Media Composer Gets a Live Timeline and 16K Support | No Film School

The venerable editing platform Media Composer has been aggressively improving this year, especially with pricing. The new price point of fully fledged Media Composer is $20/month, and Media Composer Ultimate (which comes with the Symphony color correction tools, Phrase Find and Script Sync all in one package is $50/month. Thus, Avid has positioned Media Composer not just to remain competitive with the high-end clients who love it, but also with independent filmmakers and students who want to take advantage of its robust stability and great shared editing platforms.

With the newest release, 2018.7, out this week, Avid has also added a feature that many have been clamoring for: the live timeline. What is a live timeline, you might ask? Well, if you are a Final Cut Pro or Premiere user, you might have noticed that for many tasks you can leave the timeline playback running and still, for instance, add a mark. Previously, this wasn't possible in Media Composer. Adding a mark would stop playback. Not the end of the world—you can just hit spacebar to restart playback—but kind of annoying. Especially if, for instance, you have a group of clients in the room, and the mark is just to remind you of something but not something everyone needs to know about. Maybe it was "double check that we have the right version of that shot," the kind of internal mark that editors make all the time but aren't worth stopping playback. With the new live timeline from Media Composer, that feature has come to Avid.

What else can you do with the live timeline? Now, while playing, you can open the application menus, zoom in and out of the playing timeline, add bins and markers, check tool tips, add columns to a bin, and best of all switch applications, which should allow you to click over to another app (perhaps a text edit app with a list of notes) while the timeline keeps running. Switching applications used to be completely taboo in post, but now it is almost a requirement to switch over to a Google sheet or a chat app to check against a list of notes, or to see if your post supervisor has questions. This feature alone will be a big reason for Media Composer users to upgrade.

Screen_shot_2018-07-18_at_9

Along with live timeline, the other big feature is support for resolutions up to 16K 120p. This is very forward thinking on Media Composer's part, but honestly, there isn't a ton of footage in that format yet, and even if there was, there aren't going to be a lot of systems capable of playing it. But it's nice to know it will be available when we get there.

Media Composer 2018.7 is available now. Check out the Avid blog for more.

Tech Specs

16K, 120P projects
Live Timeline
Export AMA with missing media
Resize Composer Window
BXF media format support

media compsoer media composer avid

What's the Hype With 'Interstellar' Revisiting Cinemas After a Decade in 70mm IMAX?

Here's Why You Need to Revisit 'Interstellar' in 70mm IMAX

Celebrate the love and hope at the center of Nolan's space epic in the format it was meant to be seen.

If we know anything about Christopher Nolan, he likes to go big. Nolan started with smaller-scale stories (as many of us do) with early noir adjacent works like Following, Memento, and Insomnia, then started going and staying big with his illusionist drama The Prestige. Since then, the scale has been various degrees of massive, with the biggest scope in his time-and-space sprawling epic, Interstellar.

While Interstellarmight not be everyone's favorite Nolan outing, there's no denying it's an impressive feat of filmmaking and his most emotional—if watching Matthew McConaughey's Cooper desperately try to reach his family through quantum space-time doesn't make you cry at least a little bit, what's going on, dude?

With Interstellar'sIMAX release, it's a great time to shed some tears in a public setting in one of the most prestigious film formats around. As we mentioned in our film gauge piece, Nolan loves shooting on film and utilizes 65mm intentionally to provoke a tone of massive scale. In that regard, Interstellar was made for 70mm IMAX. That goes without saying, dawg. That being said, other factors make Interstellar a perfect movie to revisit in theaters while you can.

Let's break down the release further below.

Keep ReadingShow less

Popular

Latest