Posted by Teeafit on 09/07/05 09:43

Well, let's put it this way - even as I type this, my new Liquid
Edition Pro 6 system is warming up the other side of the office.
Having worked with Premiere when I first had my own NLE, I moved to
Edition 4 having seen a very interesting demo of its Fast predecessor -
what impressed me was the background rendering, compared with Premiere,
where (in those days at least) you had to wait what SEEMED like hours
to be able to view even a simple transition.

I'd also had experience with Sony ES7 - don't go there! NLEs need to
be designed by experienced editors, not corporate software geeks!

Admittedly my first experience with Edition (v4) was not happy due to
some unidentified glitch in the capture card. Pinnacle UK started to
be helpful, and then suddenly went quiet on me. After 6-8 frustrating
months I contacted the CEO of Pinnacle USA - within days my machine was
collected and sent to a UK retailer for attention. Unfortunately (from
their point of view, but not mine) we were now into v5, and my machine
wasn't man enough to run it. As a result I received a free hardware
upgrade as well as a software one, which was appreciated.

It's probably true of any NLE that you quickly push it to the max and
outstrip its capacity. Even after an upgrade to v5.5 I was beginning
to find it got indigestion if I asked it to work on (f'rinstance) a
50-minute programme with much colour-corrected footage, CSO 'green
screen' sections, and (most important) rostruming around large still
files. The cure is to give the machine (and your own eyes and wrists)
a break by re-booting while you go and get a coffee. At the end of a
long session, I also deleted all the render files and let them rebuild
ready for the next day.

I'm particularly attracted to v6 because of the multi-camera
facilities. It's also HD-ready - I don't have any plans yet to go down
that route, but inevitably I will need to do so before long. But
equally inevitably my old machine was too elderly (3 years??) to be
expandable, so I've invested in a complete new machine, with the
fastest processor, largest storage and most RAM that I could afford.
The old machine will be passed on to a youngster starting in the
business.

The new machine arrived 3 days ago, and I started loading footage into
it yesterday. I've not started to edit an actual timeline yet, but it
seems to be very fast. Will I be pleased with my purchase? I very
much hope so. When the Avid takeover (?) first became news, I was a
bit wary of upgrading to another Pinnacle product, but I visited trade
exhibitions and looked at the opposition before deciding. EVERY NLE
has its good and bad points, and I decided that I would rather stick
with the software that I was familiar with. There were also financial
considerations, such as Avid's breakout box costing almost as much as a
new computer. I was also assured by a retailer who I respect that he
was confident that Avid wouldn't turn its back on the large and loyal
Pinnacle customer base, and that even if Edition v8 (apparently v7 is
already in Beta) becomes an Avid product in a Pinnacle shell, it would
still be an easy transfer for established users.

You get what you pay for, but I've had footage edited on my v5.5 up on
screen at a Royal Television Society awards presentation alongside
sequences produced at a professional broadcast studio, and you can't
tell the difference. I'm looking forward to getting to grips with
v6... so I'll stop typing and get on with it!

GRAEME ALDOUS
Yorkshire

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