That's one of those small changes that may hit the muscle memory of experienced editors hard, but IMHO it's a price we should be willing to pay for tabbed bins.

 They've been moved to a pop-up in the lower left corner of a bin. The real question is: what took so long?

Ī casualty of the tabbed bins, however, is the loss of the Brief, Text, Frame and Script display tabs that were atop pre-MC6 bins. It's a simple, handy way to work that beats the SuperBin-which is thankfully now gone-by a mile. There's also a small arrow in the upper right corner of a bin that is a pop-out of all bins in the tabs. Drag a clip from another bin onto a tab and that bin will pop forward so you can drop the clip into that bin. Drag one bin onto another (or more) and they join together with tabs across the top. Here's what the AJA Kona 3G control panel looks like in MC:Īnother simple but incredibly useful interface change is the addition of tabbed bins (seen below). What's great is that there are also now some affordable new prices for actual Avid hardware. If you're a longtime Avid user who never thought you'd see a day when there would be so many hardware choices, you're not alone. You'll see a Hardware Setup option at the bottom of the Tools menu that will launch the third-party hardware control interface outside of Media Composer.ĭisplay, playback and scrubbing were all as smooth as working with Avid hardware. Install the proper drivers and they just work when booting into Media Composer. 
įor this review I tested both the Blackmagic Design Decklink HD Extreme 3D (the control panel is seen below), the AJA Kona 3G and the Matrox MXO2 Mini. But 6 extends that kind of support for devices from Blackmagic Design, AJA (more than just the Io Express), MOTU, Bluefish and a few more from Matrox. I love that little box because it is small, portable and even provides H.264 encoding acceleration with MAX technology. I've long been using the first-ever supported hardware, the Matrox MXO2 Mini. This has been a long time coming but now MC supports pretty much all third-party hardware using the new Avid Open I/O. Waveform display in the timeline feels much snappier as well.

 New Third-Party Hardware Options I didn't experience this at all with the several edits I've put through MC6, even when there were multiple, overlapping bins open. Working in previous versions, I'd often be stuck as MC paused and redrew the frame icons-for quite a long time if I had a lot of open bins. I'm most impressed with the better response and fewer screen redraws while working in Frame view in a bin. I've seen quite a few improvements already in this new architecture. In the long term it means Avid should be able to build features into Media Composer that wouldn't have otherwise been possible. The port to a 64-bit operating system in the short term means MC can address much more RAM. Most of MC6's signature new features are under the hood. There will a small adjustment period as users get used to the interface tweaks, but it should be minimal. This is an important distinction because it means that an experienced Media Composer editor will be up and working in no time. But on closer inspection, I discovered that what at first glance looks like a radical overhaul of the interface really isn't all that different from previous versions. ![]() Those interface windows were the most noticeably changed, and there are several other visible changes. The Audio Mixer, above, now resembles a mixer in the physical world more than the computer world, obviously coming from the ProTools universe. The timecode displays above the Source/Record monitors have been revamped to give them a new look. There's also some subtle background shading that makes it easier to distinguish between lines of text in the project window or a bin. Instead of the usual round red, yellow, green Macintosh window control buttons, they've been redesigned into red, yellow, green squares. The interface, seen above, is darker overall, though that can be changed in the settings, and the active window now has a brown or gray title bar (depending on your Interface settings). The interface has changed significantly in a few key areas that, in the Macintosh version of MC6, I noticed right away.Īt first glance it really looks quite different. ![]() If you already use Media Composer and haven't yet upgraded to version 6, you might be quite shocked when booting the application after install. Taken together, both versions have set the stage for very exciting things to come. ![]() Version 6 is of equal importance, both from a functionality standpoint and for the future of MC itself. I actually said nearly the same thing in my Media Composer 5 review from October of 2010, though it was version 5's addition of important new features prior to full 64-bit support that earned my praise back then.
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