John Ferrick is feeling promiscuous and wants to know why he can’t always have his way...
Something that has become increasingly apparent is that we, as editors, are ever more promiscuous. In the past, you’d choose your editing software and hardware and only make a change when it came time to consider the latest upgrade. Today, though, I find that I want and need to have a variety of editing software available, each offering some subtle (or major) advantage at a particular stage of the on-going project.
Like many users of Pinnacle Studio 8, I have been a serial-victim of the program’s instability when creating DVDs. But, when the pressure is on, and what’s needed is a quick and dirty cut-and-assemble with titles, Studio remains hard to beat.
Trouble is, if I knock out a quick project in Studio, and then want to do something really fancy with it, I’m stuck. The original footage - and the project’s output - can be used in other software, most times, but the Pinnacle project itself can’t be opened in a more capable program.
What I want are programs that don’t mind me doing it with other programs. I want a way for projects from one program to be usable in others. Sometimes I need the audio abilities of Sony Vegas. Vegas doesn’t frown, no matter what media format I ask it to import. But there’s no point asking it to open another program’s project - it looks me in the eye, and just say, No way!
In other situations I want to use Pinnacle Studio’s big brother, Edition, and since they’re from the same family, one might assume there’d be a small chance that projects could be shared across the two. But, of course, they can’t be. Worse, on many occasions importing Studio-generated AVIs into Edition has been problematic. [Update 1 – Liquid Edition 6, launched towards the end of 2004, is able to import projects from Studio 9.3.5 or higher, but only brings in very basic project elements]
When the special abilities of Adobe After Effects are needed, you can forget about doing anything with a project started with Studio. You might have some luck bringing in elements of an Adobe Premiere project but, still, the safest way is simply to import the AVI that Premiere produced.
I don’t often turn to Ulead’s Media Studio - but that’s just historical - and so far haven’t had the chance to work with Avid’s lower-priced software. And nor have I worked with Canopus’s Edius, which until the launch of V2, only worked with the company’s own hardware. Now, like all of the programs mentioned, Edius is hardware-independent, but also like them, it has no effective common project-interchange ability. Clearly there is an opportunity here for one of the majors to define and publish a standard project format.
Interestingly Digidesign (the audio division of Avid) has done just that with Pro Tools. It would certainly make sense to have a big company such as Avid, Pinnacle or Sony (the new owner of Vegas) define such a standard for video that the rest of the industry adopts - by choice or necessity. Perhaps some enterprising young start-up will see this opportunity and at least develop a project converter.
Each year, I become ever more convinced that having hardware that’s locked to specific software (and vice-versa) is a short-sighted strategy more akin to a trap. I was a big fan of the Canopus’s unflappable Raptor card in the early days, and do appreciate the stability of more recent Canopus systems, but times have changed.
The days of having a specially-configured system all set up and tuned for one specific editing program are in the final stages of obsolescence. Yes, you can have a locked card and still run the other editing programs but that is simply putting off the inevitable.
Avid, with its optional Mojo real-time box is showing the way forward, as is Pinnacle, with an optional (though, annoyingly, specific) graphic card for Edition. Pinnacle could do itself a lot of favours simply by enabling support in Edition for other accelerated graphics cards. [Update 2 – With Liquid Edition 6 Pro, Pinnacle has abandoned the combi card. LE6 Pro relies on the PC’s CPU and graphics card to do all the work – the supplied breakout box contains no acceleration hardware]
