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final-cut-pro-launches-a-x-the-chasm
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[Chris Conlee] “I think you’re correct about Avid’s predicament regarding high-end/size of market. That’s why they’re diversifying into consumer (Pinnacle) and audio (ProTools) and control surfaces, along with their own overpriced hardware. The studios will continue to purchase their hardware for the sake of robust reliability. But I think Avid is seeing the writing on the wall and are opening up to 3rd party I/O to move more licenses to folks like FCP fans.”
Diversification into other product lines might well save the company long-term, but it won’t necessarily save the product.
[Chris Conlee] “You might call Avid’s UI dated, but I still call it the most functional and quickest of the bunch. Moving to another app to cut is like eating razor blades for me after using Avid for nearly a decade. It just works.”
Sure, I hear this all the time… including the “after using Avid for nearly a decade” part. I can’t recall ever hearing a new user say “I’ve just started learning Avid, and wow, it’s got this really great UI!” This is a huge problem for the platform’s long-term prospects. And Avid is really between a rock and a hard place here. If they change the UI too much, their existing users will freak out. If they don’t change it, their market share will slowly (continue to) shrink through attrition as new editors choose alternative products. Even introducing a more modern product alongside Media Composer would run the risk of alienating Media Composer users who would (rightly) perceive that the new product, not their product, was Avid’s future. Indeed, we’ve heard from a former Avid employee that Avid actually started down this road, and then chickened out:
When I was at Avid, I worked on a few internal projects trying to solve this exact problem – we saw Apple coming after us from the low end and knew it was only a matter of time before they reached Avid’s capabilities.
We worked on building “next generation” editor software. New UI, new technical foundation that would take advantage of multiple CPUs and GPUs. Unfortunately these efforts ultimately went nowhere, since the company as a whole was too timid and worried about disenfranchising the existing customer base – exactly the problem Apple is facing now.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I’ve never understood the “UI looks dated” argument. What is it about the UI that prevents you from working? Is it because Avid’s UI is kind of ugly? Because there aren’t bevels and gradients and animating playheads? Does there need to be? What do they add to the functionality of the software?
When I’m on FCP or Premiere I see a lot of worthless buttons taking up valuable space. My favorite example is the jog wheel. I’m not going to try to grab a little jog wheel to skim through my footage – I have a mouse and a keyboard that are faster and far more precise. Remove the jog wheels please.
Avid’s UI isn’t pretty, but it’s highly customizable (less than than in past versions, unfortunately). I think that’s where its strength lies. There is certainly room for improvement – I’d like docking windows for one. I’d like the ability to fully customize the colors/buttons/track colors/bin colors, etc back. I think that will come in a future release though.
If the UI isn’t impressive to a new user, is that Avid’s fault of the user’s? Sure it’s part of the first impression, but I don’t believe the UI is the reason people aren’t jumping on Avid. Avid’s branding is terrible compared to what FCP’s was. Their marketing simply can’t compete with Apple’s, and that’s hurt them a lot.
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Michael Hancock
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[Chris Kenny] “Software development is really hard. It requires a lot of resources.
Now, think about the pro film/TV segment of the video editing market. This market requires quite complicated products… but it’s tiny. This makes it very difficult to develop high-quality software if it’s too focused on this market segment, unless you want to want to charge $50,000 a seat. You simply can’t raise enough money from such a small market to make the R&D investments you need to make to produce such a complex product at a high quality level.”
I think FCP could have hired a handful of people to do the things like I’m talking about: 3:2 pulldown removal like AE, field based slo mos on interlaced material like Avid, a proper DVE like AE and Avid have had forever, EDL export that worked right like many have had for years and yes offline to online is still very much alive. Of course there are some plugins for some of this stuff but that’s more money and never as good as if it were built in to the system.
These are technologies that have existed for quite some time. Apple just doesn’t have the intention of fixing this stuff, it wouldn’t take much if they did.
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Maybe this will help
dated
adjective: old-fashioned, outdated, outmoded, passé, behind the times, archaic, obsolete, antiquated; unfashionable, unstylish, untrendy; crusty, old world, prehistoric, antediluvian; informal old hat, out, uncool. ANTONYMS modern.It’s the same UI since the 90’s. I open it up and get flashbacks of 4 GB external drives in SCSI chains, massive 24 inch tube monitors, and video that looked like crap. It doesn’t need lots of animated thingies flying around but freshen it up a bit.
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[Robert Brown] “These are technologies that have existed for quite some time. Apple just doesn’t have the intention of fixing this stuff, it wouldn’t take much if they did.”
These things always seem easy in isolation, but you have to take into account the dependancies they have on other code, and the overhead of coordination with other team members. Attempting more ambitious or faster releases by adding more developers is a very dicy business. Especially for a first release, where the major priority has to be on implementing the fundamentals as cleanly as possible, because you’re going to be stuck with whatever architecture you create for a decade or more.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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That’s BS dude. It’s all simple stuff to do if they had just decided to do it. Between 2001 and 2011 I think they could have figured it out. It just wasn’t a concern for them, pure and simple.
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