In what appears to be a pretty dramatic shift in policy, Avid is now selling Media Composer to students and teachers for — just $300. You don’t seem to need an academic P.O. anymore — just valid ID. I saw a couple of web sites that have it, including this one: Academic Superstore.
Technorati Tags: avid
It used to be that if you imported a sound file into Media Composer via drag and drop from the desktop, you got a clip with the same name as the file — but the name was truncated to 27 characters. Most of the time that didn’t matter. But with sound effects it could cause problems because sound effects libraries often have long, descriptive filenames.
Unlike a filename, there isn’t any intrinsic reason for a clipname to be shortened, so the MC was recently changed to take those filenames and turn them into clipnames intact.
And therein lies a tale.
Early last Friday I imported such a clip, and then blithely worked all day in the same bin without problems.
Monday morning I booted up to discover that the bin wouldn’t open. The error message included this text:
Exception: DOMAIN_COPYOUT_FAILED
Exception: STRM_BUF_SMALL, buflen: 256
The attic only took me backwards a few hours — none of those bins would open either. I had a backup from Thursday which worked — but that meant losing a whole day’s work. Unacceptable.
Some internet research and a few frantic calls to friends turned up the idea that the bin might open in a PC system — and, indeed, our rental house was able to open it in a Nitris. We then began the laborious process of trying to figure out which sequence within the bin was the problem. Many hours of trial and error, passing bins back and forth over the net, produced an unambiguous result — it was that sound effects clip.
Avid tech support thought the problem might be with the clipname and suggested that I keep all clipnames to 27 characters. I was skeptical since I’ve had dozens and dozens of clips with names longer than that on every show I’ve ever done. Nevertheless, I did another hour or so of experimentation and learned the following:
Now that the MC doesn’t truncate your clipnames on import, you can indeed screw yourself up pretty badly using names the MC doesn’t like. There are three conditions:
The good news is that I’ve reported all this to Tewksbury and a fix is in the works. The bad news is that it represents the kind of problem Avid faces when improving the MC. The system has grown so complex that even a simple change like this can produce unexpected side effects — and in this case, pretty disastrous ones.
Meanwhile, if you import files via drag and drop, double check the filenames before you bring them in. No punctuation except a single period between the name and file type, and make sure the filename is less than 216 characters long.
Adobe and Apple are pushing suites of applications in their quest to dominate retail post production. You make a single purchase and get a studio in a box, a studio that’s supposed to, by itself, serve the needs a diverse group of editors. That’s the competitive environment that Avid finds itself in, and it looks like there’s no going back to the old world of high prices and neatly defined market segments. However, just how these suites should function is still up for grabs.
Working with Final Cut, you end up creating separate projects in each application, and this can be problematic. Getting data between them is quirky and inconsistent. Dealing with an underlying Final Cut sequence that keeps changing isn’t easy. Hooks to make it easy to conform your work outside the suite don’t necessarily work. And not all the applications are consistent in terms of look and feel.
It’s arguably easier for software engineers to add functionality via the suite, but it’s not at all clear that we editors want so many separate applications. Take a look at Microsoft Office. Yes, they’ve kept spreadsheet and word processing separate. But Word now includes all kinds of desktop publishing features, and HTML and graphics are included via modules. Double click on an image and your toolset changes — but you stay inside Word.
One of the key questions application designers now face is how much functionality to put in the main ap and how much goes into the suite. Personally, I skew toward putting more power in the central program where I can get at it easily. I don’t particularly want to learn Pro Tools to do temp mixes — I want more power in Media Composer. But when the time comes to do full-bore final mixing, I sure want to know that everything I do is going to move over to the big sound ap, easily, transparently and intact.
There’s no magic to this — some things are better done in the editing application and some are better done via the suite. Figuring out which is which might turn out to be a big part of what separates the winners from the losers in the next round of post production competition.
Technorati Tags: adobe premiere, avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video
In recent years, Avid has added many new companies to its roster, creating an overabundance of editing applications. What does the Avid brand represent? Professional post-production, hopefully. But in terms of a point of view about editing tools, I’m just not sure.
Depending on how you divide them up, the company offers half a dozen lines of picture editing software, including Media Composer, Newscutter, Xpress, DS, the Liquid line and Pinnacle Studio. And within families there are typically several variants that have to be supported and tested. The total number of discrete pieces of software is up around 15, depending on how you count. That makes no sense to any kind of buyer, and it’s draining resources from a company that can ill afford inefficiency.
Avid needs roughly four products: something for consumers, something for high school kids and wedding videographers, something for pros, and a full-bore finishing application.
More or less like this:
But I don’t mean to imply that these applications, in their current incarnations, fit together effectively. To varying degrees, they all need to be rewritten in order to provide a single, unified user experience and full media and project compatibility. Learning one would help you understand the others. If you start your project on one system, it should move with you up the price ladder.
With a lineup like that customers would have an easy time figuring out which application they need, and Avid would have a fighting chance of defining itself both internally and to the market. They’d stop wasting resources competing with themselves, and they’d be able to combine all the great engineering talent within the company and focus it. In short, they’d be able to lead.
Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video
In the early ’90s, Avid triumphed against all competitors and democratized the editing world in the first non-linear revolution. But it didn’t do nearly as well in the second revolution that began around 2000. Apple saw that software-only systems were going to become increasingly powerful, so they cut prices and offered a swiss-army-knife product that undercut Avid’s business model. And they sold systems to people Avid didn’t even know were potential customers.
Meanwhile, Avid focused on the high end, aiming its new products at large installations with hundreds of systems. Today, Final Cut easily beats MC on market share, and looks like the rebel’s choice. But it just hasn’t caught on in Hollywood, and nearly everybody who has tried it has either come back to Media Composer or has made their peace with a product that they acknowledge as at least partially inferior. Yes, you can get the job done, and yes it’s cheaper (especially for HD) but no, for longform work, it ain’t better. And Avid’s technical support and training apparatus, warts and all, is head and shoulders above Apple’s.
The question now, is where Avid goes next. They can and should build on their deep connections with high-end editors. They’ve done way too little for creative editing over the last decade and by presenting Apple with a static target they’ve given them a huge opening. That has to be fixed.
They’ve also got to cement their strategy for their high-end corporate customers. I haven’t used Interplay but I’ve seen it demonstrated several times, and it seems awfully “version 1” to me.
But what about the rest of the editing world, the folks Apple has been cultivating? If you like, you can divide that world into two parts: consumers and, for want of a better word, independents. Avid has not been able to articulate a compelling vision for either of these groups. For consumers, Avid chose to buy their way to market share with Pinnacle Studio. For independents, they’ve been promoting Xpress Pro with only partial success.
Does Avid need these customers? Or should they just let them go and focus on the high end? My view is that the editing world is becoming more and more unitary and interdependent. I don’t think Avid will succeed selling Interplay to facilities doing offline with Final Cut, and independents won’t want to learn a new interface if they come to Hollywood. Consumers who want to graduate to something more capable will want to stay with the same brand and interface conventions they started with.
Avid needs to articulate a vision that speaks to all these markets. The product line that wins scales naturally with different buying segments, keeps prices low, and, critically important, inspires all customers to be as creative as possible. With its many acquisitions, Avid now has the pieces in place to envision that product line, but it has to actually build it — reinventing many of the applications, making the interface consistent and ensuring that projects and media can easily be moved up the price ladder. It has to start working as one company, focused on one vision for the future of editing — for everybody.
Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video
I’ve been working with Adrenaline 2.7.3 for a little over a month now and I thought I’d pass on a progress report. In general, I’m very happy with it. There are still some quirks, but the advantages now far outweigh the disadvantages. I’m working with 14:1 media on a quad-core G5, with two users sharing a project over Unity.
Pros:
Cons:
If the list below looks long, it’s only because I’m providing a lot of detail. These are relatively minor problems.
Splice Now 
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