Splice Now

Before NAB this year, my top frustration with Avid was how many versions of the software there were to choose from. We had Meridien and Adrenaline, Mac and PC, Xpress and DS and three kinds of hardware. This formed a matrix of choices that were damn near incomprehensible to normal mortals, not to mention many of Avid’s support people. And this does not include the entire Liquid product line or the Pinnacle products. All these versions sap the company’s resources and frustrate customers who keep looking over the fence at how simple the Final Cut folks have it.

Post NAB, Avid’s line is simpler and I applaud the move to a single piece of software, supporting multiple hardware configurations and with the same feature set on Mac and PC.

But there are still too many choices. From one perspective, the company has actually added an application, namely Media Composer Software, which now competes with Xpress Pro. In gearing up for the film I’ll be starting next week, I spent way too many hours trying to understand the difference between Xpress Pro, MCsoftware (or whatever it’s called) Mojo and Adrenaline. In the end, I’m choosing to go with Xpress Pro not because I’m sure it’s going to work, but because this is what my employer already owns. We’ll sort out its limitations as I start working.

Avid wants customers to look at their competitive offerings and decide that choosing Media Composer is a no-brainer. But the choice is still too complicated.

This entry was posted on July 6, 2006 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Avid. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.