Splice Now

I don’t know about you but I’m starting to wonder if I’m Avid’s customer anymore. It’s not that I don’t use their products. I do. A lot. But the more I look at Avid’s corporate communications, and what they introduced at NAB, the more I wonder whether they see me that way. If this sounds awfully basic, it is.

Most of the action at Avid in recent years has been on big iron: Unity, Isis, Interplay. On the Media Composer side the only new feature shown this year was ScriptSync. Otherwise, what we got were plumbing improvements — the ability to run DNX 36, for example — and platform changes — porting the Media Composer to Mac Intel. Those things are important, all right, and they’ve helped keep the Media Composer competitive. But they don’t inspire editors. We saw no changes to our aging mixing or title tools, no improvements to the timeline, no changes to the editing feature set at all.

Avid’s tagline used to be “Tools for Storytellers.” Then, as Oliver Peters points out on Avid-L2, it went to “Make, Manage, Move Media.” That says it all.

Avid is playing to their base — to the people who write the big checks. But as I see it, Avid cannot succeed as a general purpose media company if it doesn’t have a best-of-breed editing application at the core of its business, an application that inspires editors and empowers them to do their most creative work.

Do we really think that big producers will force their editors to use Media Composers when the editors tell them they can be more creative and productive with Final Cut or Premiere? Do we really think, long term, that those big customers are going to continue to buy Avid networking and asset management systems when all their workstations are running the other guy’s programs? It just doesn’t make sense.

Avid has a tremendous amount of engineering talent under its collective roof, but it has had a lot of trouble bringing that talent together. DS has some great features (many of which ended up in FCP), Pro Tools has some great features, Media Composer has some great features. Avid just doesn’t seem able to bring all that functionality together in one product.

But they’re going to have to do something. For the moment, they still have the lead: trim mode, matchframe, track patching, syncing dailies, media management — all work far better in Media Composer. And the incremental improvements they’ve made lately have been helpful. But FCP has Sound Track, DVD Studio, Compressor and now, Color. It has a very nice segment mode and the ability to search across bins, and it costs less.

It’s time for Avid to show us what it can do. The company used to be in the business of inspiring editors. It needs to start doing that again.

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

I’ve spent the last couple of days browsing through some of the post-NAB dialog on Avid-L2, the venerable Avid mail list and discussion group (now located in Yahoo Groups). Many of the people on the list have been active in the Avid community since the beginning, and their responses to this year’s NAB were pretty discouraging. Comments included:

• “Avid hasn’t really upgraded the toolset in years.”
• “While the basic edit functions are stable and reliable, the user experience remains lacking.”
• “Avid is about Interplay and Unity and enterprise level solutions and not about editing systems.”
• “Apple hasn’t told themselves that there’s no room to grow in the NLE market, and that’s why they steal customers from Avid every day.”
• “If Avid is serious about staying in the NLE business for the long haul and taking a leadership position, it’s time for it to show editors something — anything — new and innovative.”
• “I remember when the crowds at NAB around Avid’s booth were so large that security would have to try to clear the aisles. That’s sort of what the Apple booth was like.”
• “It’s time for Avid to learn to innovate and lead again.”

Personally, I’m not quite so negative. Avid did introduce some new things — ScriptSync comes to mind, along with DNxHD 36. And the importance of a fast, portable Media Composer should not be underestimated. But I am also frustrated by how old and creaky some parts of the application feel.

Some people think that editing tools are now a commodity. I don’t agree. There’s plenty left to do. Here are just a few examples:

• A Live Interface. I’m tired of being able to do absolutely nothing while video plays, or while exporting a Quicktime, or rendering an effect. A live interface will make everything else seem antiquated.
• Background Saves. Heck, we had this in the Montage, and Pro Tools has it now.
• Automatic Version Control. All I do all day is manage versions. The machine should help.
• Better Mixing Capabilities. We need to be able to cut and paste keyframes and move them in groups. We need to be able to mix with sparse keyframes. We need waveforms that don’t extract a performance penalty. We need 5.1 capabilities and track nesting.
• A New Titler. The Title Tool is almost 15 years old. It’s been showing it’s age for a decade.
• Search Across Bins. How long have we been asking for this?
• Improvements to Segment Mode. FCP is in segment mode all the time. I prefer Avid’s approach most of the time, but with a few improvements it would be possible to have the best of both worlds.

Give us just a few things like this and I wager we’d all get pretty excited again.

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