Splice Now

Last week I talked about how Avid and Apple look at the editing world through different lenses. Apple sees a broad, diverse market that wants a complete post production studio in a box. Avid sees a mostly pro world that wants bulletproof solutions with good support and is willing to buy many interlocking applications to get it.

Avid has lots of problems right now, not the least of which is it’s relatively low stock price. Many of its recent initiatives haven’t worked out as planned. Adrenaline offered great real-time capabilities when it was introduced four years ago, but it’s been persistently buggy. Xpress Studio was supposed to compete with the Final Cut suite but it was based on Xpress, wasn’t available on Mac and its marketing was lackluster. Avid bought Pinnacle to get into consumer editing but it turned out that the price was too high and the Pinnacle products weren’t all that good. Interplay has had a mixed reaction in the marketplace and only appeals to the biggest customers.

The question now is what the company’s strategy is going to look like going forward. Is Avid going to continue to focus on large customers or are they going to go head-to-head with Apple and Adobe for the hearts and minds of editors?

I’m inclined to believe that at the end of the day, there is only one market. No independent producer wants to use a product that is shunned by professionals. And the top of the market can’t function effectively while every kid in high school and college can make movies with Final Cut in his sleep. I’m cautiously hopeful that we’ll see a renewed development effort at Avid in the coming months. But only time will tell.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

I just listened to a smart speech by Herbert Allison, CEO of TIAA-CREF, the big financial services firm for higher education, talking about how he turned that company around. And boy did it sound like a story about Avid. Same exact problem — the market expands because it’s being democratized, the company doesn’t see the new market because current customers are happy. The company’s business model was designed around their old definition of the customer — and it’s just too disruptive to change the business model to fit the new definition. Everything would have to change.

Old customer — facilities, broadcasters, rental houses. Able to write relatively large checks. Need excellent support. Willing to buy a variety of products to get the job done, as long as they all work well and fit into existing workflows.

New customer — individual film and video makers. Can’t write large checks. Don’t expect one-on-one support. Want an all-in-one product. Have no existing workflows. Workflows can be invented for them.

There are way more of those new customers than old customers. But Avid didn’t recognize them because its business was built on making the old customers happy.

Avid democratized post production in the early ’90s. Apple democratized it further in the early years of the new century. The question now is whether Avid can come back. They still hold the top of the professional world. They have to build from there, and they have to win on points, creating something that does more and works better than FCP. Tall order — but not impossible. And, make no mistake about it, the better they compete the better it is for all of us. Competition brings out the best in everybody.

Allison’s talk, delivered in December at Yale University, makes some interesting recommendations. It’s available as a podcast — item 98 on this page at the iTunes music store.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

Talking to friends about their future plans, I’m learning that the one thing that seems to galvanize Avid folks this year is the possibility that they could soon be cutting HD images in an “offline” environment. In my circle of friends DNX36 is the most interesting thing Avid has introduced in a while.

But that inevitably leads to an obvious question. “How much storage am I going to need and how much is it going to cost?” The question is usually framed in relative terms, namely, “How much MORE storage am I going to need than I use now?”

I can do a rough estimate, of course, but it would be nice to have a calculator that compares 14:1 storage requirements with DNX36 requirements — on 24-fps material. Does such a thing exist? Several searches on Avid’s web site didn’t turn up much of anything. The charts the company offers for DNX storage leave out DNX36 and never compare it to Avid’s SD codecs.

In general, Avid’s web site is impossibly hard to navigate. There’s too much stuff, organized poorly, searches are often ineffective, I rarely find what I’m looking for.

Avid-ites are behind their FCP brethren in the switch to HD, but I think we’re going to be moving there in droves in the next year or two. Avid ought to make the switch easier and more comprehensible. What do you need? How much can you do software only? What’s the simplest and least expensive workflow? If that information were widely disseminated we’d see a lot more people upgrading their aging Meridien systems.

And it would also help if Adrenaline HD wasn’t so much more expensive than FCP with a Blackmagic card.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video