The 12 reasons I hate AVID Newscutter

So, that was a fun three-day weekend here at The [Five]. You may have noticed that the Fantasy Football Preview never appeared on the site. There is a reason for that: AVID Newscutter sucks.

AVID creators must fall asleep smiling. And wake up laughing. They live for the “F-word”

Failure.

They have made it unnecessarily difficult to produce a finished product. The word, convoluted, doesn’t do their program justice. If they had their druthers, they would make counting to three an impossible task. The interface they created makes a pile of spaghetti look organized.

In attempting to export the final product of the Fantasy Football Preview AVID decided I had not taken the necessary steps. To give you an idea, simply making the “opener” of the Vodcast is a even a twelve-step process.

1. Upload the intro footage
2. Upload the logo
3. Upload music
4. Drag footage, logo and music into the timeline
5. Add an edit effect (“change size of image”-effect)
6. Change the photo size
7. Import a “lower third”
8. Input the name of the show and website onto the lower third
9. Save the template
10. Render the chyron
11. Cross fingers
12. Indicate which layer (hopefully, the layer you just created) is visible on the timeline

That takes roughly 15-30 minutes (Meanwhile, in FinalCut Pro that process might take 15 to 30 seconds. Okay, a minute if I’m having a bad day).

So, after working on the intro for 30 minutes (okay, so, it was actually an hour because the edit effect wasn’t loading properly), I began to edit out two goof-ups, a bad camera shot, and laid a handful of video cuts (which take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes per video to download from the web and upload to AVID) over the top of the 10 minute video.

I started working at noon on Friday. By 5pm (yes, 5pm) I was finished. I hit export.

And I waited. And waited.

… And waited.

Two hours later the 10-minute video was finished exporting.

The time was 7pm.

Perhaps I hadn’t indicated the correct “layer” to export or maybe I didn’t (or did) have something highlighted. Or maybe AVID didn’t like the way I was typing that day.

At any rate, the project exported was not the video I was editing for the last five hours. Instead of starting over and waiting another two hours (and by the time it would have been done exporting, 9pm on a Friday night) I decided to call it an evening.

And a weekend.

But never fear, it’s Monday and we’re back.