Avid Media Composer: Redesigned modern UI with new features and more performance
By Adam Noyes
The Avid Customer Association’s annual Connect gathering kicked off with an exciting reveal of Media Composer 2019. More than just an upgrade, this is Media Composer reimagined to inspire creative storytellers at every level, from beginning students to top-echelon experienced editors.
For both new and current users, there is a lot to discover. This new version of Media Composer has a redesigned modern look and feel to enhance the user experience, as well as more power under the hood to handle the demands of modern media formats. Whether you’re an independent editor or part of a large-scale production team, these new features and tools will help you work faster and more efficiently, so you can readily meet deadlines without sacrificing artistry.
Below are major areas of what’s new that users can look forward to in Media Composer 2019:
Redesigned UI and a new user experience
The Media Composer team thought long and hard about how create a better user experience. Their goal was to create something that would be intuitive, easy to use and easier to learn, look clean and modern, and let editors focus on their creative task without needless clutter or distraction. The software also had to be flexible enough to adapt different needs for different users. All this while maintaining what our customers know and love best about the software – no small feat! We believe they succeeded:
These are just a few highlights of the new Media Composer 2019 interface and design:
Clean, modern design with a new look
This is Media Composer like you’ve never seen it before. Every window, menu and panel has been carefully rethought and reimagined to be more beautiful, more intuitive and more inspirational for your creativity. We’ve added new light and dark skins for any operating system, support for high DPI monitors, and added an expanded 32-color palette for labeling and organizing clips in your timeline. The new Media Composer 2019 will look amazing on any screen.
Task–oriented workspaces
One click opens a workspace with the right tools for the task at hand, whether that’s editing, color, audio, or effects. See what you need, hide what you don’t, to streamline your workflow. Or, if you prefer, customize the workspace with exactly the tools you want.
Simplify the complexity with a new panel interface
Too many floating windows can cover up tools, content, and key information. Media Composer 2019 solves that with a paneled UI with panes that change size automatically when you resize other panels. Use the default layout for a particular task, drag and drop to rearrange panes to your preference, and add or remove panels as needed. For more flexibility, one or all of the panes can pop out to float over the paneled UI. For current users who have their floating windows just the way they want them, Media Composer will remember their size and position upon relaunch.
Find media faster with new bin mapping and navigation
When a bin fills up with clips, it’s too easy to waste time finding what you need. A bin map shows users which section of the bin they’re viewing, not unlike a world map in a video game. Specific clips are easier to locate, and users retain the value of their bin organization. Adaptive bin frames adjust automatically to prevent clip names from overlapping.
Along with much, much more…
Finish & Deliver
We’ve talked to many customers and understand some very important current and future challenges for production companies. The growth of the everchanging formats, bit depth and resolutions as well as the different industry standards around delivery requirements causes extra costs in the tools along with deficiencies in operational efficiencies. In the Media Composer 2019 there are number of new capabilities that will give production companies as well as individual freelancers the tools they need to finish and deliver complex projects on time without sacrificing quality.
The new 32-bit full float color pipeline allows you to work in high-res HDR formats from start to finish. We know that exporting to external color grading and finishing applications is time-consuming and expensive, and isn’t needed on every project. Now you can edit, finish, and package productions entirely within Media Composer when appropriate.
For projects and workflows that need to make the roundtrip to other applications for grading, effects and finishing the new color pipeline and standards support for ensures pristine quality, accuracy and precision, so you can be confident you won’t lose any color data coming or going. We’ve also added support for finishing formats like OpenEXR to continue to improve interoperability and speed up roundtrip workflows.
This new release is also the industry’s first video editor to join the ACES Logo Program under the new Editorial Finishing category. Adopting an ACES-compatible color workflow, allows you to work more efficiently, maintain consistent color-accuracy throughout your project, and finish faster. We’ve also expanded Media Composer’s capability to ingest, edit, grade, and render DNxUncompressed codec with more bitrates.
Finally, we’ve aligned with the latest industry standards for delivery and packaging. With the Symphony option (included in most licensing options) you can now create SMPTE Standard 2067-21 IMF packages and deliver them directly out of Media Composer to the OTT provider of your choice.
Next-gen Avid Media Engine
We’ve been doing a lot of work under the hood of Media Composer as well. If editing software isn’t powerful and efficient, it will slow down production with non-creative tasks and tie up your computer’s resources when they should be helping the editor stay focused on telling the story. That’s why over the last year we’ve implemented next-generation features like background rendering and transcoding and live timelines with edit-during-playback. These were major improvements to how Media Composer handles media and they succeeded in removing processing inefficiencies and waste to allow editors to stay in their creative flow.
Now, with this release we are upping the ante again with a few more major improvements to the next-gen Avid Media Engine. First, we’ve added native support for OP–1a wrapped media, a common industry media file format. Now Media Composer editors can not only ingest OP–1a footage directly into their bins and timelines without needing waiting or re-wrapping files, they can create new OP-1a media inside their projects and consolidate, transcode, mixdown and distribute it for better performance, faster interoperability and turnaround.
We are also introducing Media Composer | Distributed Processing, a new add-on option for both Media Composer | Ultimate and Media Composer | Enterprise. Distributed Processing goes beyond background rendering and transcoding and allows users to completely offload these processor-intensive tasks to other machines, either idle or dedicated, that are on their network. This saves Creatives even more time and compute resources, and it’s scalable.
By moving GPU- or CPU-intensive jobs like rendering off the computer you’re working on, you and your team can stay focused on the project at hand (or just surf the web) without any slowdowns. When the job is done users receive a notification that files are ready, and they can link to their new material immediately. Additionally, a render or transcoding process can be split among multiple clients or servers and scaled for even greater efficiency. In practical terms, that means a 30-minute job could be split among three machines to become a 10-minute job. Older or out-of-use computers and servers retain value when put to work as a rendering and transcoding farm.
A Customizable Toolset for Any Role in Your Organization
Meet the newest member of the Media Composer family: Media Composer | Enterprise. For the first time ever, you can adapt all of Media Composer’s capabilities for differet roles in your organization. Enterprise will give facilities that have multiple users performing multiple roles the ability to customize the tools and the user interface for each different type of user – whether they are an assistant, or logger, craft editor, sound editor, director, producer, or any other role. Each user gets the tools they need, and only what they need.
Media Composer | Enterprise will help facilities and organizations reduce overhead and minimize costly mistakes. For new and inexperienced users, it’s easy to limit access to tools, functions, and media making Media Composer easier use and faster to learn — reducing training time and costs. Education facilities can change the available tool set by course level or scope, from editing and effects design, to color correction and audio production. For pros in news, sports and post-production facilities, Media Composer | Enterprise makes it easier to collaborate and bridge workflows among editors, journalists, and other contributors. Media, projects, and bins can be shared with collaborators on- or offsite.
Lastly, Enterprise also gives sensitive productions and premium content another level of protection and security. Whether by accident or malicious intent, valuable content can be lost, leaked or erased. By preventing newer users from accessing certain functions, unauthorized projects, media bins, or preventing operations like exporting or changing ingestion and encoding settings, Media Composer | Enterprise can greatly reduces the risks of media theft, loss or destruction in your organization or facility.
With its incredible new features, innovative design, and deep, powerful improvements Media Composer 2019 has been reimagined to make editing, finishing and delivering more intuitive, more interactive and more efficient. For Makers.