drbgaijin:

Every week there are still new voices being added.

Let me be a new voice today. At the TV station where I work we have not upgraded (?) to V5 because of the many unwanted changes to the software, as amply demonstrated by this thread and similar ones. I have experience on V5 at home and at a client's location, and can only echo the frustrations most users have raised. The advanced keyframes issue is at the top of my hate list!

drbgaijin:

Every week there are still new voices being added.

eddieb:

 Let me be a new voice today.

And now, I'd like to address all of you of the remaining 91,000+ members of this Forum who rarely or never actively post. Please join in and make your feelings on these issues known. There is great power in numbers. Certain people at Avid would have us believe that this Forum represents a vocal but inconsequential minority of the total Avid customer base, and therefore not representative. WE NEED TO PROVE THEM WRONG. And we need your help to do it. Please indicate your opinions, pro or con (both would be preferred), with a capsule description of what you like and/or do not like regarding the interface changes in MC 5. Thank you all so much for your cooperation.

I am a new voice. Let them hear us.

Larry Rubin:

And now, I'd like to address all of you of the remaining 91,000+ members of this Forum who rarely or never actively post. Please join in and make your feelings on these issues known.

As one of the "Liquid to MC" group I took early advantage of the upgrade offer and spent a lot of time "playing" with short clips in MC 4 to really get the hang of the keyboard shortcuts.

I had several printed A4 sheets scattered around my desk with all the shortcuts on them. I also spent a lot of time getting used to the ways that the work area could be customised for various tasks.

With the arrival of MC 5 I'm convinced that all of the time spent learning MC 4 was just a pure waste - thanks Avid.

I hate the "Smart Tool", and I've lost count of the number of times when I've really messed things up because I didn't keep checking what it was forcing me to do when I thought I was doing something else.

If it hadn't been for users on this forum I'd never have found out how to change by Bin colours.

A "work in progress" is nothing more than an Alpha or Beta test, and some of the changes made to the MC5 interface make it look at times like pre-Alpha.

While most of the improvements from MC 4 to MC 5 are great - the interface changes suck.

Just my 2 cent rant of the day.

Gerry

Larry Rubin:

Certain people at Avid would have us believe that this Forum represents a vocal but inconsequential minority of the total Avid customer base, and therefore not representative.

When I was in software development we used to jokingly call bugs "undocumented features".  As far as I'm concerned the Smart Tool is a documented bug.  And I'm not intending that as a joke.

And "Smart"?  George Orwell's newspeak is alive and well at Avid.

Larry Rubin:

Certain people at Avid would have us believe that this Forum represents a vocal but inconsequential minority of the total Avid customer base, and therefore not representative.

Almost any time I look here the number of guest on the forums out numbers the online members at a ratio of more than 50 to 1 (and I have seen ratios of 150 to 1).  Are these "certain people" at Avid also insinuating that a large part of this silent majority just reads the views of the "vocal but inconsequential minority" on important issues affecting the tools of their trade? Then if those views are totally out of line with their own views just apothetically ignore them.  Sorry IMO you would have to be a real Snake Oil sales person to try and make that concept fly.

Please continue to make MC better for ALL different users.  If it truely is a "work in progress" then make the changes optional additions at present to the NLE that already works very well for a very large number (silent majority?) of your existing users.

I've posted before but to consolidate into this thread - top gripes in order of annoyance:

*Patches - my top gripe.  Time for a full release with fully tested features that dont require this patch merry-go-round some of us are on.  This I suspect leads to point 2:
*More crashes than ever before - it happens far more often than it ever did under v4 and is usually associated with some sort of FX in my experience
*Smart tool, remove and deactivate without re-enabling itself
*Advanced keyframes
*having to toggle a switch on the ST to edit audio keyframes
*Colour picker for clips/bins
*Colour range for those clips - washed out and too many choices

Likes (needs some positives in v5!)

*MXO for monitoring - love it and cost effective
*Link selection for clips on timeline - big time saver for me
*Stereo tracks
*Win 7 is snappy - the system seems a little more responsive than MC4 on Vista 64

Top area I'd like to see the design team put effort into:

*Render cue - for crying out loud we have wanted this for so long

And on the small and annoying list:

*Marquee - closes itself on app exit without you needing to be prompted (except possibly to ask you to save work if you want to).

MC4 was the high water mark for me - if it worked with MXO I'd roll back now.

Avid, we do not want to sign up for social networking sites, we have a proper forum here...why are you running? The mods are incredibly helpful and they cannot be used as buffers against a rising chorus of discontent.

My major peeve is the time required to work with AVCHD, especially the time wasted importing hours of footage that will yield a fraction off the gross import. There are other NLEs that can import and edit instantly with a fraction of the cpu power, and with lesser cost video cards.

Its time to qualify some ATI FireGL cards.

I've posted before but I'll post again.  The advanced keyframes absolutely KILL me. They make MC5  totally dead in the water for me. I do a lot of graphic resizing, placement, and simple moves. Advanced keyframes make what used to be quick and easy, long and arduous.  The color picker is EXTREMELY frustrating. Like Kenton, I group my clips in colors for easy selection. And, like Kenton, it's almost impossible to always pick the same shade of whatever. HUGE waste of valuable time. The reasons for making changes to keyboard commands, particularly the control key on the Mac, make NO sense. These senseless changes make me have to stop and think about how to do what I'm doing, instead of just doing it. Last but not least, the not-so-smart "smart" tool. Not only is it's behavior unpredictable, it takes up valuable space on the timeline, and is distracting to work around, and even to look at..

I solved these problems by backing down all my systems to MC4. Yet, I crave the actual improvements in MC5 - The stereo tracks, being able to use Pro-Tools plugins, using more than one DAE effect on a track, the improvements to AMA - especially quicktime, importing specific P2 tracks instead of all or nothing (I haven't tried this, but someone from Avid demonstrated the method to me at NAB.) These are the reasons I was so excited about MC5 after NAB.

Like most of us here, I live and breathe editing. It pays my bills, puts food on my table, and paid for my kid's college educations. Avid was a big part of it. I hope and pray that Avid will hear our impassioned pleas, and restore Media Composer (and Symphony) back to being the greatest non-linear editor on the planet.

TVJohn:

Its time to qualify some ATI FireGL cards.

I agree with John but also how about your vendor of choice Nvidea, Adobe has qualified new cards. I also cant believe a company like Avid refuses to respond to its users, I learned a long time ago at IBM that if we were not talking to our customers some one else was. I think this head in the sand attitude is reflected in the less then impressive sales numbers as opposed to your competition. People are tired of "we hear you" & then no response since then.It is not fair to the great moderators to have to defend a management team that cant face the reality of what they have done. Don't you have a product or marketing manager that can talk to your customers?

about the ati cards....is it just because no one has really ever embraced them tahts why the industry has gone total nvidia??????

you know in all seriousness, there are problems such as bugs and "updates" (smart tool, advanced keyframes wtf, gui customization, updates that break functionaltiy) that have gone too far. you know go ahead and give me a ban because i think AVID means "A Very Ignorant Developer".

Advantages of MC5 over MC4:

Improvements to AMA, Realtime audio plugins, 64 bit operating system support.

Disadvantages of MC5 over MC4:

Smart Tool, Advanced Keyframes, Audio keyframe toggle, Bin column sort (Cntl-E gone).

CTRL-E isn't gone, I just tried it out and it works as always.

What bugs me is that we're getting new features that nobody wants or asked for, but things that should have been fixed years ago are left untouched. 

Why can't I get a soft dropshadow on a matte key?  Is this 1995?

Why can't I create a batch import list from multiple folders on my hard drive, instead of having to group everything in the same place first?

Why can't Avid tell me which item it's importing, which one's it's done and which ones are left?  "Importing 5 of 10" is not very useful.

Why can't I import (or render) files in the background?

Why can't the Avid be smart enough to remember which items I've already imported so that I don't keep reimporting the same files over and over?

Why for the past 5 years does my timeline get corrupted when I scroll up and down on a sequence with a lot of tracks?

Why can't I tell on my sequence which channel an audio edit was sourced from?

Why can't I set the audio globally for a bunch of selected clips?

The list goes on and on.  These are basic, and probably mostly easy, fixes.  Yet it only took them 15 years to fix transition preservation (something that should have been fixed in version 2 of the original MC).  And we get nonsense like the Smart Tool that 0 people want.