my guess to what will happen to the suite

[Craig Seeman]

Macworld: DVD Death Watch: Sales drop 20 percent
https://www.macworld.com/article/159637/2011/05/dvd_sales.html

Nearly 30 million U.S. households now have Blu-ray hardware sitting in their entertainment centers, according to the entertainment group. But when you consider there are more than 116 million households in the country, 26 percent Blu-ray penetration isn’t that impressive.

Especially if you compare Blu-ray popularity to HDTV adoption. In November, Nielsen said 56 percent of U.S. households now have HDTVs. So high-definition viewing is big, but Blu-ray isn’t.

With only 26% market penetration I don’t think most business would be driven to distribute menu driven Blu-ray discs. I suspect they’d be relegated to a company’s use for presentation (what I call “screeners”) in which menus don’t have to be much more than utilitarian which can be done in FCP7/Compressor currently.

[Walter Soyka]

[Oliver Peters] “It will have a lot of advanced technology and very cool features, but it’s unlikely to be a high-end leader, like Autodesk or Quantel or Filmlight. After all, FCP 7 greatly lags behind Premiere Pro (and even Media Composer) in flat out media performance and it lags behind Media Composer and DS is pure advanced features.”

I’ve been very surprised at the number of posts that use FCP X and Smoke in the same sentence, but I think this is the first time that DS has come up.

While Apple, Avid and Adobe are jockeying for rank in the low and mid markets, Autodesk is positioning Smoke on Mac well as a high-end complement to FCP — and getting a lot of attention.

Autodesk has staged live Smoke demos, followed up by phone, pushed the trial download, posted all kinds of free Smoke training online, broadened hardware compatibility, added new features in twice-yearly releases, produced case studies left and right, and captured trade press attention. Where on earth is Avid with DS?

In the year that Smoke has been on Mac, I’ve seen precisely one press mention on DS — that’s it’s available as a software-only license like Smoke. Is DS viable anymore? Who’s using it? Is Avid ceding their high-end to Autodesk, intending to continue to duke it out with Apple for the lower-end?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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