It’s rare to have some exciting news from Avid, but a couple of things have come up recently. The first is the new lower subscription rate, $33CAD/month which brings it under Adobe Premiere’s monthly rate and makes it quite competitive for the first time ever. The second was the launch of a free version of Avid called Media Composer First last year, a fully functional version of their software with a few limitations.
Here’s the link and here are some incredibly dry video tutorials to help you get started.
The original idea of this post was that I would create a tutorial video where I gave the software a whirl to find out whether it was functional and what were the real limitations.
Well… after 3 hours of installation, reinstallation, rebooting, reconfiguring, importing, reimporting and transcoding, I had a simple project ready to go with a few clips and a very long video with me cursing a lot and “loving” Avid. I’ll put this here – http://avidhatesyou.blogspot.ca
So what I learned was to uninstall all things Avid before installing MCFirst. A clean installation is a must, you cannot have another version on your computer. That’s where I found out the first very big limitation of this program. There is no ability to open MCFirst projects in Media Composer or vice versa. There goes the idea that you might start a project in MCFirst and then finish it in MC later.
Next, I choose a variety of different clips to test for importing. Sony MXF and Arri MOV were the easiest. Any H264 footage (GoPro, Drone, DSLR, Web Clips) could not be imported directly but through a workaround, I could link them then transcode them. Already the idea of this being an easier stepping stone into the full Composer world was been completely dispelled.
However, once you’ve gotten through that process, you are ready to edit in exactly how you would in MC8. Your limits are 4 video tracks, 8 audio tracks, 5 bins and you can only export 1080HD. Most new editors will be happy within these limitations, but it doesn’t take long to run out of bins or tracks in the course of a simple edit. Avid provides a happy box that tells you that upgrading is easy and a click away. And you should, immediately.
I read many reviews of MCF and most commonly under “strengths” was that it was free and that it forces you to learn Avid. If this is indeed your only goal, to learn Avid, then this software may be for you. It catapults into the illogical ecosystem of Media Composer and will give you the tools you need to move up to the full version when you feel ready.
But honestly, why bother. It’s a self contained program which doesn’t allow you to work on Media Composer projects and is just as difficult to learn. You might as well just subscribe to the full version (now only $33/month!) and learn it using real world edits from shows that you’re working on.
While it’s an interesting step in the right direction by Avid to gain new users, if you’re thinking of taking the plunge, best just to head for the deep end and go for it.
Alec MacNeill Richardson works as a director and editor in all things fictional and factual. He edits with Media Composer, Premiere and FCPX.
