Avid’s Fourth Quarter Numbers
Avid released lackluster quarterly numbers on Thursday, and the stock price fell about 5% on Friday and seems headed for another drop today. Revenue is down from last year and the company showed a net loss for the period. Even if you subtract a $53 million charge for “the impairment of goodwill associated with the acquisition of Pinnacle Systems,” (whatever that means!), you’re still looking at a company that just barely broke even.
For the year, revenues were up relative to 2005, but the company still showed a net loss.
CEO David Krall called the results “mixed” and pointed to a “shortfall in our video business in the fourth quarter.”
One has to wonder how much the slow adoption rate for Adrenaline here in Hollywood influenced these results. Adrenaline is nearly four years old, but you still don’t see very many systems in editing rooms here. Personally, I would use Adrenaline every time over Meridien. But it’s been hard for me to find others who strongly recommend it.
Adrenaline, like Meridien before it, simply doesn’t offer enough for feature and television editors. The product is less expensive than Meridien, does a lot more in terms of visual effects, and this year runs without extra hardware. But there isn’t much in it that makes editors like me say “I gotta have this.” And it was much too buggy for far too long.
Editors in the “longform” world represent a significant portion of Media Composer sales, and upgrades here could certainly contribute to Avid’s bottom line. But that won’t happen until the company makes a concerted effort to understand what we need and create features that make us sit up and take notice.
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February 13, 2007 at 8:19 am
What about Avid’s Unity Shared Storage system? I work at a small post house in the midwest and we do half hour tv shows and hour long specials, and very little commercial work. We have 1 Express Pro w/Mojo, I work on the Media Composer w/Adrenaline, and our finishing suite is an Avid DS. Although we’ve had bugs, and our process isn’t completely streamlined by any means, it is SOOOO much easier to finish a show when we’re just transferring AFE’s, and not EDL’s. I couldn’t imagine a large house in LA or NY that doesn’t have shared storage of some sort. It would take so much longer to finish shows if they are being offlined and onlined in separate rooms. How do the larger houses handle this problem? (without having to redigitize the tapes over and over)
February 13, 2007 at 9:46 am
Shared storage is very common here and so is Unity. No question, Avid understands the workflow issues pretty well, although we still have a lot of problems that derive from the fact that their effects solutions are so proprietary. There’s no good way to get visual effects from a Media Composer to a Discrete system except just by visually copying what was done. That has unquestionably driven some DS sales but has also caused a lot of frustration since Discrete systems are so common.
I’m not quite clear about the relative advantages of Adrenaline vs. Meridien when it comes to upressing via DS. Adrenaline at least allows for 1:1 media in 24 fps projects, and while that’s a nice benefit, it hasn’t motivated many sales.