Little Frog in High Def

I think, more than anything, it's due to the fact that Avid's eggs are all in one basket. It's not a diversified company. Apple's wide product line is well known, and Adobe's software line extends into web publishing, animation, compositing, digital photography, etc., etc.

People don't realize that Avid makes things other than NLEs. Several years ago I was talking to a former Avid employee who said that they make money from broadcast installations not from NLE sales.

What's $25k or so for an NLE when you have a TV station spending several million dollars for much of the infrastructure that goes into making a TV station? Think about it, Avid sells CGs, servers, newsroom computers, automation systems, etc. This list goes on.

Well, then it looks like full blown station installations are down too.

My guess, stations have been spending millions for the past decade for the DTV transition. There have been lots of mergers during that time, meaning many stations are now owned by even fewer companies. Then the economy tanked. Ad revenue is down, stations are spending less on new gear and trying to get by with what they've got. The internet has become a major competitor to TV. Also in that time UPN and WB merged into The CW. Quite a few stations went dark as a result, everything snowballs… you get the picture.

Link points to:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/84502p

Instead of:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/84502

As it should.

MAN…thanks for that. I always leave some H or P in there from my template.

Thanks,

Shane

If Adobe bought Avid, then Apple would get the kind of competition it needs.

That would be easier for Adobe than trying to make people take Premiere seriously. This is nothing to do with features and workflows – it's image and perception.

Ever since FCP came out I have been saying for years that Avid will go bankrupt and it looks more and more that way, they will either fold or sell to another company, never liked the Avid, FCP is king specially in the mid and mid high end suites.

alex4d-

I think Adobe on its own is already starting to bite into Apple's share a little bit, and I think it's a trend that's going to continue. I also believe that this is a major reason for the price drop in FCS.

The task in front of Adobe right now is to make Premiere acceptable to the masses. I think that's far easier than Apple's task to close the gaps between Motion/After Effects, Aperture/Photoshop, ?/Illustrator, etc., etc. More and more workflows involve compositing these days, *and* more workflows are oriented to web delivery. Adobe has the edge in both.

Don't get me wrong – I'm a big fan of FCP, and I've spent many hours carrying the FCP banner in my business. But I do see Adobe being all the competition Apple wants, and then some.

If Apple were to roll Shake into FCP, they would have done it by now. I think they're content to keep incrementally improving the product, getting it in the hands of as many young people as they can, and, end of the day, selling a lot of machines that run FCP.

Just my .02

I've been surprised to see so many Avid installations still running in the documentary TV world (ie, doing shows for History, Discovery, etc.). Not only are a lot of major companies still running Avid, but they're running many-years-old installations.

It saddens me, really, to walk into an edit suite circa 2004.

The good news is that those older installations can't go on forever, and when they come up for replacement, I think Final Cut will have a good chance of replacing them.

Avid let this happen. It tried to move its future to the PC when the Mac still obviously had a lot of life left in it. It let Apple use changing technology to create a far better value. It didn't develop a competitive suite on the Mac. Etc. etc. This is really a business case-book study in the making…

Helmut,

Unity is the reason so many places are using Avid for that kind of work. In a multi-editor environment many people would much rather work on 4 year old Avids on a Unity network than on FCP/XSAN. Also, for the offline/online workflow where you are going to another facility for finishing, Avid offline edits still give you far fewer headaches than FCP offline edits.

I cut on both and love both. But for me each has advantages over the other. If I'm the only editor on a project and I'm going to do the finishing work myself, I would prefer to cut on FCP. However, when it's a show with multiple editors give me an Avid on a Unity network.

I'm with Dan on this. There are many cases where I'd rather be editing on an Avid. Shared environments and Unity are just too good…put FCP and XSAN to absolute shame. And I'd still use Avid on docs, sure…and I still do. I love Avid…NOW. Back in the Adrenaline days I moved to FCP and was happy to be on a stable system. But now Avid is rock solid and I love it.

It just takes me a week to shift editing gears and get my pace on the other editing system. I hope they don't go anywhere…Feature Film editing alone would suffer without Avid.

I don't think AVID is going anywhere for a while. With $100+ million in cash and no debt, they can self-finance with cash flow while the economy turns around. I've been pleased with the work they are doing to re-tool their product lineup and while I don't think they will get back to the dominance they once had, I also don't think they will just disappear. Now, if someone were to come along and buy them…. that's a different story.

It's interesting that you guys mention Unity, but the first three companies I was thinking of when I made my comment about finding Avid in the doc world don't happen to use Unity, or any shared storage solution at all.

One company, which produced about 70+ hours of programming annually, simply installed a 72GB removable hard drive into their capture station, digitized the footage, then walked the drive over to an edit suite and installed the drive into the Avid's raid rack.

I've seen similar variations on that theme. All of these companies, by the way, would work with off-line material, and then online somewhere else (which also seems like a pretty archaic approach). They would create HD shows, but the editors and producers would never work with a single frame in HD.

Anyway, I don't want to see Avid out of business either, but my loyalties are ultimately with Final Cut (provided there's not another 27 month wait for a moderate upgrade to Studio).

Had Apple not come along, Avid would have continued to keep editing tools limited to a very premium market. Apple is the one that changed that, not Avid, and I bet that continues to be the case….

I think I know which company you are talking about Helmut. They just went out of business after close to two decades of producing quality cable docs. I've done a couple of shows with them. For most of their shows they only had one editor, thus a Unity wasn't necessary. However for shows that had more than one editor, like the one I just recently did for them, they rented a Unity.

Finishing out of house still has its merits in the Avid world. Cost of equipment being one of the biggest factors. A Symphony costs a lot more than a Media Composer, sufficient storage to do HD at 1:1 costs a lot more than storage needed to offline at 15:1s, you see where I'm going with this.

Don't forget color correction. A lot of editors can do a decent job color correcting, but producers often want more than most editors are capable or comfortable handling. That is why you still see a lot of shows offlined on MC, conformed on a Symphony, and color corrected on a da Vinci. Hell, I even see a lot of shows offlined and conformed on FCP and colored on da Vinci. The best colorists I've worked with do only color. They don't edit, they don't want to edit.

Dave makes a great point about cash flow. And besides Avid still owns plenty of other areas in production, audio, and operations even if they have slipped in the NLE arena. They won't be going away any time soon.

Good guess work, Dan!

See, that's my problem with the Avid world: doing high-end work often means using the most expensive set ups and workflows. Unitys. Symphonys. Da Vincis. Time wasted to redig tapes. Etc. etc.

This can't and won't last. People are already successfully building 8TB shared storage solutions for $10K, connected via Ethernet (supports a few streams of ProRes just fine). It's not as sleek a solution as a Unity, I'm sure, but it can get the job done now and the tech will continue to evolve quicker than a Unity will.

And instead of paying for a DaVinci in a stylish post-production studio, why can't I send out a hard drive with my show's final cut to a freelance colorist who works out of his/her home? A freelancer can't afford a DaVinci, but they can certainly afford a fast Color 1.5 workstation, FSI monitor, a color control surface, and some neutral paint and black out shades. Do most cable shows really demand more than that? The profit margin for a lot of these shows isn't huge, and as a producer, I have to wonder if it's really worth it to sit in a $100K studio with a staff colorist to work on a show that is comprised mostly of interviews and B-roll footage.

Tech-based businesses like ours always evolve downwards, in terms of costs. The problem with Avid is that it's not *leading* this trend downwards. Apple is (and Adobe to some extent). Despite Avid trying to get more competitive lately, it's still so invested in the high-end, "premium" side of the business that it's unwilling to truly participate in the inevitable "creative destruction" of that same high-end.

So it's left to somebody else (Apple, etc.) to carry out that destruction and win all the customers who want to do more for less, which is most of them.

OKay, time for me to get back to work…. ;-)

Shane said "Back in the Adrenaline days I moved to FCP and was happy to be on a stable system. But now Avid is rock solid and I love it."

Is that Avid on a Mac because I use Symphony on Vista and Jeebus H it's shonky… As an assistant, I rue the nights I have to use it , it's just so unstable, and we have two of 'em.

Yeah, any time I get on an Avid on a PC, it's no fun.

Avid on Vista?!?! Now that's a scary thought! All of the PC Avids I've worked on are running either Windows 2000 or XP Pro.