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Avid DS has been EOLed
After whispers from resellers, the official/unofficial word has come down from Marianna on the Avid DS forum: Avid DS — Avid’s editorial/compositing/grading/finishing system — is EOL. There will be more info on what exactly this means to come later this week.
DS, originally from SoftImage, was utterly brilliant and a decade before its time 15 years ago. It had a fantastic user community who quietly delivered an awful lot of good work.
Unfortunately, Avid never really pushed DS after they acquired it. It had poor support for file-based sources and new camera formats, and it never got an integrated 3D space. The most promising development in recent years came from Eyeon software when they released a hook from DS into Fusion.
I trained a little bit on DS before ultimately picking Smoke for my needs, but I had kept hoping that Avid would eventually make the improvements DS deserved. Even though I never used DS for a paying gig, I’m sad to see it go.
I’m very glad to see that Adobe, Apple and Autodesk have continued to invest in their solutions to keep them relevant. I think at this point that Pr, FCPX, Smoke and MC are all fundamentally good pieces of software that serve different niches very well. I hope none of them fall behind like DS did, and I hope that the coming years prove Avid a better steward of MC than they were of DS.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
9 Replies
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Time to start the Move to Smoke or Not: The Debate forum.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Time to start the Move to Smoke or Not: The Debate forum.”
LOL!!
Seriously, DS being EOL’ed is sad news but we could have seen it coming. DS has really been left behind in the past years and I guess it would have taken too much of an investment to get it’s code up to date with today’s technologies. We have taken the FCPX/Smoke 2013 route without any regrets.
– Ronny
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Very sad indeed. I have spent the last 14 years working on DS. And yes, it has been long overdue for a re-write. No question it has suffered as file-based acquisition has taken over. Once you have ingested everything in DS there are very few edit systems with it’s power. Yes, the 3D sucks but we never relied on DS for 3D. At one point we had 7 systems cranking out over 7,000 commercials a year for GM. They were rock solid and never failed us. We use Premiere, MC and FCP as well but nothing has the all-in-one power of DS. Thanks to Sylvan for all his support through the years.
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Maybe avid is making space to purchase the adobe production bundle as soon as the cloud crashes and adobe decides to become a cloud marketing onle company.
ricardo
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[Ricardo Marty] “Maybe avid is making space to purchase the adobe production bundle as soon as the cloud crashes and adobe decides to become a cloud marketing onle company.”
I don’t mean to interrupt your axe grinding, but if DS had seen even a fraction of the development that After Effects and Premiere Pro have in the last few years, it wouldn’t have fallen so far behind the times and more of us might be using it now.
Whatever you think of subscription, Adobe has been very committed to developing their digital video apps. There’s currently every indication that this will continue under CC, and arguably improve with more frequent releases, and any DS user would have been envious of that kind of development effort.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
I was chatting with the SGO guys at IBC (as I do some consulting for them), and I think they would be more than interested in offering some form of ‘DS Replacement’ option with Mistika…
If anyone is interested in the possibilities I could get some official word from them?
Steve
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DS and Mistika’s toolsets have much in common although DS doesn’t come close in terms of performance.
http://www.HDhead.com
HD and D-cinema Consultant -
For those that asked for more info, there is some news on the SGO website home page: https://www.sgo.es/
Steve
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