Media Composer


Media Composer is a non-linear editing software application developed by Avid Technology. First introduced in the late 1980s and widely adopted in the 1990s, it has become a prominent tool in the professional editing landscape, particularly in the film, television, and broadcast industries. Media Composer is used in a variety of production environments, including feature films, television shows, documentaries, and streaming service content.
Its interface, functionality, and workflow are designed to accommodate the complex requirements of professional editing, offering advanced tools for managing large volumes of footage and collaborative post-production work. Due to its widespread use in professional environments, it is often regarded as one of the industry standards for non-linear editing, particularly in Hollywood film production and broadcast television. The software's features and workflow are closely aligned with the needs of high-end post-production, and it continues to be a favored tool among professional editors.

History

Media Composer was first released in 1989 as Avid/1, an offline editing system designed for the Macintosh II. According to Eric Peters, one of the founders of Avid, most prototypes of 'The Avid' were originally built on Apollo workstations. At some point, Avid demonstrated one of their products at SIGGRAPH, a prominent conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Says Peters, "Some Apple people saw that demo at the show and said, 'Nice demo. Wrong platform!' It turned out they were evangelists for the then new Macintosh II. When we got back to our office after the show, there was a pile of FedEx packages on our doorstep. They were from Apple, and they contained two of their prototype Macintosh II machines. Also there were four large multisync monitors. Each computer was loaded with full memory, and a full complement of Apple software. That afternoon, a consultant knocked on our door saying, 'Hi. I'm being paid by Apple to come here and port your applications from Apollo to Macintosh.' He worked for us for several weeks, and actually taught us how to program the Macs."
At the time, Macs were not considered powerful enough for video editing. However, the Avid engineering team managed to achieve a data rate of 1,200 kilobytes per second, which enabled offline video editing on the Macintosh platform.
  • In August 1992, Avid introduced the Film Composer, the first non-linear digital editing system capable of capturing and editing natively at 24 frames per second. Steven Cohen was the first editor to use Film Composer on a major motion picture, Lost in Yonkers. The system has since been used by notable editors, including Walter Murch, who used it for The English Patient, the first digitally edited film to win an Academy Award for Best Editing.
  • 1994: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Avid Film Composer with a plaque for Science & Technical Achievement. Six persons were recognized in that effort: Bill Warner, Eric Peters, Joe Rice, Patrick O'Connor, Tom Ohanian, and Michael Phillips. For continued development, Avid received an Oscar representing the 1998 Scientific and Technical Award for the concept, design, and engineering of the Avid Film Composer system for motion picture editing. Today, Film Composer is no longer available, since all of its specific film editing features were implemented into Media Composer.
  • In July 2009, American Cinema Editors announced that the ACE Board of Directors had recognized Avid Media Composer software with the Board's first ACE Technical Excellence Award.
  • The December 2020 version added a new media engine called the Universal Media Engine. This was added to replace the existing AMA functionallity. Updates enabling this app to support macOS Catalina eliminated 32-bit QuickTime libraries, the legacy AMA engine relied heavily on those libraries. Likewise, the technology behind UME is more flexible and extensible than AMA, allowing Avid to support codecs and formats faster and with better performance than with AMA.
  • In December 2022, as part of a long-awaited request for better interoperability between Avid's own apps, Media Composer 2022.12 was released as the first version to be able to export Pro Tools Sessions. This is not a replacement for AAF export, but an additional export function, allowing for a more seamless export process from Media Composer to Pro Tools.
  • As of February 2024, Media Composer's ScriptSync option allows for the creation of automatic transcriptions of audio. This is a significant advancement for documentary and other genres of editorial that base storytelling on captured interviews.
  • As of June 2024, Media Composer has received significant improvements in its interoperability with Avid Pro Tools. This makes the workflows between the two much more robust.

    Features

Key features

  • Managed Media
  • Animatte
  • 3D Warp
  • Paint
  • Live Matte Key
  • Tracker / Stabiliser
  • Timewarps with motion estimation
  • SpectraMatte
  • Color Correction toolset
  • Stereoscopic editing abilities
  • Linked Clips : the ability to link to and edit with P2, XDCAM, R3D, QuickTime, AVCHD, and other raw media files directly without capture or consolidating/transcoding.
  • Mix and Match - put clips of any frame rate, compression, scan mode or video format on the same timeline
  • SmartTools - drag and drop style editing on timeline, can be selectively adjusted to the types of actions that the user wants to use when clicking on timeline.
  • RTAS -, support for realtime track-based audio plug-ins on the timeline.
  • 5.1 and 7.1 Surround Sound audio mixing, compatible with Pro Tools
  • Script-Based Editing - The ability to import the same scripts used on film shoots with the goal of dragging media colips to the scripts and syncing them up. This gives users the ability to click on a word and be taken directly to that portion of the video where the word is spoken.
  • ScriptSync AI - The paid option to speed up the syncing process in Script-Based Editing. As of 2024 it also includes the ability to create automatic transcriptions.
  • PhraseFind AI - The paid option to index all dialog phonetically, allowing text search of spoken words.

    Color correction

Avid Symphony has a strong history with broadcast users because much of its design and implementation came from the scopes, monitoring, and terminology that was familiar to the television industry's online mastering process. It has since grown to include Advanced/Secondary/Relational Color Correction and Universal HD Mastering.
Avid Symphony used to be a separate product from Media Composer, purchased as a standalone system for mastering. Beginning with Media Composer 7, Symphony became integrated within Media Composer as a paid option. In 2014 when Media Composer 8 was launched along with Avid's subscription licensing, the paid option included monthly and annual subscription licenses.

Software protection

The software used to be protected by means of "blesser" floppy, tied to the Nubus's TrueVista board, and later with USB dongles. As of version 3.5 the dongle is optional, and existing users may choose to use software activation or keep using their dongles, while new licenses are sold exclusively with software activation. The software ships with installers for both Mac and Windows and can physically be installed on several computers, allowing the user to move the software license between systems or platforms depending on the licensing method.

Licensing options

There are currently four versions of Media Composer.
Media Composer First is a freeware version that allows users to publish completed works directly to the internet.
Media Composer, Media Composer Ultimate, and Media Composer Enterprise are paid licenses, each one includes access to more features respectively.

User Interface

The Avid Media Composer user interface has seen many changes and upgrades over the years. Early versions focused on creating somewhat of a digital representation of the film editing process. The idea of organizing clips using bins was a familiar concept, so it was easy for editors to migrate from the flatbed editing world into Avid's digital interface. Also familiar was the Source/Record window which was seen in KEM and Steenbeck systems.
Through the 1990s, the interface saw practical upgrades which were made in collaboration between its designers who were also working editors, professional editors working in Hollywood, and at network television studios. The interface design remained decidedly plain and two-dimensional, focused more on clip management in the Timeline Window, than on UI colors and buttons.
Crossing Y2K and into the early 2000s with Media Composer 10, 11, and 12, the user interface saw significant advancements in not only project organization but also skeuomorphic design. It gave users incredible power in defining their own preferences in button shapes and shading, color coding, workspace architecture, and other intricate customizations. In May 2003 when Avid Adrenaline introduced HD editing and a resetting of the version numbering back to 1.0, work on improving the user interface continued.
With the release of Media Composer 5, the user interface saw a visual change. After extensive testing, the entire industry began discovering that skeuomorphic designs and other visual elements were causing drains on performance. For Media Composer, it was decided to scale-back the design and chase a "flatter" approach. Users who upgraded to this version were initially upset at the loss of customizability but were indeed satisfied with the noticeable reduction in interface lag. This design lasted through Media Composer and Symphony versions 5.0 through 2018.12.15.
By Media Composer 7, 8, and 2018, there was a consistent outcry from customers asking Avid to upgrade the overall interface. The consistent complaint was that it felt "old".
During 2018, Avid conducted extensive interviews, listening sessions, and ACA meetings with hundreds of users to absorb as much of their opinions as possible. Key outcomes from those sessions included needs for stronger organization abilities for bins, tools and other interface elements that could snap-to each other, a "paneled" interface that could mold itself to any screen size or configuration, and a means of toggling between the classic concept of Avid Workspaces in a newer, more accessible way. Another common complaint of the classic interface was its overall performance, which had laggy timeline behavior in comparison to other nonlinear edit systems. While the Media Composer team worked on the new user interface, the engineers and architecture team retooled the underlying code and video engine. In June 2019, Avid released Media Composer 2019.6 including a new user interface.
Users saw consistent upgrades to the user interface throughout 2019, 2020, and 2021. As of late 2021, the majority of Media Composer users were subscription-based, and using the modern user interface.
The March 2023 version included a new template for a User Profile called "Transitioning from Adobe Premiere Pro". This configures Media Composer's existing interface and settings to reconfigure itself in such a way to somewhat resemble what they may be accustomed to seeing in Premiere Pro. The purpose is to help Premiere Pro users to operate smoothly in Media Composer. Since Premiere Pro is also compatible for use on Avid's NEXIS shared storage, this new feature is also being used heavily by facilities that have editors and assistants who use both NLE apps.
The August 2023 version allowed customers who were hesitant to migrate from the comforts of the older 2018 version to finally do so. It included a new "Classic" User Profile, which takes many frequently-used settings from the 2018 interface and applies them to the modernized 2023 version. This way the interface was familiar, yet included all of the bug fixes and improvements made in the years since 2018. It also included new AI updates for the classic ScriptSync and PhraseFind options. The new ScriptSync AI and PhraseFind AI offered auto-transcription capabilities, faster workflows, and much more in-depth language support.