The battle among editing manufacturers for the hearts and minds of filmmakers is in full swing.

Avid Technology, long the standard-bearer of digital nonlinear editing systems, has seen its market dominance challenged recently, as editors and independent filmmakers have begun touting the virtues of editing software solutions, particularly Apple Final Cut Pro, initially targeted at hobbyists and event videographers.

Following a couple of years of favorable word of mouth, the high point for Apple came early this June when Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Traffic, Erin Brockovich) extolled the benefits of FCP in finishing his latest feature, Full Frontal.

‘This is a real filmmaker building real films with a $1,500 product,’ says Willy Powell, strategic development manager at Apple Canada in Markham, ON.

Indeed, thanks to ever-quickening desktop processing times and software advancements, such programs are now in a position to challenge the high-end hardware such as Avid Symphony for market share.

Of course, Avid has recognized this and not been idle.

The Tewksbury, MA.-based company was quick to counter FCP with the introduction of its own software-based editing system, Xpress DV for Windows. Avid hopes to solidify its place as the leading choice for both the high and low ends with the June 26 launch of its dual Mac/Windows-based software package, Xpress DV 3.5.

‘We think that [Mac users] looking for alternative solutions will find this very exciting for several reasons,’ says David Krall, Avid president and CEO. Those reasons include realtime architecture with over 100 customizable effects, titling, compositing and color correction – all without rendering.

‘The beauty of staying within the Avid family is that your media and metadata is compatible with the rest of the Avid toolflow,’ Krall adds. ‘You can offline your work in compressed format and then go into a studio or post facility and online it with an Avid workflow, and your media and metadata transfers perfectly and you get 100% conform.’

Krall says that in two head-to-head tests between FCP and Xpress DV initiated by DV magazine, the Avid product edged its competition.

So is Apple worried? Not likely.

Apple is primarily in the business of selling computers, and its boxes now support the two leading brands of DV-editing software. In fact, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was so excited about the new Avid product that he was on hand to launch Xpress DV despite the challenge it poses to his own software product. Fact is, FCP was not introduced as a challenge to Avid in the first place.

‘I don’t know if we broke in on their turf – we broke into a different ballpark,’ says Powell. ‘I think what you’re seeing is Avid saying to its customers ‘That different ballpark isn’t so bad after all.”

Powell says FCP was targeted at producers one tier down from feature filmmakers – those looking to complete miniDV productions. ‘At the time [of its introduction] it was without a doubt the best miniDV editor around,’ he says.

This in turn caught the attention of the independent production community, many of whom were beginning to see DV as a way to save money and still maintain production values. Meanwhile, top-level players have also begun to see benefits in the software.

‘The reason it appealed to me was that I could get a complete nonlinear editing system sitting on my PowerBook,’ says Bob Munroe, VFX supervisor and president of Toronto’s CORE Digital Pictures. ‘The portability and immediacy of that was key.’

Munroe, who has worked on such features as Finding Forrester and Vincenzo Natali’s forthcoming Cypher (formerly Company Man), began taking FCP on set upon the product’s release. By digitizing the videotape as scenes are being shot, Munroe uses his laptop on the fly to ensure all the elements are in place to complete F/X in post. He is so impressed with FCP that he has been pressing editors at CORE to replace their Avids with the software product.

Yet not everyone in the post community is so impressed. According to Alex Olegnowicz, CEO of Toronto boutique post house Imarion, there are some telling differences.

‘On FCP and even Xpress DV, you can see that the color correction is not as beautiful as it is on the higher-end systems,’ he says. He adds, however, that the color correction on the new Xpress DV 3.5 is superior and more in line with Symphony.

This becomes critical when a production goes for foreign sales, particularly in Europe, where distributors can be extremely critical of such deficiencies.

Olegnowicz has four Xpress DV systems and an Avid Symphony. Imarion editors use the lower-end systems to offline and then online with the Symphony. As for FCP, he says the software works very well, providing you never need to export it to a higher-end system.

‘We finish projects that come from Final Cut Pro, [but] there’s always the odd problem with the EDL,’ he says. ‘Apple has not been particularly helpful in making its system compatible with anything else – not only with Avid, but with Discreet or linear suites.’

Then there is the issue of rendering times.

‘If you have a one-and-a-half-hour show, and to go to tape you have to actually render every single shot to color correction, it’s just not efficient,’ Olegnowicz adds. ‘It takes time and a lot of disk space.’

-www.avid.com

-www.apple.com

-www.coredigitalpictures.com

-www.imarion.com