Nonlinear editing: everyone is cutting on NLEs these days, but there are more choices than ever. These pros talk about what systems work for them and why - Video

Post, August, 2003 by Christine Bunish

While every post house today has at least one nonlinear editing system at its core, few offer the choice that Flashcut Editing has in its Toronto facility. The spot-cutter's eight editors may select from two Lightworks Touch systems, a new Avid Adrenaline and Avid Media Composers, Apple's Final Cut Pro and Discreet's Smoke and Flint. "We find editors have different working styles and prefer certain machines," explains senior partner Bob Kennedy.

Flashcut (www.flashcut.com) has been a beta tester for Lightworks for years and Kennedy participated in beta testing Touch. "It's quite a nice piece of software, much faster than previous models and with more features. Lightworks has really listened to user input."

The biggest improvement in Touch, according to Kennedy, is integrated effects. "It's the area Lightworks was always weak in," he notes. "Now Lightworks has adopted a plug-in architecture and we use Boris, which works seamlessly. In the commercial market, effects at the rough cut stage are pretty much standard. With Touch we can now integrate major applications."

Kennedy says Touch and the other Lightworks systems are skillful at dealing with large volumes of footage. This was the case with a tourism campaign, edited by partner Norm Odell, which featured montages compiled from 60 source tapes. "Touch is really good when you need to access a lot of material and you're forming spots from masses of footage," Kennedy points out.

Touch is also a good choice for dialogue spots, he says, because it "can handle very complex audio. It edits very fast with fewer keystrokes than other products." Kennedy would like to see Touch gain even more audio capabilities "in terms of EQ and simple effects, I think they're looking at audio plug-in architecture to accommodate this."

He believes HD capabilities are also "down the road" for Touch but "for commercials, especially in Canada, ND is not a big factor."

Flashcut's array of NLEs run on various OS. Lightworks Touch runs on Windows 2000, Adrenaline on Windows XP was just delivered, one FCP station is still waiting for an OS X driver and the SGI platforms for Smoke and Flint are IRIX systems. "We have a full-time staff technician who spends about 60 percent of his time on computer issues," says Kennedy. "The downside of systems that are not proprietary is that when you deal with several vendors the weakest link in the chain can take everything down with it."

DOC EDITING, COMPOSITING

Media 100 systems do double duty in San Francisco for Dan Geller and partner Dayna Goldfine. One PC-based Media 100 844/X and a trio of Mac-based 100i stations serve both Storyline Productions (www.storylineproductions.com), a corporate media creation company, and Geller/Goldfine Productions (www.gellergoldfine.com), a documentary production company.

"Media 100 has been the core and workhorse for all we do since the first product was released in 1993," Geller reports. "For the first five years, Media 100 had a clear advantage in quality and price. Since then they've sometimes been ahead of the pack, in the middle or lagging behind. But they jump back to the head of the pack when they do something wonderful."

Geller is referring to Media 100's 844/X, which he acquired last January. "It allows us in one application to do nonlinear editing and serious effects compositing in realtime at a fraction of the cost of big effects/compositing boxes," he explains.

Geller/Goldfine's doc on the Ballets Russes (from 1929 to 1962) has "wonderful, rich effects that look organic to the period, not like broadcast TV graphics," Geller notes. "We've been cutting for the past 18 months on 100i and are now moving sequences to 844/X and integrating effects. We're taking old B&W stills from the Ballets' print programs, scanning them into 844/X and creating effects introducing movement, color and focus for a feeling of old optical effects with a contemporary spin." Geller and Goldfine are editing the doc with Nathaniel Dorsky and Gary Weimberg.

Upgrading operating systems hasn't been an issue for Geller. "For the most recent upgrade to Media 100i, users need to switch to Mac OS X, although one could stay with OS 9 and continue to work with a mature product. On the PC side, we went from Windows 2000 to XP painlessly. When you get smoother plug 'n' play, a more stable OS and a better set of drivers, upgrading is no problem."

CHROME AT ZERO GRAVITY

Columbia, SC's Zero Gravity Project (ZGP), which produces longform industrial and government programming as well as local and regional commercials and PSAs, boasts two Liquid Purple 5.0s, a Liquid Silver and a new Liquid Chrome from Pinnacle.

"The Liquid line-up shares the same sleek and intuitive interface, but the format capture and output are different from product to product," says ZGP president Keith Bogart. "We started with Liquid Silver, then bought Purples for our laptops for high-quality editing with our clients on location. For more polish we move the project files to Silver and Chrome where we recapture footage at a higher resolution and continue editing."