Xpress Pro Exit Stage Left

Posted May 7, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut

Tell me again — what is Xpress Pro doing for Avid? Sure, when Media Composer meant Adrenaline, Xpress Pro gave Avid something that ran on the desktop. But now that Media Composer can run fine without extra hardware, Xpress just exists to support Media Composer’s high price. That might have looked ingenious to Avid management a year ago, but today it’s wasting resources and confusing editors.

Xpress is nobody’s first choice. The only reason you use it is because it’s cheaper. That breeds a subtle resentment. If you’re familiar with Media Composer, and you do a show with Xpress, you have to go through a week figuring out how to outsmart it and work around its limitations. The fact that you can do this makes you unconsciously lose respect for Avid. If you are a new user, your value proposition is this: either buy the full version of Final Cut, no limits, with all its applications, or get the stripped-down version of Media Composer — for $300 more! What kind of weird motivation makes you buy MC? “Well, it’s used by professionals. I better get it. Even though the pros use the pro version, I’ll be fine with the amateur version.” Nobody thinks that way. You get angry at Avid for its lack of respect for what you do — and you love Apple for liberating you.

But the worst part of this is that Xpress, by its very existence, is sucking resources from Media Composer and weakening Avid’s ability to compete. It requires its own engineers, support staff, testers, its own marketing, packaging, distribution, it’s own part of their website. Somebody has to figure out what features to take out of Media Composer to create Xpress and what features to put into Xpress to make it compete with Final Cut. It’s an impossible proposition.

Collectively, Avid has lots of great engineers — but they work on so many different products that their creativity is dissipated. How many editing applications does the company make? Xpress Pro, Media Composer, Symphony Nitris, DS, Pinnacle, Liquid and Newscutter. Many run on both Mac and PC.

Avid is making a valiant effort to support its margins by keeping the editing world segmented. Apple is breaking down those barriers by offering a Swiss Army Knife at a low price. Long term, Avid cannot win at this game. All the energy involved in differentiating its products is subtracted from the core issue: innovation and leadership. The first and easiest move is to get rid of Xpress — and lower the price of Media Composer.

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Helpful Tutorials

Posted May 3, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid

Avid has posted some useful (and free) tutorials at this address.

There’s a very good overview of the powerful new motion tracking tools in Media Composer 2.7, and an introduction to SpectraMatte, the new, high-quality keyer.

There’s also a long (and slow!) overview of HD workflow in Adrenaline, as well as an introduction to the Marquee titling tool.

The tutorials seem to be the free portion of Alex, Avid’s fee-based online training service. But thankfully, you don’t have to go through the needlessly complex Alex interface to see them.

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Turn it Off

Posted May 1, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Quality of Life

I’m starting to think that the fastest way we Americans could help reduce global warming is by just turning stuff off when it’s not in use. I’m a bicyclist and I can’t begin to count the number of people I ride by who are sitting in parked cars, talking on their cell phones — with their engines running. Folks, you are getting zero miles per gallon!

We could do a lot just by turning lights off when they’re not in use. How many rooms in your home are lit up at night with nobody using them? In post-production, we leave the juice on way more than we need to. Do you leave all the lights on in your cutting rooms when you go to lunch? Or when you go home at night? Lots of people leave their whole editing setup on 24/7.

Last year Canon estimated that about 44 million kilowatt-hours of electricity would be wasted in Great Britain by leaving office equipment on standby over the ten-day Christmas holiday. The price for all those machines doing nothing was estimated to be about $17 million, or about 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere.

Yes, I’ve heard that hard drives last longer if they’re never turned off. Maybe so. But drives are a lot more reliable now than they used to be. It’s hard to believe that turning a drive off a few hundred times a year makes much of a difference, when Seagate says their drives can easily go to 100,000 stop/start cycles. Could take a while to use that up.

Maybe it’s time for us editors to start turning things off at night. We could save a lot of watt-hours, and these days we need to do as much of that as we can.

Comments: 5 Comments

Who is the Customer?

Posted April 30, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Final Cut

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.

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Avid First Quarter Results

Posted April 28, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid

On Thursday, Avid reported their first quarter results, showing flat revenues from the same period a year ago and net income of just $20,000 — essentially zero. The company also announced that it would take $100 million from its working capital and buy its own stock back.

On Friday, Avid stock dropped in price by almost 13% (chart).

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Dual Res All the Time

Posted April 27, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow

Adding to yesterday’s post about things Avid could do to improve it’s editing applications, let’s take a look at how we up-res a show.

It seems to me that the duplicate/decompose/redigitize workflow that we use now is very much “Version 1.” It’s flexible, sure, but all that flexibility adds up to a lot of complexity, too. And in the world of feature films, where we inevitably continue to make picture changes after a first conform, the decompose process gets even more complicated.

I want the system to take all the bookkeeping out of this and transparently keep track of two parallel sets of media, allowing me to use whichever resolution is appropriate. The key is that you work with one and only one version of your sequence. The system connects it, as needed, to the low-res media or the high-res media. You can make picture changes either way. If you’re looking at the high-res media and want to extend a shot, the system knows that the extension doesn’t exist at high res and uses low-res media as needed. When you’re ready to conform, it automatically asks for the needed tapes and loads whatever extensions are needed.

Now wouldn’t that be a whole lot easier than what we do now?

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