Avid Xpress Pro

Already known by many as a leading tool for professional video-editors, Avid is now competing for users on a more modest budget with Xpress Pro, which throws it into a ferocious marketplace where it isn’t the dominant player. The big question for Xpress Pro is why should anyone pay £1500 for a package whose strongest competitors – Final Cut Pro, Premiere and Pinnacle Edition – are less than half the price.

Avid Xpress Pro, of course, has one major advantage over the competition – its inheritance. Being produced by the market leaders in high-end editing means two things. First, it can easily slot into the production process of any company – a director can hash together a rough cut of the day’s shooting on a laptop, and post it through to the online suite for cleaning up without worrying about compatibility. Second, Avid can take a whole range of tools and industry-proven workflows, and transplant them directly from high-end systems into Xpress Pro.

All this means that a student who’s learned their trade on Xpress Pro should be able to sit down on their first day on Avid Media Composer, and start working immediately. With the number of other edit suites moving ever up-market towards Avid, the company is taking the new generation of editors seriously – even to the extent of introducing a freely dowloadable editor, Avid Free DV, designed to familiarise new users with the Avid workflow.

Quality product
Opening the box, you might be forgiven for thinking that Xpress Pro is taking itself a little seriously. Two heavy user guides is fair enough, but the package also includes no less than nine CDs – as well as a set of keyboard stickers. You’re given the impression that you’re getting your money’s worth with this tool from the very outset. Once installed, it presents a strong and clear interface which responds well, works intuitively, and sensibly hides away unused functions where they won’t get in your way. You have to overcome some of the idiosyncrasies of the Avid environment which won’t be to everyone’s taste, and there are certainly editors who prefer the clarity of Pinnacle Edition, or the mouse-centred, hands-on responsiveness of Premiere. However, Avid’s tools are driven by the experience of editors who do nothing all day but edit, so at least they’re highly refined.

Xpress Pro is designed to work with or without the hardware acceleration provided by Avid’s Mojo product. This box (costing an extra £1527) gives you real-time DV quality output for all your effects, overlays and transitions, and also adds its own analogue and digital capture and output. If you choose to use Xpress Pro without it, you won’t get real-time DV quality effects on an external monitor. What you will get is a choice between real-time effects in the preview window or non-real-time DV output. You can easily toggle between the two via a button on the timeline.

Working on the preview window uses your computer’s hardware to attempt real-time rendering, so what you get here will obviously depend on the quality of your particular machine. You should get a pretty good result from most modern desktops or laptops, and the software offers five real-time video streams.

If you can play back your effect in real time, a green dot appears over it on the timeline – this makes it easy to see what you’re going to get when you hit the Play button. Even if you reach the stage where your work is so complex you can’t get real-time playback, you can adjust the image quality manually to give your system a better chance.

Xpress Pro slightly improves on the basic functionality of Xpress DV, but basically the interface and most of the features remain the same. Avid has added image stabilisation for cleaning up those dodgy handheld shots, and Timewarp effects are now also included. These are presets that change the speed of a clip over time, moving from a freeze frame to full speed, for example. You can’t change Timewarp effects, but there are enough of them to provide you with some decent basic effects.

The program’s handling of colour manipulation is a real strength, and one of the most striking new features is automatic colour correction. You can now take any two shots – even if they’re taken under completely different lighting conditions – and match the look of the colour so they appear perfectly balanced. It’s pretty much instant and virtually a one-button job, and it works well on most footage. It’s not perfect, and the fussier editor will still want to tweak, but most people will be more than satisfied with the instant results on footage.

Extra programs
The fact that Xpress Pro comes as a nine-disc set hints at the presence of a few extra freebies, and indeed the editor itself is simply the centre of what adds up to quite a significant suite of programs. For a start, there’s Boris Graffiti and Avid Title Tool. Together these enable you to quickly create 2D and 3D title sequences, captions and text screens. Animation is easy enough, and there’s sufficient integration with Xpress Pro itself for you to feel as though you’re working with a connected system.

Next up there’s Sonic ReelDVD LE. Not surprisingly, this is a DVD authoring package from Sonic. You can put together quite sophisticated DVD presentations with this tool, adding buttons, links and movies. It’s a big step up from the heavily preset-based DVD authoring programs usually found bundled with editors, but it doesn’t make the process any more difficult than it needs to be. Sonic DVD uses a flowchart view rather than the more common timeline approach, and this seems to work very well, enabling you to quickly build up an easily understandable map of your production.

For media compression, Sorenson Squeeze is included. It’s not as well known as Discreet’s cleaner, but it’s none the worse for that. It provides a range of useful presets, but if these aren’t enough, you can fine-tune them to your own needs. It also supports batch processing, includes watch folders (where footage is automatically compressed if it’s placed in a certain location) and works quickly and cleanly with most footage. There’s even a capture function so you can capture and compress without having to mess about in separate packages.

On top of that, there’s the Avid Film-makers Toolkit (a specialist toolset for film editing), Avid Pan and Zoom (primarily for animating a virtual rostrum camera around high-resolution images to make still shots look more interesting), and Avid Illusion FX (effects filters like lens flare, motion blur and lightening). Finally, the Electric Gasket utility is included; this enables you to use After Effects filters (of which there are an awful lot on the market) within Xpress Pro.

This program has a professional feel and a price-tag at the higher end of the mid-range market, and while it doesn’t tower above the likes of Premiere in terms of features, its range of bundled external apps do up the stakes, making it an attractive option for professional users.