Avid announced a major new release of its flagship Avid Media Composer 2020 video editing software. Designed to give storytellers at all levels the most powerful solution for more creative freedom and workflow flexibility, Media Composer 2020 includes a redesigned customizable user interface, a new Universal Media Engine, finishing and delivery tools, and support for Apple ProRes for Windows and Catalina, among many other enhancements.
“We’re very excited that the ongoing updates in Media Composer continue to reflect the user community’s extensive input, including their desire to customize their workflows to conform to the unique ways editors likes to work,” said Raymond Thompson, Director of Market Solutions—Broadcast and Media at Avid. “Building on last year’s complete reimagining of our flagship application, Media Composer 2020 gives aspiring pros, freelancers and post and broadcast facilities of all sizes the ability to work remotely and collaborate with other storytellers across the globe to develop the most compelling, high-quality content within a single end-to-end video editing solution.”
- More customizable user experience—With Media Composer 2020 users can tailor their workspace to exactly how they want to work. Improvements to the paneled UI dramatically increase ease of use and faster editing and mastering. A new Timeline Sequence Map increases efficiency by letting creators navigate their entire sequence without taking up the whole screen, while the Blank Panel unclutters the UI and stops panels from resizing.
- Finish and deliver with precision—Expanding on the editing and finishing capabilities introduced a year ago, Media Composer 2020 enables users to fine-tune color with greater precision and make more granular gain value adjustments when working in ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) spaces. Users can finish high-resolution and HDR projects with total color precision and interoperability, ensuring pristine picture quality throughout their workflow.
- Next Generation Avid Media Engine—Media Composer’s powerful Universal Media Engine enables users to accelerate their workflows by reducing the reliance on QuickTime to deliver better media importing, playback, editing and export performance. The media engine increases processing speed of hi-res HDR media and provides native support for a wider range of formats, including direct media access and Open EXR for over-the-top services such as Netflix. Media Composer 2020 enhances a user’s ability to easily create content for mobile video platforms and social media by providing 9×16 and 1:1 Mask Margins and FrameFlex framing pre-sets.
- Apple ProRes for Windows and Catalina Support—Like Mac users, Windows users can now create, edit, collaborate, and export ProRes media natively with encoding supported on Windows machines for media creation and exporting to .MOV export, MXF OP1a, and MXF OP-Atom workflows. Media creators also can use Media Composer on Apple’s latest macOS Catalina, a 64-bit OS that provides superior performance while leveraging the power of the new Mac Pro.
- Media Composer | Enterprise—Additionally, Media Composer | Enterprise expands its role-based customization capabilities to enable users to deploy or update site settings across an organization and deploy user settings independently to individuals or groups quickly without impacting any existing site settings. With more studios managing remote teams, Media Composer | Enterprise gives users more control over their productions.
