Coming soon: New Avid MC interface (interview at NAB2019)
By Jim Bask
Hi everyone. I know you’re curious about the new Media Composer being released soon. Many of you saw it has a new “paneled” user interface, a new color palette and other features. Obviously everyone’s worried how thoughtful it will be towards their needs. What will this new design do to projects? To workflows? Can those colors be muted?!? (Haha.)
Not to worry. Hopefully this video will put a lot of your worries to ease. Recently at NAB’19, I got the opportunity to record a fun, “fact or fiction” style interview with the head Product Designer for MC.
In addition, I’m lucky to be part of the many professional editors out there who are on the BETA testing team. We are pro editors volunteering for this, while we’re working on docs, on network TV shows, on commercials, on news, on Netflix deliveries… Avid has certainly reached out to a diverse group. I can tell you the process is great. For months, we’ve been getting new versions to test constantly. Sometimes weekly or less. We report back what seems to be working and what isn’t. Then Avid’s whole MC team of engineers and app designers review the feedback and triage the issue(s). We get the next version to test, and so on. Each new BETA version has been better and better. Frankly I’ve been amazed how quickly everything is able to be implemented.
There are a LOT of people involved, helping Avid get this one right. Also there have been 3 constant themes in this process:
1) None of us (neither Avid’s staff nor us editors) want this to be like the initial launch of FCPX. Everyone is working hard to make this great, right away. And each release after it will include more and more features, based on the overall feedback from the Avid Community.
2) If users are too busy right now to play around with a new user interface, that’s fine. You won’t be left in the dust. Avid is intentionally going to keep development going on the December (2018.12) version, until users get a chance to test the 2019 version. So for a while, there will be TWO versions of MC considered “new and current” – 2018.12.x and 2019.x.
3) Everyone who uses MC has been asking for YEARS for a redesign. This is it. Code-wise, there will be no physical way to “shut off” the new interface, however if users wish, they will indeed be able to go through and make everything look very similar to the old way… and then they can slowly integrate one new interface idea at a time. (This is what I did on one of the BETA versions and it worked great.) When it comes out, IT IS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT. So the same way you sit down in a new car and have to get used to it, set aside time for yourself. But I promise, you’ll only need 20-30 minutes inside of the interface before you get comfortable. After that you can start to create Workspaces for your old ways and your new ones.
They not only brought our beloved app into this century, but they’ve rewritten lots of that decades-old code underneath it. As a result: – The timeline interactions are SO fast now. – The playback engine is now SO much more responsive to interface clicks. – You can even change things like the timeline track colors using the OS’s own color picker!!! I’ve been sitting here, using my 25-year muscle memory, and just flying… amazed at how fast I’m working. I hope you find the same.