Letter from Avid CEO

[Peter Moretti]

Avid management has done a world wide tour and has heard much of what you are raising in your posting. While it is difficult to change the past, the important part of "New Thinking" is the change being put into place to correct for a lot of these areas. Will it happen over night? No. But knowing what to correct for and prioritization of those issues is the first step.

A lot of the changes are still in course, and management of a finite number of engineering resources versus all the solutions Avid provides into a postproduction market whether that be feature film, television, news, broadcast, of form a single point editor to very large scaled collaborative environment - it is a huge effort as you can imagine.

But one of the major changes you will see over time as a change to past managements is looking to all the Avid owned companies as separate companies and truly making it one. With that comes a lot of work due to differences in data models, compositional structure, metadata representations, etc. There are four major and different code bases for core editors: Media Composer/Symphony, DS, Pro Tools, and Liquid. Each one with their own advantages unique approach to a similar challenges.

And yes, RED is another camera in a market where there seems to be a new camera every other week. Even cameras from the same manufacturer use different essence and metadata wrapping. Some manufacturers go outside the specification (HDV for example) to provide a unique offering in what is now a very competitive market. All of this lands on the NLE at the end of the production day. So not only do we need to ensure the single point editing product can deal with it, but also through the entire post chain of Avid shared solutions. From ingest to archive.

I don't say this as an excuse for any faults in the past - all issues have two sides to them and New Thinking is also about understanding needs and priorities and working with the customer as a partner to move forward together. It is the first step of many.


Michael

Michael,

I truly don't envy your position of having to defend some of Avid's past practices while at the same time explaining its new approach. But you do it admirably. So please keep up the good work, and hopefully there is a bright future out there for Avid and those of us who use its platforms.

Thanks again.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

Michael,

From your earlier post, it would seem a codec like Cineform would be the ideal solution for a number of reasons. Cineform can handle the transcoding of the native camera file to Cineform and if Avid provides top rate support of Cineform, then you have a winning solution.

In the case of RED, there's no doubt that Cineform will support it in some fashion, and then if Avid were to support Cineform... You get the idea..

As a customer: I posted a while ago what has kept me from Avid. It's actually the same thing that has kept me from learning FCP: A closed system. If I were able to integrate my Avid with other software easliy or use my files to edit on more than one platform, then I would have a winning situation.

It looks like the editor for me would be the Avid Media Composer Nitris DX. But can I finish on this system? That's important for the smaller stuff.


Now I do need one thing cleared up: What is this I hear from people about Avid's "support costs"? One guy says, "I can't use Avid, no way I am paying $2,000 a year for support!!"

I assumed this was for the higher end stuff. Is this the case? Do you really need a support plan to be able to edit with Avid?

What's the deal here?

Jay

 

[Greg M]

Now I do need one thing cleared up: What is this I hear from people about Avid's "support costs"? One guy says, "I can't use Avid, no way I am paying $2,000 a year for support!!"

I assumed this was for the higher end stuff. Is this the case? Do you really need a support plan to be able to edit with Avid?

Jay,
All systems manufactures offer support plans, it is simply that a "support" plan. It is not required to use the product. But as a professional you would quickly understand its value to your business. The support plan offers access to the technical support team and it also offers replacement hardware when something fails. It is an extension of your warranty.

If you make a living with the system, then you would be foolish to not be under a support plan. It keeps you running in the event of a systems failure, for example lets say your I/O board fails in the middle of a job...you call tech support and the next morning Fedex arrives with a replacement. Your client is happy and your accountant is happy because you would have spent more than $2,000 on the new hardware.

It obviously also keeps you up to date on the latest version of Avid software. Recently our MCA went down, the problem was a bad Adrenaline box...over $10k to replace. Support had us a new one the next morning and the session continued. This one incident paid for 5 years of support.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

I see your point. It's not a world I have lived in just yet being a "one-man shop" but I see your point

Jay

 

[Michael Lindsay]

basic Avid support is not unreasonable.... how they handle it sometimes is a problem... with their 'new Thinking' the basic costs are OK...

 

[Dylan Reeve]

If I were able to integrate my Avid with other software easliy or use my files to edit on more than one platform, then I would have a winning situation.

For what it's worth, Avid has DNxHD currently which is a 'mastering quality' codec that is both cross-platform and freely available to end users. This makes workflows from Avid to things like After Effects somewhat easier than they are with Apple's ProRes for example.

It looks like the editor for me would be the Avid Media Composer Nitris DX. But can I finish on this system? That's important for the smaller stuff.

That depends on what you mean by finish really. Media Composer Nitris DX will support up to 1080 uncompressed. It has a capable colour grading toolset, although lacks in-built secondaries (although that functionality can be emulated with by combining the grading with key and matte effects).

I'd generally have no problem with finishing broadcast HD work in Media Composer. But with no native support for DPX or greater-than-HD resolutions it is limited in some respects.