Alright. My school got completely whole, new pcs. 120 gigs and all. They want me to get look for the best pc editing suite. They don't care about the price. So, my question is, which Avid(if avid is even the best editing application)program should I go with? I hear all this talk about Avid Dv. Is that what the big boys use? If not, please inform me what they use. That would be most likely what the school will get.

Chris is a "big boy" if you will, and I am sure he uses something along the lines of either Avid|DS or Avid Symphony....

The beautiful thing about Avid, is the interface is pretty much identical, whether you are on Avid Free DV or you are on Avid|DS...

For school, I would either get Avid Xpress DV or Avid Xpress Pro... I personally use Pro, and love it to death.

As far as a comparison between the two, I would check this link out:
http://avid.com/products/xdv_xpro.html

In plain english it lays out what the differences are..
I would reccomend Xpress Pro, if money is no limit for your school, but Xpress DV works awesome as well!

Make sure that the comps have 2 hard drives...
One that holds program data (what you run Avid off of) and then a second drive for media storage...

Otherwise, you will notice a major slowdown on your drive. It isn't reccomended by Avid to have the media drive be the same drive that the program runs off of.

I use an external HD to store my media. Check out LaCie, they are very good. Also, Western Digital is awesome...

But anyways good luck! I think you made the right choice going with Avid!

Good luck!

Avid Xpress Pro.

The "Big Boy Avid" will run around $25-$40k and that is for a Media Composer Adrenaline.

It won't run on the computers you have now.

Avid Xpress Pro is great for learning, cheap (compared to the big boy and in reality through JourneyEd.com). Plus the editing interface is 90% what the "big boy" Avid is.

Avid DS is COMPLETELY different than Media Composer or Xpress Pro. Completely different user interface and beast. Awesome. But different beast.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

What do you get with the media composer that you dont get with xpress pro? (besides hardware and more import options)

It's a lot more streamlined and powerful. HAHA! A LOT MORE POWERFUL. Thanks to you guys, I am now drooling at Avid DS...

**sigh** someday.......

if they dont wanna spend the money on Avid MC, Get Avid XpressDV Pro, with the Avid Mojo consoles.

Generally, the big boys use AvidMC as a offline Editor, and Avid DS, or flame, or inferno as their online systems.

If you are running multiple editing machines, it may be a good idea to network them using Avid Unity, so you can have multiple users on the one project editing together simultaneously, or so you can edit on a different machine each session.

Unity works with most avid suites from Xpress Pro up, i believe.

"or flame, or inferno as their online systems."

I think you mean fire or smoke systems.

or smoke,or fire, or combustion, they all come from the same company

before we get into an argument, i know inferno and flame are composition tools, they are also generally used in the post houses as online suites and compositors at the same to save time.

I can see that.