My own Avid Media Composer... finally!

For a lot of us editors- and I'm not going to call us 'offline' we're editors - the ultimate editing machine is definitely an Avid. And when we say 'an Avid' we mostly mean a Media Composer. Not some watered down XPress or XPressDV or something like that. Though in the past 2-3 years the low-end Avids like XPress and XPRessDV have gotten pretty close to Media Composers in features.

But still a full-blown Avid Media Composer has always been something that someone else owned and we rented. At anything between Rs. 20-30 lakhs (Rupees 2-3 million), it has definitely been out of reach for most. I mean, you can get a rather good flat at Andheri for that kind of money. Or buy two luxury cars even.

So if any of us ever owned an editing system it usually was an FCP on a PowerBook or maybe a pirated copy of XPress on a cheap PC laptop. I must say though, that almost all the editors who I've seen get a PC and a pirated Avid XPress didn't eventually do much editing on it. The FCP-PowerBook people fared slightly better.

But now, finally many of us can actually afford our very own Media Composer. At NAB last month Avid announced that the software-only version of Avid Media Composer would soon be available for US$ 5,000 (About Rs. 2.5 lakhs with some taxes). Sounds like a lot of money still, but hey, it is a Media Composer. No excuses. It can do DV, all resolutions to 1:1, multi-track, multi-cam, film, anything a Media Composer can.

To be able to capture from Beta/Digi, you can buy the new Avid Mojo SDI for US$ 2,700 (About Rs. 1.8 lakhs with some duties and taxes). You'll need some fast storage for that, though. Mojo SDI has SDI, component analog, composite, S-video, AES and analog audio, all in and out.

So any of us can now finally own an Avid Media Composer. For about 2.5+1.8 lakhs=Rs 4.3 lakhs plus the cost of a good Mac or PC and some fast storage. A real Media Composer, a brand new one, that can open any old project even open old Meridien media.

And a dream system would be, a new Apple Mac G5 Quad, Avid Media Composer Software, Avid Mojo SDI, and some fast storage and a good monitor and speakers. Under Rs 8 lakhs. Add a bit more and maybe you can even run FCP on it. Of course you can get a PC instead of a Mac, but then you can't run FCP on a PC.

And by the way, this Avid Media Composer ships for PC as well as Mac in the same box. You can use either PC or Mac. No need to commit yourself to Mac or PC. Even have both and run it on either, one at a time.

One slight snafu is that this Media Composer will not run on the newest Intel Macs - The MacBook Pro, the iMac , or the MacMini. But Avid will be out with a Universal Binary version of Avid Media Composer in a few months, maybe end of the year.

And then, if the new Intel desktop Macs are available who knows... you can even get a Mac that runs Avid Media Composer, and FCP on a Mac partition and also boots in Windows in another partition so you can run Avid Media Composer, and other PC apps on the Windows partition, even play PC-only games. Mac and PC, Avid and FCP in one box. Now how about that?