Avid Liquid Pro And Designing.. - what is the best Os

i didnt know where to put this topic so you can relocat it ... Does any one here knows how to deal with Avid luquid pro .... i use XP windows since ever and havent tried any other yet ... and iam asking coz some of my friends advise me to run it on mac and Adobe too. what is special about mac to make Designing and movies on mac..?? ***re-edit my Q: -joe

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First off there is iMovie HD that comes with a Mac or you buy with iLife for $80 if you have an out of date system. The major limitation with iMovie was the limit of only two sound tracks. However, with intergration with Garageband (also part of iLife) that limitation isn't as bad as it used to be. Now that's just the freebe. Frankly it's powerful enough for some of the video biography work I do where I don't need to do compositing or anything fancy.

The kicker is Final Cut Express (for DV users) and Final Cut Pro (DV & Film). While FCP is not Avid, it's price point and user interface is perfect for those of us in the small/medium production side of the house and can't afford to drop $100k for an avid system. Also there is Apple Shake (which is the application I get paid the most to use). Shake is industry standard for compositing (okay some of the Discreet folks will say combustion but to each their own). When I bought shake, it was $3000. Now it is only $500 and works on Intel/PPC macs.

A year ago I upgraded my main tower to a Quad Core Powermac (2x2x2.5Ghz = 10Ghz total power) with 8GB of Ram for about $8000 with the expensive video card and fibre channel card to connect to my 1TB storage system (Apple Xserve RAID). FCP 4.5HD was $1000 for the suite coupled with Soundtrack Pro and DVD Studio Pro. DVD Studio Pro is great and even works with both my Blu-Ray and HD-DVD burners to burn HD content.

You add it up and $8000 for the Machine ($2000 for the 23" HD Cinema display I bought in 2002 and $699 for the 17" flat panel secondary display which I already had too) $1000 for FCP, $500 for Shake and $6000 for the RAID system is pretty cheap for a complete production set up. (Blu-Ray burner was $750 and the external Firewire HD-DVD burner was $1200)

I just purchased a Sony FX-1 HDV Camera for $3800 (before I was just doing editing and post production work for people) so I can do a few weddings and shoot HD video memories of people and I now have a complete HD set up for about $22,000.

On post production, I get paid between $450 - $1000 PER SHOT. Video Biographies I make about $4500 each so I earn it back. If I do any 3D animation work, that's between $650 - $15000 per job.

 

 

 

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Right now in "the industry" they use Avid and Final cut. Final cut is becoming more mainstream in the professional world and more and more movies are being cut with Final Cut over Avid. One example, the current production of Alien versus Predator 2 is being cut on Final Cut pro. There's one yet to be released by David Fincher called Zodiac (though I heard the title was changed to Chronicles). I also know of a lot of professionals that use Adobe premiere. I use adobe premiere myself, and I don't need anything more.

One really cool thing about final cut, though, is the new multicam edit feature. It's really hard to describe, but it's really really cool to play with. Google it to learn more if you're interested.

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Adobe Premiere is the FCP rough equivlant on the Windows platform. I started with Adobe Premiere 5 then Premiere 6 was god aweful with crashes and we started using FCP 3 and never looked back.

Cold Moutain was another hollywood film cut on FCP and FCP is the industry standard for field journalists as well. Those tstorys from the front lines of war are often edited with FCP.

I'll be upgrading to FCP 5 when I get a MacBook Pro this fall. Until then 4.5/HD does everything I need.

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Yup. My first short video I ever did was cut on Final Cut pro. Since then, I only use a PC in my house, I discovered Premiere. It's very very similar to FCP, so I've been using that to cut anything I do. For a while I played with Sony's Vegas. It was alright, but I still prefer the FCP/Adobe premiere interface. Maybe it's just because that's what I started off with.

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Yep ... maybe it works with you guys but i have tried Adobe Premier 7 and it didnt give me the performence that i need ... at least i needed a program that at least can handel 4 Canon XL H* series.
but for Final Cut i havent tired it yet ... now i have Avid liquid Pro 7.1 and the type of vedio i do require at least 18-25 GB for each 1hour of recording.
and still till now have some unexpected problems with avid.
ex.
the picons of the media wont appear even the option is turned on but it only show the picons in the start and the end of the media
i once did it using the same damn option and it did showed the whole media picons but when i reopned it again it showed me the picons in the start and the end of the media and that what confuse me alot..

If any1 have any idea or any thought that might help. i would be glad.
thanks in advance

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I deal with Sony FX-1, FX-3, and 2 HC1 and editing HDV and I don't have a problem. Average file sizes I work with range from 5GB to 120GB depending whether it is a 30 second commerical or a 2 hour long documentry. FCP seems to work great and with very few hiccups. Combined with SHake for compositig and post needs and it becomes an extremely power tool for $10,000 in software and hardware.

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