Archive for the ‘Avid vs. Final Cut’ category

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No Avid Booth at NAB

November 14, 2007

Avid announced today that they won’t have a booth at NAB 2008. Instead they’re planning private meetings in Vegas and “a series of customer-focused initiatives in 2008 – all of which will be designed to make it easier for customers, prospects and the media to interact with the company.” They’ll reveal the details in February.

For long-time Avid watchers like myself, that’s a huge change. The company has lived and died for NAB every year for nearly two decades now. But, no question, Avid needs to interact with editors much more effectively than it has in recent years and NAB hasn’t necessarily been the best place to do that.

There was a lot of talk on the net yesterday about this announcement, most of it positive. Lots of people, me included, want to see Avid strike out in a new direction, and any sense that they’re doing that is a good sign. But the press release tells us mostly what Avid isn’t going to do. It seems like we’ll have to wait until February to learn more about what positive steps the company plans to take.

Ultimately Avid lives or dies based on the quality of its products. It spent a great deal of effort in 2007 fixing bugs. The result is that Adrenaline is a much better application, and for me, choosing it now is a no-brainer. But there’s still plenty to do.

Long term, it’s hard to see how Avid can compete effectively for the hearts and minds of newbies if they don’t stand up and do battle with Apple in the public arena, staking out a vision for the future of post production. In the past, that’s always started with NAB. For many Avid watchers, it’s going to be hard to avoid the interpretation that the company is avoiding NAB in order to avoid going head-to-head with Apple. But only time will tell.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut

Comments: 8 Comments

Leopard First Impressions

October 29, 2007

It seems to me that software design can spring from two opposing philosophies. One says, “We know what the machine can do. But we don’t really know much about what you want to do with it. We’ll spend our time making sure you have all the options you want.” The other says, “We know exactly what you want to do. We’re going to make the machine do that. We’ll spend our time figuring how to make it do the right thing intuitively, quickly and easily.”

Which brings me to Leopard. I haven’t tried it, and I won’t be able to until the MC works under it. That’s a shame, because after four major upgrades, Apple has demonstrated that the OS can still be markedly improved, to a new level of interface simplicity and intuitiveness. Leopard makes it easier to find stuff, easier to back up, easier to share files, easier to stay organized. And as nice as Tiger looked, Leopard looks better.

To see what I mean, check out Apple’s Leopard guided tour video. It’s a half hour long, but when you’ve watched it, I think you’ll agree that Apple has found plenty of room for innovation in the supposedly staid world of operating system design. What I find so exciting is that many of the improvements make routine tasks, things we’re completely used to, all of a sudden seem old — because the designers found a simpler, more aesthetic, more visual and more intuitive way to do them.

They accomplished this by first deeply understanding what their customers are trying to do, and then by innovating — creating new and more intuitive ways to do those things.

All this begs the question about what Avid’s been doing low these many years. Way too many of the problems I have with the Media Composer have been around for a decade — not just bugs, but features that didn’t work right from the beginning. Yes, we’ve seen many innovations, but most have involved visual effects and color correction. When it comes to basic usability, we’re still working with Media Composer circa 1997. Luckily for Avid, Final Cut’s basic feature set hasn’t evolved much in the last couple of years (innovations have come in the suite instead) and before that, they were playing catch-up. But if Apple starts innovating the Final Cut interface as much as it has OSX, the MC is going to look awfully tired very quickly.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, User Interface

Comments: 7 Comments

Stop Competing with Yourself

October 2, 2007

To restate the obvious: editing is being democratized. The market is getting shorter and wider — less money per sale, more sales, more and more power in the box, less need for specialized hardware.

Avid has to lead in this world, not the old world of big hardware and fewer, higher-priced sales. The question is not whether they have the expertise to aggressively innovate — they do. The question is whether they can pry themselves loose from their old business model to do it.

In some ways, they don’t have to invent anything. They could make a very good start by rolling together all the goodness that now resides in the diverse and still separate applications they’ve bought over the years.

Wouldn’t you like to have some of these capabilities?

  • Background saves (never again be interrupted by a save).
  • Background rendering.
  • 5.1 mixing in the main application.
  • The ability to generate a DVD directly out of the timeline.
  • Compatibility with AJA hardware.

Where do you get all that? Not from Final Cut — from Liquid, which is now an Avid product.

Or this:

  • DPX file editing and conforming, all the way up to 4K.
  • Sample-based editing.
  • Nested sequences.

You get all that, plus all kinds of terrific effects capabilities, in DS.

And aren’t you eager to benefit from some of the sound editing and mixing capabilities that reside in Pro Tools? (Details in this post.)

Bottom line — Avid has to show it can lead in the way it empowers creative people. It once did that in spades — and it beat every competitor. It can do it again. But it has to take off the gloves and change the way it does business. Anything less than that is a formula for slow death.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs

Comments: 6 Comments

Too Suite?

September 25, 2007

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.

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Categories: Adobe Premiere, Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut, User Interface

Comments: 6 Comments

Toward a Unified Product Line

September 24, 2007

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:

  • Pinnacle Studio (competing with iMovie)
  • Xpress Pro lite (competing with Final Cut Express)
  • Media Composer (with Newscutter and Liquid functionality rolled in)
  • Nitris or DS (a full-bore finishing application)

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.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, User Interface

Comments: 5 Comments

How Many Editing Markets Are There?

September 20, 2007

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.

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Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Consumer Editing, Workflow

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