Avid Wins Big at the Oscars

Christopher Rouse (The Bourne Ultimatum) may have walked away with the award for Best Editing at this year’s Oscar ceremony, but Avid Technology is the real winner. The company, already synonymous with Hollywood editing technology, recently announced that all of the nominated films in eight categories at the 80th annual Academy Awards employed at least one Avid system.

All of the nominees for Best Picture, Directing, Documentary Feature, Original Score, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing used either Avid, Digidesign, Sibelius or Softimage, all Avid-owned companies. Why is Avid so popular with Academy Award winners? “An Avid system is far and away the most comfortable tool for me to work with,” notes Rouse. “There are zero barriers between me and the material. That, for me, makes all the difference.”

Atonement score composer Dario Marianelli agrees. The film required him not only to think about the characters’ motivations, but to transform them into music. With Sibelius 5 music editing, the technology conformed to his creative instincts and not the other way around. “Panorama view in Sibelius 5 really helped me with arrangements of both these themes because I don’t think in pages, I just think in music,” Marianelli says. “With Panorama, there are no breaks in your thinking, you can think more laterally,”

Any editor will tell you that a movie gets made in the cutting room. While there can sometimes be a struggle between creativity and technology, Avid allows a moviemaker the best of both worlds.

For more information, visit www.avid.com.