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MultiRez — How Not to Add a New Feature

December 22, 2007

I recently stumbled on a whole new set of features in Adrenaline, and now, having spent a couple of hours with the help files, I’m confused. Avid has obviously spent a lot of effort on this, but the new capabilities are explained so awkwardly that I’m not surprised nobody I know is aware of them. It seems that the features could work in a typical feature or TV environment, but not until more functionality is added.

MultiRez and Dynamic Relink allow you to create two sets of media files, one, say at 14:1 and the other at 1:1 — that apply to the same master clips. You can edit with the 14:1 media and just use the 1:1 material for output. The system will automatically switch from one to the other depending on what you’re trying to do. Sounds pretty good huh? Why didn’t anybody tell us about this?

The answer begs the question of how existing editors learn (or don’t learn) about new features in Media Composer. This applies to all kinds of new capabilities, many of which are underutilized in Hollywood. Examples include sophisticated effects like SpectraMatte (way better than the old Avid Chroma Key Effect) or the new motion tracker, or timewarp motion effects, as well as much more mundane stuff like volume graphing or clip colorizing (described here).

Avid’s help files are broken up into little chunks of information, with the result that you often have to wade through a lot of pages before you get an overview of a new feature and how you might actually use it. MultiRez is no exception.

MultiRez allows you to associate multiple media files with the same master clip, and, even better, allows you to have sections of a master clip available at various resolutions. That’s revolutionary and could be the foundation for a slick DI conforming engine. But one key feature appears to be missing — the ability to re-digitize a sequence without decomposing.

The docs imply that MultiRez is aimed at news environments and “is available only on Avid editing systems that have the Avid Interplay Media Indexer installed.” I guess that means that it requires Interplay, and that’s probably why nobody I know has heard of it.

I’m hoping that Avid makes this facility available to the rest of us. It sure would make the conforming process simpler. Meanwhile, the help files need some redesign. Most important, it’s time that we take a thorough look at how existing editors learn about Media Composer improvements. New features don’t help if nobody knows they’re there.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Comments: 4 Comments

Avid Names a New CEO

December 20, 2007

In a much anticipated development, Avid announced the hiring of Gary Greenfield as CEO and chairman of the board. He’ll replace Nancy Hawthorne, who served as temporary CEO while a permanent replacement for David Krall was found. Hawthorne will assume the role of lead director on the board. Avid’s press release included the following quotes:

Hawthorne: “We sought a leader who had direct experience in helping complex and multi-dimensional public companies achieve their goals. Gary is an outstanding choice to lead the company into a new era of growth.”

Greenfield: “Avid has a rich 20-year history as a vibrant and innovative technology pioneer, whose family of brands stands at the forefront of technology for the digital media and entertainment industries — that’s what made the opportunity to join the company so attractive. I believe Avid can become a true media powerhouse and I am excited to lead that charge.”

Greenfield formerly led a company called GXS, a “provider of business-to-business integration, synchronization and collaboration solutions.” You can listen to the company’s conference call introducing Greenfield here. (I couldn’t make it work on a Mac. Maybe you’ll have better luck on a PC.)

Technorati Tags: avid, edit

Categories: Avid

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Totally Portable – Not!

December 9, 2007

I’m about to start a mix and I thought that it would be nice to have my whole show available on a laptop while we worked. This can be helpful in a pinch, and I figured it would be easy to arrange. Four hours of frustration later, I’m not so sure.

We have about 7,000 OMF media files taking up about 200 gigs of space and living on six Unity partitions. Each partition has a separate media folder, and each one contains two “msm” files, which constitute an index of what’s on the drive. The MC needs those files, and if they’re not there, it will create them.

My task was to move all that of our media into a single folder on a firewire drive and open that up with the laptop system. The folder would be re-indexed and all would be well.

Trouble is, MC-software won’t index that media folder. Roughly half way through the initial scan it consistently crashes. That seemed awfully strange to me, so I tried using our main Adrenaline machine to create the index (taking Unity offline, connecting the firewire drive and starting up the MC). That worked fine. So I figured I had a good index and could now open the firewire drive on the laptop. Nope — even with a good index, the laptop wants to scan the drive — and crashes halfway through.

There are differences between the desktop and laptop systems: one is a quad-G5 tower with four gigs of RAM, the other, and core duo Mac Pro with 2 gigs. I’ve never known one to be allergic to drives indexed with the other, but you never know.

So I created a much smaller media files folder with just a couple of hundred clips — the laptop was able to index that just fine. And I was able to add media files to that folder successfully — but only until I got to around 3,000 files, at which point the laptop would crash halfway through the scan — leaving behind a corrupted index.

After four hours trying all of the above and everything else I and our rental house could think of, I gave up.

Maybe a system with 2 gigs of RAM can’t read a big index. Maybe an Intel system can’t read a big index. Maybe an Intel system can’t read an index created on a G5. But one way or the other, I can’t take my show on the road.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film

Categories: Avid, Avid Technical Tips, Laptop Editing, Workflow

Comments: 6 Comments

Avid’s Consumer Strategy

November 18, 2007

Nancy Hawthorne, Avid’s new interim CEO, spoke to stock analysts at the JP Morgan Small/Mid Cap Conference in Boston a couple of weeks ago and said some interesting and important things. The company “did not integrate the several acquisitions that we did particularly well, and as a result, we have kind of a mishmash of different systems, and the company has not been positioned strategically to operate as a seamless entity in presenting a lineup of products to the marketplace.”

That’s certainly true and it’s great to hear a high-level Avid executive say so. She also talked about the company’s new focus on product quality, again a very positive thing.

She stressed the company’s expertise with big enterprise customers, and, regarding the Pinnacle division, commented, “we do need to understand what role the lower-end technology plays in our lineup. Is it strategically critical to us, or is it not?”

A week later Apple dropped the price of Final Cut Express from $300 to $200, added a mixed HD/SD timeline, and improved compatibility with iMovie.

All of which begs a key question: can Avid make a business at the top of the professional market and avoid direct competition with Apple, or is there really only one, increasingly democratized market that everybody is part of, one way or another? To put it another way, can you envision a future where young people use iMovie and FC Express and then come to Hollywood and switch to Media Composer?

Maybe — but for that to work, Avid would have to be innovating like mad in the professional world, with a product that was clearly and unambiguously superior. If FCP and MC are even roughly competitive, then it seems to me that you have to go after mindshare — which means you gotta get ’em young. Apple hasn’t won this game yet — iMovie ’08 got a decidedly mixed reception when it was introduced, and there’s a huge paradigm shift between iMovie and Final Cut. Avid, coming later to the party, could build something more consistent and scalable.

But either way, whether Avid wants to go after the whole shebang or just the professional market, they’ve gotta get busy with the software, making it sing for the people who use it, namely editors.

My intuition is that there’s only one game in town. Focusing on the pro market can only succeed as a temporary strategy. In the end, you’ve gotta duke it out at all levels. Otherwise the pressure from below will kill you.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, final cut pro

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

Comments: 4 Comments

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.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut

Comments: 8 Comments

HD Notes on Iron Man

November 9, 2007

The ACE tech blog has posted some useful information about the use of DNxHD-36 on the show “Iron Man,” edited by Dan Lebental. I’m eager to shift to this workflow, but it sounds like there have been some pretty significant growing pains.

Iron Man Update

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film

Categories: Avid, Workflow

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