finishing tool – it features a full NLE interface but also a powerful multi-layer and nodal effects engine. It’s also possibly an under-developed product sadly. While DS has a base of devoted users it is also a niche product that hasn’t seen a lot of big developments in the last 5-6 years and it has never received the marketing push that Avid’s Media Composer and Symphony products have. So while Smoke 2013 seems like a great product for post-production it is also poses the question “is this what DS could have been?”

I’d like to think that Avid will see the attention that Smoke has grabbed and realise that it already has a product that’s quite close and just needs some more attention. But even if that happens, how soon could we expect to see Avid revitalise DS in the way that they have with Media Composer?

The approach that Autodesk (and Avid, with DS) have taken is to have a single tool that can do it all. Smoke and DS are capable NLEs, they also have a very strong effects pipeline and advanced colour correction tools – the idea being that the project can stay in a single application instead of being moved through a series of disconnected (or loosely connected) tools to achieve a finished product. I like this approach – for most things – but at the same time it should be recognised that a tool dedicated to a single task is usually more powerful than one dedicated to all tasks – the old “jack of all trades, master of none” thing. For most projects the Smoke approach of multifuctional tool makes sense and it the right answer, but for some projects a dedicated tool is probably a better solution. So in this way Smoke isn’t going to kill the need for dedicated editing tools like Media Composer, or grading tools like Resolve or effects tools like After Effects.

As for Smoke itself – it’s an exciting product. Most of my job is finishing or online – I am grading, doing basic effects and fixes on TV shows. Currently I do so with Avid Symphony and occasionally Adobe After Effects, but it’s easy for me to see that Smoke could be a great solution for my needs, and at only US$3,500 it’s not even a difficult purchase to justify. But, and it’s a fairly big one for me, it’s tied to the Mac. Currently all my systems are Windows-based HP workstations. I don’t have any Mac hardware and given what appears to be Apple’s growing disinterest in desktop computer in favour of mobile and smart devices I am entirely unwilling to make an investment in Apple hardware. Realistically the only option available to run Smoke 2013 in my situation is a iMac which is unsuitable for my needs. It’s hard to imagine where Apple is going in the next couple of years, but if I were a company that specialises in high-end content creation tools I would not be relying on Apple alone to provide a platform for my software.

I’m sure Smoke 2013 will be a great product and I think Autodesk has clearly understood exactly how to meet the market. I would also love to see Avid meet them head-on with DS or something new – I think the approach Smoke is taking makes a lot of sense and it’s one that Avid has taken before. I would like to see Autodesk make Smoke cross-platform – either offering it for Windows or making a Linux version that could be run on standard ‘PC’ hardware.

Regardles of specifics the future is bright for us. It’s now entirely possible to have a computer with Media Composer, the entire Adobe collection, DaVinci  Resolve, Smoke, ProTools and much more, all for less than the cost of a single basic NLE suite from just ten years ago – and it can do more than even the most high-end tools of ten years ago.

So then does this mean that 4K is the future, or in fact if the cameras are here now – is it the present?

The answer to both questions is yes! And also no.

Lets step right back to fundamentals and ask a basic question – what is 4K? Unfortunately it’s here that we hit the first (and biggest) hurdle. 4K, at the moment, is basically whatever a camera (or display) manufacturer wants to say it is. The DCI defines 4K as 4096×2160 at most (with actual height being a product of the aspect ratio), while RED’s 4K is 4096×2304 or 4096×2048 (depending on aspect ratio). Many other companies are adopting the Quad-HD format – 3840×2160 – twice the height and width of 1080P HD and still other 4K standards have been based on other “close to 4000″ frame sizes. But overall there’s no one standard framesize that we can call “4K”

However it’s clear that 4K technology is here, but it’s not all here yet. When HD finally arrived in a meaningful way there were two basic variations – 1080i and 720p. Two framesizes each with a distinct scanning pattern (interlaced or progressive) – it was complicated by various framerates (23.976, 25, 29.97, 50, 59.94 etc) but overall there was a standard. A Sony camera could be connected via SDI cable to a Grass Valley vision mixer and recorded to a Panasonic VTR. This is not true for 4K. There are no firm standards addressing how a 4K picture should be transmitted over a wire. Monitoring, offboard recorders, projection – all rely on a handful of ad-hoc solutions wedged around existing formats and standards. HDMI is the closest we have to a usable standard for 4K video connectivity – and HDMI is not practical for most professional applications.

There’s also the matter of demand. There is currently no distribution system for 4K (beyond DCP for a very limited digital projection market). RED want to change this with RED Ray, but they are working alone on that and I’m sure we can recall how Beta/VHS and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hampered technological advancement. Currently there are no broadcasters, distributors or film festivals that demand (or accept) a 4K deliverable. Of course that’s likely to change, but without standards, formats and platforms for that distribution, the demand is going to take a while.

But, of course, more cameras are starting to appear, I/O hardware is starting to offer various 4K support, and NLE software is also getting there. But for what? Only an absolutely tiny fraction of a single percent of the projects created with RED’s cameras in the last 5-6 years have been finished at anything greater than HD (or 2K). Jim Jannard will argue about the future viability of those projects – suggesting that a new 4K master could be created from the original source once the demand arrives (and HD is considered not good enough), but in reality for most it’s unlikely that the terabytes of source footage will been suitably archived to make that possible.

So what is 4K for now? 4K now is for HD. A great 4K image makes an even greater HD image when it’s downsampled for the smaller frame – this is the idea behind Canon’s C300 camera which does this internally. Also a 4K image provides a lot of scope for reframing in post-production – a shot can be “zoomed in” approximately double before new image data has to start being created.

Do you want to get into 4K? Maybe, but spend a bit of time first thinking about how and why you want to do so. It’s incredibly unlikely that you’re going to face a sudden need to actually deliver 4K images. The technology that seems great now may not be at all suitable when you are finally faced with a need for a 4K finished product – if, for example, we end up settling on 4096-wide frames for standard 4K then footage acquired with the Quad-HD format would need to be blown up to fit.

If you are doing work that frequently sees you needing to re-frame shots in editing then a 4K camera may be really beneficial. That was the first application of HD for many producers – allowing footage to be zoomed within SD projects.

There’s no clear answer to this, so let’s work through the most obvious options.

Do I need to move?
As has been very widely echoed in discussion about the new version of Final Cut Pro, your current version has not stopped working. So do you need to move to something else at all?

Maybe not. It does still work, and it shouldn’t just stop working at any point in the near future, so you can obviously continue your current projects in FCP7. But the future is much less clear. What we do know is that FCP7 has been discontinued – there will be no FCP 7.5 or 8. What it is today is all it’s likely to be. If you’re having difficulty with workflows now they aren’t going to get better.

Also you effectively need to freeze your system where it is now. While Apple say that FCP7 will work in Lion, there’s no guarantees beyond that. OS updates in the past have often caused problems with Final Cut Pro, as the application is EOL it’s unlikely that updates will be released for OS compatibility. Also new Apple hardware tends to be unable to run any OS version earlier than they were shipped with, so it’s possible that future Macs will not be compatible with FCP7 at all.

Another concern is forward compatibility. Final Cut Pro X does not support old FCP project files. So any new FCP project you create now is effectively being created in the last application that will natively read or write that format. While there are methods to import those projects into other systems they are effectively EOL along with the application.

Can I Move to FCP X?
Very possibly. It will depend a lot on what you do and what you need from the application. It appears that Apple have designed FCP X to be suitable for what they believe are the most common requirements and workflows. Ultimately you are the only person who can determine if it will meet your needs.

Broadly speaking, if you’re work is heavily reliant on tape-based formats, interchange with other post-production tools or advanced features like Multicam and telecine tracking it’s unlikely that FCP X is going to be readily applicable. At this stage there is also no capacity for standard broadcast monitoring.

If FCP X will do what you need there are still a few considerations… It’s a whole new way of working – you need to factor in the learning curve and a fundamentally new way of thinking about some of the basic concepts. There is no backward compatibility with FCP7 project files – the work you’ve done before will not be able to be transitioned into the new application.

The Alternatives
Assuming you want to continue basically the same work with basically the same hardware there are effectively two options going forward – Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer.

Both applications are very capable video editing applications with a long history and both will probably run fine on your existing Mac hardware.

Best of all both have 30-day free trial versions available.

Avid Media Composer
Media Composer, often known simply as Avid, is the big boy of professional NLE applications. It is still the most widely used NLE in most broadcast TV and film (although FCP had been making a big impact on those markets).

As of today Media Composer is at version 5.5 (the version numbering was restarted in the early 2000′s) and is a very different application from that which many remember or have heard about. In recent years Avid has been very pro-active in adapting Media Composer to better suit modern file-based formats and workflows. Avid as a company has also evolved now, becoming much more attentive to user feedback and suggestions.

Another big change for Media Composer is the move away from proprietary hardware. At this stage Media Composer offers support (with various limitations) for the Matrox MXO2 Mini and AJA IOexpress hardware I/O devices. It is widely expected that the next version of Media Composer will feature hardware support for popular I/O hardware from AJA and Blackmagic.

Unfortunately there is no simple and native way to migrate FCP projects into Avid, but there are two effective tools available from third-party developers – Pro Export FCP from Automatic Duck and AAF Transfer from Boris.

Media Composer is still the most commonly used NLE in Hollywood and for network TV, if you’re aspiring to work in those fields then experience with Avid’s systems is invaluable.

• Media Composer product page at Avid
• Download the 30-day Media Composer trial from Avid.
• If you are a student or teacher you are able to purchase Media Composer for US$295 which also includes four years of upgrades.
• With a valid FCP serial number you can also take advantage of a US$995 crossgrade offer.

Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe’s NLE, Premiere, has been around for 20 years. It was among the first applications to bring video editing to the desktop of regular computers. In 2003 it was reinvented as Premiere Pro and updated to better meet the needs of professional editors, and to be more intuitive for editors who were familiar with FCP and Media Composer.

The application has made further leaps and bounds in the last few versions and now features some of the best real-time performance available thanks to it’s ability to leverage the power of NVidias graphics processors through the CUDA architecture. The most recent versions also include native support for Final Cut Pro XML allowing for easy project import.

Many editors have sung the praises of the new Premiere Pro, but overall the application still hasn’t gained a reputation as a truly professional tool, at least in the television and film world. It has support for things like EDL, AAF import and export, R3D, tape-based workflows and more. It’s a successful hybrid tool, with one foot in the ‘old school’ world of tapes and EDLs and SDI, and the other foot in the future world of files and metadata.

Premiere Pro also forms one part of the very well integrated Creative Suite group of products. It supports powerful and direct interchange with other Creative Suite productions such as After Effects (visual effects and motion graphics), Photoshop (photo editing), Illustrator (vector graphics and design), Encore (DVD and Blu-Ray authoring), Audition (sound mixing) and Flash (keyframe based animation and app development).

Adobe is in a strong position to take advantage of the change that’s been motivated by FCP X – many users already own the Adobe Creative Suite (for After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator) and it can also take advantage of most of the same popular I/O hardware in use commonly with FCP.

• Premiere Pro product page from Adobe
• 30-day trials of Premiere Pro and the whole Creative Suite Production Premium are available from Adobe.
• A competitive upgrade offer makes the Production Premium suite available from US$849 for any FCP or Media Composer owner or Premiere Pro alone from US$399.
• The Academic edition of Production Premium is available for US$449.
• Adobe also offers a unique subscription model, making it possible to pay as little as US$39 a month for Premiere Pro – which includes all upgrades.

The Way Forward
There is probably not any rush. Ideally you should evaluate all the options. Unfortunately no trial version is available for FCP X, so to demo that you really need to shell out the purchase price. For Premiere Pro and Media Composer you can download the trial versions and evaluate them for your needs. There is plenty of training available for both products and large communities of existing users to provide more information.

Any change is going to require some retraining and some workflow adaptation, but both Adobe and Avid have publicly affirmed their commitment to the professionals who rely on their products, and both companies have been very proactive in their development over the last few years and show no sign of slowing down.

The current specials are great, and are currently available until the end of September 2011. If it’s practical it could be worth taking the opportunity to purchase both Avid Media Composer and Adobe’s Creative Suite Production Premium – VideoGuys are offering the Avid and Adobe offers together for US$1744.

Purchase links in this article are to VideoGuys.com – this is because they are experts in this field, offer a wide range of product, and sell internationally with no fuss. I have no financial relationship with them and am not receiving any affiliate income from my referrals.

Before I go any further I need to define what I mean by Pros in the headline (and from here on) – I am referring, mainly, to editors who work predominantly in broadcast television and feature films. Obviously there are many more people earning money editing video, but it’s these editors who are the most demanding, and for whom the uncertainty of FCP X is such a problem.

Has Apple abandoned this market? I think to all intents and purposes they have. They will continue to claim that their product is a professional product and a continuation of the Final Cut Pro legacy, but in reality it really appears they are absolutely willing to lose that market if they need to.

And why wouldn’t they? Apple’s estimate of FCP install numbers was “two million” a while ago – it wasn’t clear how that was measured, but many speculated that it was all sales since 1.0 or some similar aggregate number. Regardless, it was clear that within the larger world of FCP users it was a minority that were utilising it in the demanding broadcast television and film market. The vast majority are probably doing all their work within the one suite – capturing a tape or importing a file, editing, basic audio mix in FCP or Soundtrack Pro, export a file for DVD or web upload. And then another large segment are likely to be “aspirational” editors – people who don’t get paid to make videos, but have installed FCP because they would like to one day and it’s the accessible “pro” tool.

So as small as the “professional” (see second paragraph) market is within that user-base, it so destined to be much smaller in an application that costs a mere $300 from the App Store and has so many simple time-saving features to make it as easy as possible to get something in and edited. Catering to the “professional” market would add complexity to the application, and reduce it’s appeal to people outside that market.

Apple doesn’t seem to do niche any more. They have been systematically killing any and all non-mainstream products they offered, and the re-imagining of Final Cut Pro seems clearly in line with that. If a product doesn’t have a sales potential of millions of units it doesn’t seem to fit into the Apple business plan.

Is FCP X a bad product? No, not really – and had it been called anything other than FCP X there would have been widespread acceptance of this. However FCP X is not a new version of the Final Cut Pro that had won respect in the film and television industry – it simply doesn’t have what it takes to work in that environment.

Businesses in the film and TV industry, that have to deliver a product to a strict standard within a strict deadline, can’t pin their hopes on a future upgrades or the next version while relying on an increasingly ageing product that has been EOL’ed. They need certainty and at the moment the only certainty that exists with FCP is that the current version has no future hopes and the current version isn’t suitable for their work. They have no choice but to look elsewhere.

It simply makes no financial sense for Apple – selling a $300 product that appeals, as is, to millions of people – to pursue a small market with very specific and complicated demands.

In the end Final Cut Pro X will be a success, it is a powerful and innovative application. But it will no longer be a big part of the film and TV post-production industry.

Let’s imagine a car racing league that uses production-style cars (basically ‘touring cars’ in many places). In this field there were a couple of established players, they made very good cars, but they were incredibly expensive as they really only made them for this very small number of potential clients.

Then a new upstart car maker comes along – they’ve designed a car that looks like one of these racing cars – we’ll call this car Fast Car Pro – it can drive the circuits well, but It’s not quite ready to win races, but it’s giving the big guys a run for their money. Also, this new car is available to the mass market and costs a just a tiny fraction of the cost of the established cars.

In time this Fast Car Pro starts to attract more professional teams and even wins a few races. Even more importantly there are now a large number of third parties making accessories and modifications for the car that make it more powerful and more suitable for the serious drivers. While at the same time the car is still fine for driving the kids to soccer or taking on a vacation.

After a decade in production the FCP is still going strong. Many racing drivers have adopted it and are doing great, but it’s a bit overdue for a new model and the manufacturer, Apple Automotive, has promised something great. At this point the car is still seen as a racing car that many people also like to drive on the highway.

After a lot of secret development Apple Automotive reveals their new Fast Car Pro X – which some people have suggested will be a Minivan Pro. It certainly is revolutionary, it has a joystick instead of steering wheel and all the seats (there’s now 7 of them, a lot like Apple’s minivan) automatically move around inside the car to where they are needed. It has auto-driving features and a host of other time-savers. For a ‘Soccer Mom’ this car certainly is revolutionary and will probably make life easier.

But for the racing drivers there are some problems. It can’t go above highway speeds for a start. None of their old aftermarket accessories can be used on the new car, and it can’t use the high-octane fuels they rely on for extra performance. Also the tyres can’t be changed to suit conditions, and it’s not possible to turn off the auto-driving features. It is still technically able to drive around the circuit, but it can’t do it with all the established racing cars.

Of course the original Fast Car Pro they’d become so used to still works fine, but it wasn’t going to be updated anymore. Also, surprisingly, Apple Automotive had decided that the same day they launched the new car they would entirely discontinue the old one. They stopped selling the original Fast Car Pro and even told dealers to send back all their inventory. If a team crashed one of their cars, or wanted to add a new car, there wasn’t any option to buy more – they would have to go to the second-hand market.

For the racing drivers this seems like the end of the world, they had built reputations and teams around the Fast Car Pro and now the new version simply couldn’t perform the way they needed it to. Apple’s decision seems insane to the drivers because Apple had effectively held half of the market for these racing cars. However the potential market for the racing cars was pretty small.

From Apple Automotive’s perspective and, perhaps more importantly, the perspective of their shareholders the new direction was a great decision. Now instead of a potential market of racing drivers and a reasonably small number of car enthusiasts they were looking at a potential market of just about everyone who needs to drive anywhere. Even if the professional racing drivers were entirely alienated they stand to gain a lot more than they lose with a new, more accessible, performance car.

Now, there is some hope that Apple Automotive might reinstate some of the missing features for the racing drivers, but there’s no suggestion of when that might be or what features might come back.

The main issue is that for editors in the Film and TV world FCP is basically one of two options. For Apple however the Film and TV post market represents only a small fraction of the current FCP market, and a absolutely tiny fraction of the potential market for a new application.

For the editors FCP is a big thing, for Apple the TV/Film world is a small fry.

Edited: By request of FCP editor Doug Dillaman, my representation of the FCP X potential market.