No AVID at NAB 2008

[Peter Jefferson]

Originally Posted by Andrew Farrell

I was pretty disappointed with DMF this year - No Sony, No Apple, No Videocraft. Was that because they were all at SMPTE earlier in the year? Pity I hadn't decided on what I wanted then and was hoping to have a final play with what I needed before I purchased.

No, its for the simple fact that these "festivals' aren't bringing in much cash. Last one we did cost us over $12k (about 5 years ago from memory) and it really wasn't worth our time.

[Peter Moretti]

This is a very bad move, IMHO. You don't begin to listen to your customers more by ignoring the single biggest customer gathering.

This is poor body language for Avid: Are they so desparate for cash that they need to save the cost of going? Are they afraid of being over shadowed by Apple? Are they retreating from the middle market, even though a lot of its members get promoted to the upper market? Do they have nothing impressive to offer?

To be honest, I think Apple's Final Cut can do to Avid what Microsoft's Excel did to Lotus 123. Lotus was a firmly entrenched product in the professional world, but Excel was considered more user friendly and reliable. People coming out of school liked Excel more than 123, and Excel played extra nice with an OS on the scene that was gaining ground: Windows.

With Apple's money and Steven Job's savy, the only ? in my mind is if Apple wants to essentially wipe out Avid in ~ ten years, not if they are realistically capable of doing it.

[Jacques Mersereau]

I purchased my own personal Avid back in 1996. Back then it was
the way to go and that interface for cuttiing is still elegant in its simplicity.
Apple got most of FCP from Avid.

That said, my view is that Avid is hurting big time. Apple has cut into
their territory and is running away with all the clients who don't need
Avid's massive, and massively expensive, media sharing network.
READ: Almost everyone!
The highest end clients are still Avid's and will be for a while longer,
but between FCP and Logic, this is the first sign the giant has
stumbled while grasping for his heart.

[Jacques Mersereau]

More info on the Avid rumor mill. I just spoke with a long time
Digi employee. He said that the Avid board forced out David Krall,
a good guy, and put in some woman who has no idea as
to what a pro tools rig does other than, "puts music into the
computer." She is the interim CEO, and she decided to bail
out of NAB, because the story goes, she does not really know
much about Avid or Digidesign or NAB for that matter.
When that decision was made, Avid stock dropped $3 that day.

This could be wrong, but that is what I have been told.

WMMV.

[Glenn Chan]

My thoughts on this:

1- Avid doesn't seem like they get what's happening with the desktop NLE market.

1a- Having a booth at NAB is a good way to reach this market. For the high-end market you can simply do your own thing at a hotel (Sony and some other companies do this) and be successful at it since you are dealing with a very very small # of customers. But the desktop market is high volume (e.g. 700,000 registered copies of FCP)... having no presence at NAB sends a bad message and means that these customers can't talk to Avid.

1b- Free DV is finally discontinued, and likely a sign of poor management. Ok there is some concern about cannibalizing sales. But it looks like they spent a lot of development effort crippling the product and not a lot on actually making sure it met its goal (getting people to learn the Avid user interface). It was too buggy for people to give it a fair shake.
And did they not learn anything from Pro Tools Free? Watered down, didn't work (crashes every other command on average... literally), and finally discontinued.

1c- They need to get rid of Xpress (or Xpress Pro) and just sell software-only Media Composer (or Symphony) at a similar price to FCS. The professional offline editing market is going to bottom out because of FCP... so there's little to gain from protecting it while Avid could be going after FCP's 700,000 users (and Adobe and the others). But by watering down its product into Xpress, Xpress just isn't a very compelling choice compared to FCP.

2- Bad marketing and public relations. Their press release backfired on them as most people picked up on the "not exhibiting at NAB". I'm not sure what message they were trying to send with the press release, but I think a lot of their customers are getting the wrong message... e.g. "not exhibiting at NAB because we can't afford it / we are on our way out". The information about their new marketing strategy is extremely vague... "we are changing our marketing strategy, but we can't tell you what it is yet".

The press release is just written really badly since the first line is not written for news. The most newsworthy/important piece of information needs to be in the very first line. The message of their press release seems to be "we are changing our marketing strategy, but we can't tell you what it is yet"... unfortunately that is not newsworthy (or not written in a way that lends itself to be newsworthy). So most people picked up instead on "we are not exhibiting at NAB"... which is the newsworthy bit in their press release.

The intended message and mechanics of their press release is really bad. They should have been saying something like "we are increasing our marketing budget". Or they should not have even released it.

long AAPL, short AVID has been a nice pairs trade for about 3 years running...Avid earnings has been flat to lower in the past year, while Apple's growth in the multimedia space has been through the roof....

I think one should keep in mind that both companies aren't solely in the NLE business. Most of Apple's business is in iPod, Mac computers, and in cell phones. I'm not that familiar with all of Avid's holdings, both I believe a lot of their holdings aren't in video editing (e.g. Pro Tools, playout, etc.).

[Peter Moretti]

I believe Avid's best longterm hope is to be bought by or do some type of partnership with Microsoft. Avid can't even turn a profit, how can they realistically compete with Apple for the long haul?

[Peter Jefferson]

Originally Posted by Peter Moretti

I believe Avid's best longterm hope is to be bought by or do some type of partnership with Microsoft. Avid can't even turn a profit, how can they realistically compete with Apple for the long haul?

Loyalty...
They rely on existing loyalties to keep them afloat.

To be honest, I see more people (we're talking high end studios) jumping to Matrox Axio and Vegas. Price is good, and functions are ideal. Working side by side they scream productivity, much more than Avid or FCP could ever be.

[Greg Penetrante]

hmmm. Could 'ever be'? Those are pretty strong words. That line of thought would imply that both companies (avid and apple) are not constantly improving their product.
Being a former Vegas user myself, I find the ergonomics and workflow of HD in FCP much more conducive to me being a more productive editor than Vegas 8 at this time.

best regards...

[David Parks]

http://www.avid.com/company/releases..._ceo_avid.html

Change is coming. For better for worse.

[Richard Alvarez]

Well, he seems to have great credentials for acquisitions and mergers... is that a good thing or a bad thing? Would have been nice to have someone with a little production in his background.

[David Parks]

Your right Richard. But at the very least maybe he can at least get Avid to work better with 3rd parties, maybe attract some capital investment, and generally infuse some genuine excitement for users again.

BTW, I've been editing on Final Cut 6 the last 3 weeks here for a NASA contractor. Overall, the titling is very limiting almost toy-like and doing title stacks is almost impossible. I even posted on the FCP section here and nobody had any definite solutions. basically there isn't a "Save As" function for the titler. The Avid titler is way better even though it is much older. Much more flexible. And even though we're running on a brand new quadcore with 8Gig of memory, moving from FCp to Motion, (used Primatte for greenscreen), it is terriibly slow, (A 35 minute render) much much slower than Media Composer using Spectramatte. Overall, it was easy to edit with, but slow and it crashed a few times. So, while FCp geneally did most things that Avid does, it is still not up to deadline intensive demanding editing in my opinion. I think that the FCP world of editors are mostly one man shops. But it is different when you've got someine breathing down your neck in an edit.

After editing on FCP, I have found new respect for what i have in Avid.

Cheers, Stay cool in the bay area and Merry Christmas.

[Glenn Chan]

basically there isn't a "Save As" function for the titler.

You can drag the title generator to your effects panel, name that, and stick it in a bin if need be. To have it stick around with your project file (instead of the Mac), drag those generator presets onto a new clip on a new sequence.

You can also duplicate items by option dragging (let go of option after you drag).

get Avid to work better with 3rd parties

I don't use Avid myself, but it seems like Avid has done a lot of work to have their product compatible with 3rd parties.

They created the OMF and AAF standards. And the nice thing about those standards is that they work (well AAF not all the time, but there are situations where it does work well). And it's not like they are forcing Avid users to do their audio in Pro Tools... OMF works in most other audio applications.

Avid's DNxHD codec is also cross-platform compatible... unlike Apple uncompressed, DVCPRO100/50, Prores, etc.

[Richard Alvarez]

Avid has worked really well with third party (software) apps, but has been slow to integrate new hardware boards and CAMERA formats. Still waiting for them to support Canon's 24f format. JVC has some issues with them still I think.

I'm not sure what the shake up in top management will mean. I'm not really sure what AVID's overall goal is. Consolidate and hold the top eschelon? Not good when you cede the 'middle' level of small shops and indy operations to FCP. Their aqusition of Liquid was a good move for the 'lower level'... but just spread the name out over different NLE constructs.

I've been saying for two years now, merge MC and AXP into one product. Open the ability to work with AJA/KONA/Blackmagic and go head to head in price with FCP. (That might cripple 'mojo' sales... not sure.) MC is a MUCH better app, and definitely primes the middle market to move up.

Season's greeting to all!

[Eric Stemen]

I'm going to Western Kentucky University for TV production right now. I have only run across one student who prefers avid over other NLEs. Most prefer, as many others have mentioned, Final Cut. A few, including me, prefer Adobe Premiere. At the moment, I don't see most of the people I go to school with wanting to learn Avid when we haven't seen it do anything better than Final Cut or Premiere. If our instructors would show us what it can do better we would be more likely to want to learn it.

[Richard Alvarez]

Eric,

Try cutting FILM on something other than Avid. Yeah, 'who cuts film anymore?' You might ask, "It's all going to be HD anyway." I suspect youre film(TV) department isn't shooting a lot of film.

All the NLE's do 'the same thing'. In as much as they all allow you to cut and paste clips into a timeline, and add transistions and effects. Sure, they are all 'the same' in that respect. But how they go about it, how they 'manage media' how the interact and interface with LARGE SYSTEMS that might be cutting in four or five edit suites simultaneously with the same files sharing on the same network (Think in terms of huge feature films).

Have you ever been in a SYmphony Suite? Seen what it can do in realtime? Media Composer with Adrenaline is blazing. And the interface is virtually identical to Avid XpressPro.

Frankly on a 'small scale', there isn't a lot to compare. It's when you ramp it up to cutting and conformiing feature film negatives, working with huge files on networks and broadcast scenarios where Avid shines. It's why AVID is still number one in feature films and broadcast.