All excellent suggestions - but the one I'm most keen for is a docked UI, Adobe style (as mentioned).

Floating windows is practically retro these days, and for good reason. It wastes massive amounts of screen real estate, a docked interface reduces clutter massively and allows you to allocate every spare pixel to something useful.

There'll always be people complaining when things change, but it's well worth the risk.

I complete support "Swils"  Opinion. Every Word of it!

Plus: in addition to screen real estate the floating Window Concept also wastes my Time and my Concentration when I am forced to constantly rearrange the Windows Sizes and Positions to find a Tool or a Bin. The "Toolset" Approach is not a solution for that and quite limited. But still Windows arrangements should be able to save.

Swil:

All excellent suggestions - but the one I'm most keen for is a docked UI, Adobe style (as mentioned).

...

There'll always be people complaining when things change, but it's well worth the risk.

In Addition i want suggest to implement a more convenient and consistent Color-Marking-Behaviour. Especially customizable, colorable BIN-Backgrounds, or at least colored Bin Headings. This helps quick Orientation when a lot of Bins are open. Also i always oversee the ProjectWindow as its Colour is exactly the same as the bin windows except the headings. (why is this feature gone in MC5 to colour my Project Window? seems to be unimportant, but i actually used that feature!)

Also, i often want to color Mark a bunch of Clips in a Bin, but i cannot mark them in a Row and color them all at once, i have to color-select each and every clip for its own.

By the Way: Lassoing to select a Group of Clips is very difficult. Only possible in the first Collumn. Why does the other collums turn in to edit mode if I try to lasso when there is no editable data ?! (like TC start, duration, creation date...). Would'nt it be better to be be able to Lasso over all the Collums? 

To add a bit more:

http://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/improving-media-composer/

- Oliver

Nice job with that list Oliver. Add to it the single most annoying aspect of Media Composer's interface - playback stopping on nearly any other command.

I would just like to have the things in mc5xx just work it is so buggy i would be ashamed to put my name on it  maybe it could be called  AVID PREMIER MC 5.0.3 PRO

switthaus:

 While I have seen this as a major issue for a portion of the user base, it must be a headache for the developers trying to move the software forward to meet the needs of new users coming to the product.

The choice of name suggests that the designers thought it was a good idea.  Based on this good idea they made ST ON the default.  It was that decision IMO that made the whole Smart Tools implimentation strategy a very poor one.

Had they left the default UI as ST off  and gone ahead and  given relevant info in the tutorials (they and others produced on the Smart Tool) for how to turn ST ON in Avid or User settings quickly followed by the how to use it tutorials they actually made it would have kept everyone happy. 

They would then have had the luxury of fine tuning ST at their leisure and based on market response made ST ON the default (if approriate) in subsequent releases.

Actually this is the the exact argument used against users who got burned by jumping into MC5 without sufficent testing.  Maybe designers could consider testing the water with their toes before jumping in boots and all.

I'm with you. OliverPeters, especially about point 1: font size, although i assumed that this gui derived from the 1024x768 pixels-age of computers.

and as we are talking about the gui i would like to emphasize my opinion that Avid should after more than 10 years on Windows finally adopt Windows standards in dialogues as i have pointed out in the AVID MC - PC forum.

I overall enjoy MC's UI.. I really feel Adobe and Apple's UIs are still a decade old too, with bunch of little tweaks thrown in over the years.  Though admittedly, through the generations of recent Adobe CS, it totally went from sloppy (cs1/2) to near perfected (cs5).  BUT I love your suggestions, and what you point out is true.

I really want to thumbs up 4, 5, and 6--these three especially would instantly improve my editing experience on MC.

- wb