This is a detailed engineering summary of the differences between these two applications. This will be updated as the technology always changes.
Media Composer:
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Industry standard Realtime Project and Bin sharing that can be utilized on short form or longer form projects.
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Projects have some forward capability with versioning as Avid Bins (.avb) are modular and can be opened from older to newer projects.
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Grouped clips and multicam workflows are easy to manage on Avid.
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Older versions of software can be used to workaround critical bugs.
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Nexis shared storage is the most stable, fully supported and optimized storage for Avid workflows.
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Now fully integrated with Pro Tools so sessions can be passed directly into Pro Tools Projects from Avid.
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Mature workflow to finish in Resolve.
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No limit on project size that I have seen.
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Expensive to license per seat and requires Nexis warranty coverage for F series.
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Supports Project Sharing/Bin locking over third party NAS storage but no support from Avid.
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24/7 worldwide support with access to top engineering resources. Local support in Burbank.
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Just started third party html panel support so Avid is slowly opening the platform, but they tend to have a slower response in keeping up with the technological changes on the Mac side.
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Avid is currently much more stable on Windows than Mac.
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Powerful AI tools but require an investment in Media Central.
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SRT is fully integrated for off-prem, over the shoulder remote review in Teams.
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Script Sync and Phrase Find integration.
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Continued Title Tool issues.
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Best Broadcast ingest workflow in the world.
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No built-in transcoding tools.
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Avid Edit On Demand allows for quickly spinning up ephemeral projects and storage.
Adobe Premiere:
- Two Options: Team Projects/Shared Projects & Productions
- Team Projects – more for collaborating on many small projects as opposed to a larger, longer form projects. Requires Teams an Enterprise subscription and the projects reside in the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem.
- Shared projects (Non-Cloud) can be local without using the Adobe Cloud but this is the traditional manual project management that has been utilized in the past. It is cumbersome and can result in projects getting accidentally overwritten but it can be effective if everyone adheres to the manual workflow requirements.
- Productions are a collection of Adobe Projects that work by automatically locking the project that is opened on a shared volume by one editor so only that one editor has the write permissions to that project. Cross-Project Referencing is just a fancy term for copying a sequence in a read only project into the project that an editor has access to and is currently working on within the Projects ecosystem. Projects has a nice panel for doing this operation.
- All of this just to say that Project Sharing in Adobe is not nearly as seamless as Avid and requires more versioning management, but it is possible.
- Adobe is a cheaper option than Avid per seat.
- Excellent workflow and integration with other Adobe apps.
- Open Ecosystem that allows for quick, outside innovation of tools and solutions.
- Better third-party panel support within the application for tools and plugins aka quick to respond with supporting newer camera codecs
- If there is a critical bug, you must wait for it to be fixed and addressed.
- No support for backward Project compatibility or support for earlier versions. Everything must come forward to the latest if possible and you must run the latest build of Premiere as you cannot go backwards.
- No direct support unless you get Adobe to come onsite. Run the latest and you are on your own with fellow users/supporters. You will spend a lot of time on Reddit. You will need a dev ops environment to test build before deploying.
- OMF only workflow to Pro Tools. OMF is the old Avid format for project interexchange and has a 2GB limit amongst other 32-bit limitations that make it very difficult to export.
- Is certified and supported by Avid to be used with Nexis and can be used with an array of third-party storage solutions.
- AI Tools do not require the purchase of an expensive ecosystem to take advantage of the best options i.e. using AI to locate b roll and making edit suggestions or basic assembly.
- Media Encoder is included for transcoding and supporting proxy workflows.
- Existing “camera to cloud” workflow with FrameIO