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AVID Presentation Thurs at KeyCode – the natives were restless.
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[Tim Wilson] ” the newest version of Liquid was very FCPX-like: one window, insanely nimble, with a lot of extra power (albeit presented modally) that neither FCPX nor anyone has really attempted at the same degree — outstanding CG (DIRECTLY tied to the broadcast engine of Deko that was one of the core drivers of the whole thing), a terrific integrated DVD authoring interface (the best I’d seen), and the best multi-format support on the market — including uncompressed.”
I think I am the only one who ever stated the cool attributes of Liquid. I used to own it.
[Tim Wilson] “Liquid was compelling technology to reach a market where Avid had no play…but it was by no means easy money.”
Liquid was way a head of the the other NLE at the time.
[Tim Wilson] “It happens that Liquid (with the Blue hardware configuration) was the only Avid product that supported uncompressed video at the time.”
Liquid could also edit HD without additional hardware. It used the GPU back in 2004 right as Pinnacle was buying out Fast Multimedia. Fast implemented background rendering in 2000.
[Tim Wilson] “To be honest, I was surprised that Xpress Pro lasted for another couple of years, but not at all surprised that Liquid carried for years after that — again, 5 years as a product, and supported for 2 more years after that.”
? Avid stopped development of Liquid in 2007. There was no Liquid 8 or as Avid stated. Liquid 8 means Liquidate.
[Tim Wilson] “Certainly enough to set to rest the fiction that Avid bought it to kill it.”
I think they bought Liquid to implement the background rendering and GPU acceleration into Avid MC.
[Tim Wilson] “It died a natural death as Avid focused on exactly what they should have been focused on in post, where Liquid lived: dual-platform, team-oriented, feature and TV editing.”
I think Liquid was purchased to help improve MC.
[Tim Wilson] “I still treasure every cycle I spent working on Liquid and its community — and it was a huge part of what I did my last year-plus at Avid.”
Are you saying after Avid bought Pinnacle the Avid folks started doing the coding for Liquid in the USA? I thought the development team for Liquid was in Munich Germany.
[Tim Wilson] “I was also nuts about the Pinnacle product folks I got to work with, in both post and broadcast.”
I don’t think I ever seen you post about the Liquid software. I have many times.
[Tim Wilson] “What he said to us afterward was that we’d had it coming. We weren’t doing well enough. We needed to do better.”
As I have stated a few times Avid had background rendering and GPU acceleration before FCPX but the credit needs to go to Fast Multimedia and Pinnacle Systems. I think Avid made some very bad choices by ending my software of choice but I am not biter. I don’t post hate for Avid daily. I used to edit on a Mac based MC. I liked it but times have changed.
[Tim Wilson] “While most Apple customers are happy enough with the outcome, I simply refuse to believe that they wouldn’t be happier if they insisted on the same level of accountability from Apple displayed by other industry leaders, and Apple actually did it. Nothing bad comes from public accountability, and it’s silly to argue that it does.”
I know some FCPX users would not dare to question Apple but I would.
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[Tim Wilson] “[andy patterson] “I am not sure it was the HDV codec.”
It was absolutely not the HDV codec. That article was pulling stuff out of thin air based on what THEY found compelling in Liquid, which is fine, but it never came up internally. Avid’s commitment was to 100% native HDV editing, and they wound up shipping that feature very late as a result.”
I stated I am not sure the HDV code was the reason. Liquid could edit native HDV because it used the GPU and CPU back in 2004. They may have had a proprietary codec but the GPU acceleration and background rendering was more impressive.
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[andy patterson] “I think Liquid was purchased to help improve MC.”
Not in the least. Please re-read what I wrote. I was there. This was my job. That was not the case.
Your opinions about the relative value of MC vs. Liquid are completely valid because they reflect your experience, but objectively speaking, they also underscore the reasons why what you’re suggesting was impossible. The two products had completely divergent goals, technology bases, and customer bases. They had nothing whatsoever to do with each other. There was no competition — hence nothing was “killed” to “protect” something else — but also no complementarity.
[Note: I edited the above paragraph quite a while after I posted it, because I overstated my personal perspective as reflecting Avid’s corporate priorities. As it turns out, the two were not in fact always the same. ]
The area that interested me most was graphics integration. Avid had half a dozen graphics technologies it seemed like — Marquee (which came out of the Elastic Reality purchase and team, and vastly more power than was being tapped), the built-in titler, Deko (including the database stuff), the 3D technology coming out of Softimage (which was oriented toward characters, not objects and rigs like text requires….but I still felt was worth investigating because Deko lacked true 3D capabilities)….plus some very compelling technology (if I say so myself) licensed from Boris FX (basically, Boris RED rebadged as Avid FX), which I’d been the product manager for before coming to Avid….and I couldn’t find a single meaningful way to get even TWO of these talking to each other, much less all of them.
I want to emphasize that I have zero engineering skills. I’m speaking strictly from a product management perspective viewed through an end-user lens. But no, nothing like this was gonna happen. Engineers later confirmed my suspicions in vastly more dimensions than I’d considered. ????
So please believe me when I say that there was NO intent to somehow “use” Liquid to improve MC. It’s one thing to say that MC should have had some Liquid features, but in practice, even something as “simple” (but not actually simple at all) as Liquid’s hella GPU acceleration were irrelevant to the core workflow needs for the core MC audience in 2005.
Nothing about the two are related. The sooner you let go of this, the sooner the whole picture will come into view.
Not that it’s not fun to play compare-and-contrast. Of course it is. That’s some of why we’re here. But what you’re talking about as an end-user doesn’t factor into what actually happened.
[andy patterson] “Are you saying after Avid bought Pinnacle the Avid folks started doing the coding for Liquid in the USA? I thought the development team for Liquid was in Munich Germany. “
Liquid development stayed in Munich. The product management team was in Mountain View. I was product marketing at Avid HQ, which was then an hour outside the Boston area (Tewksbury to be exact), which is where Avid worldwide sales was based — but Liquid’s two sales managers were located in Chicago (Blue, with its heavy iron IO and storage) and Dallas (the rest of the Liquid line, including software-only and lighter-weight hardware.)
We all got along great. We got together now and again in various locales around the world (including for my counterpart in Mountain View and the lead developer in Munich, one night at my apartment in Boston), and we all knew how to use phones, too. The object of the game was to create the fewest possible obstacles to people continuing to do what they were doing, so not wasting time and money uprooting large teams. Keep doing what you’re doing, ppl. That part of it worked just fine.
[andy patterson] “I don’t think I ever seen you post about the Liquid software.”
You’ve only been here a fraction of the time that I’ve been here, and I’ve alas been pulled away and hardly posting in the past year when you’ve been most active. (I really do hope to get back to it.)
I was also posting here for many years before I started working here, going back to 1996 in our original incarnation. I’ve certainly written about my role working with Liquid at Avid before in many posts and a variety of articles in the COW library (as well as other aspects of my life with Avid and other companies in the industry), so I’m not sure what relevance that has to anything.
Of course you and I have very different ideas about relevance, but that’s fine too. It’s your forum. I just work here. ????????
Heaven knows I’m not recommending that anyone go back and read 20 years of my nonsense here. ???? I’m barely tolerable in the present tense, ideally in vastly smaller doses than I typically dole out.
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[greg janza] “What’s notable about your thoughts is that you add the comparison to Apple and from my perspective Avid and Apple are similar in at least one regard. Both companies had a dedicated and loyal video professional user base. But each company made strategic moves that ended up alienating a sizable percentage of that professional user base and I’d argue that as a result both companies have permanently lost a significant portion of those users.”
I agree completely.
In Apple’s case, I’m on the record of buying 100% into their logic. They didn’t want to split their focus, but instead chose to go all-in on a new direction, no looking back. They did this for the first time in 1984 with Macintosh, and in fact never recovered the market share that the Apple II had. As an Apple II customer since 1979, this cheesed me off, to say the least. ???? My then-girlfriend, now wife (since 1985, in fact) was the first person I knew to buy a Mac, in February 1984, but like me, she kept her II around for years to keep using the software that in some cases never did make its way to Mac.
That’s the price everyone pays for being a Mac customer. At some point, it’s YOUR turn to be burned. But the results are the results. When we started our video production company in 1990, there wasn’t a single second’s hesitation about which platform we’d build it on. We just went in assuming it was a matter of time until they hosed us again. System 7, anyone? ???? As bad as anything that any company has ever done to its customers. FAR worse than MS Vista, imo. And others after that. You roll with it, or you don’t.
I can say this as a then-outsider, but I found Avid’s approach with products like MC Express and Xpress DV to be infuriating. It’s like they were trying to piss you off into buying a Media Composer by keeping out critical workflow features. (You won’t let me use the most common MC keyboard shortcuts and resolutions?!?) Wrong. People just wound up pissed off. I’ve got pals who are former MCE users whose hatred for Avid can still be seen from outer space.
Hence my tremendous relief as a product manager to no longer need to explain to people what the hell Avid was thinking with this or that differentiation starting in the spring of 2006. You want MC Soft? Here’s MC Soft. Easy.
But Avid’s saving grace is similar to Apple’s: some people have found a home there that has allowed them to weather disruptions and continue to thrive. God bless them. ????
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[Scott Thomas] “Apparently the main problem was not enough bandwidth in the system. The thought was that perhaps Pinnacle wasn’t completely forthcoming on the system’s development.”
I’ve heard that before. I wasn’t intimately connected with Liquid Blue, but there seemed to be bandwidth issues there too. I wish I knew more about this, but yours and your colleagues aren’t the only two examples I’ve come across.
Integrating tech is a lot harder than it sounds. Yet another reason I bow down in the general direction of Grant Petty whenever this comes up. You just don’t know how big a deal it is that he’s been able to do what he’s done, including getting some VERY hardcore non-Mac products to work great on Mac. Astounding.
Investigating other people’s storage pre-purchase is also harder than it sounds. Medea was a game-changing system that made a lot of people a lot of money back in the day, but by the time Avid got its hands on it, it was a dog with fleas. (I’m under the impression that a lot of the key developers had already gone to G-Tech? The details of this too were beyond me. This is definitely an area where many of you will know vastly more than I do.) It SEEMED like the right move for Avid looking for low-cost, high-volume, local RAID, but what a mess in practice.
I wish that part of the story were happier, but boy howdy, it sure wasn’t.
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Tim,
I hope you can appreciate the trip down memory lane.
As I have stated before Avid did have background rendering and GPU acceleration before Apple and Adobe but the credit has to go to Fast Multimedia. I do often wonder where Fast Multimedia/Pinnacle/Avid’s Liquid would be in 2017 had it been developed. It was a cool program.
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I like the “specializes in specialists” line. That’s good. There’s a career in marketing for you!
IIRC, the first Avid product to support uncompressed was Symphony, ca. 1999-2000. Before that there was also Avid Fusion, which never made it out of the tech preview stage. It ran on SGI and I presume the company opted for Symphony instead. There was also DS, but I don’t remember the timeline of when exactly Avid bought Softimage.
Avid always has the mixed blessing of trying to change/advance Media Composer without alienating a passionate user base. There are plenty of editors who are quite familiar with FCP7, FCPX, Premiere Pro, and Resolve, that will absolutely opt for Media Composer as the more reliable, robust NLE for the work they do.
That base wants change, but not major change. So Avid has to do things incrementally, especially anything “under the hood”. Look, they completely swapped out the engine from 32-bit to 64-bit with minimal hiccups. They are slowly replacing dependencies on QuickTime with minimal disruption. I think users appreciate that without Apple’s “rip the band-aid off approach”. But, of course, that also means they aren’t the sportiest car in the garage.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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The attitude and body language of the panel is interesting. None of them seemed to want to be there.
Scott Witthaus
Owner, 1708 Inc./Editorial
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
Way back in 2003, while writing for a magazine called ‘Misenscene’, in India, I got a review system of Pinnacle Liquid. This was sold in India by local Pinnacle dealers, as a card with the Liquid software. Where the software would only work with the card installed. Inside any compatible PC.
Just for memory sake, here are pdfs I had saved of the original article. In two parts
https://www.sadwelkar.com/pdf/Introduction%20to%20Liquids%20Part-I.pdf
https://www.sadwelkar.com/pdf/Introduction%20to%20Liquids%20Part-II.pdfLater in 2003, we went around many cities in India demoing the LEP card and software. And, if memory serves me right, the local Pinnacle reseller sold tens of thousands of these units in the event/wedding/docu market locally. Having used it then while doing demos, I can attest to the fact that it was revolutionary in the way it handled compressed media.
At that time, Avid was firmly entrenched as the NLE of choice for the the close to a thousand movies edited in India. And FCP was just emerging. In the next 5 years or so, till 2008-09, Avid retained its place in the feature film sphere, but FCP swept away all other NLEs in the TV/docu space in India.
Today, 2017, FCP 7 is waning away, Prem Pro is emerging as its replacement for TV, while FCP X rules in the web video market, while Avid MC still has a stubborn but minuscule and shrinking set of ‘pro’ editors.
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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India -
[Tim Wilson] ” I’m barely tolerable in the present tense, ideally in vastly smaller doses than I typically dole out.”
Disagree!! Your posts are always fun and informative… more Tim (IMO)!
Shawn
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