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Screenlight: Will Accounting Woes at Avid Spark Big Changes or an Acquisition?
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[Joseph W. Bourke] “And of course AVID’s method of dealing with competition was often to buy them; and then use these technologies in lieue of innovation and R&D.”
Which was a viable business model for a time. They can’t afford to buy innovation any more. While they have no debt they have no significant resources to buy or even to put into their own R&D. They can’t even sustain their relationship with Boris for bundling.
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[Chris Harlan] “Maize-like? Really? Doesn’t feel like a modern app? I’m sorry. I find these silly statements.”
That might be debatable but the gist of his comments hold true to me.
As to the UI, an experienced editor using FCP can probably work their way through the differences. I don’t see a newbie finding it easier than learning Premiere Pro, maybe Lightworks and especially FCPX.
If an FCP user has an easier time picking up Premiere Pro. If a newbie has an easier time picking up FCPX. The MC UI certainly doesn’t hold any advantage and may be a greater obstacle than other NLEs. Maybe that’s not as harsh as Chris’s comments but I haven’t heard anyone talk about the MC UI as equal to or easier to grasp than any other NLE on the market. -
[Craig Seeman] “That might be debatable but the gist of his comments hold true to me.
“I’m surprised! I’m shocked! I’m falling down!
[Craig Seeman] “As to the UI, an experienced editor using FCP can probably work their way through the differences. I don’t see a newbie finding it easier than learning Premiere Pro, maybe Lightworks and especially FCPX.
If an FCP user has an easier time picking up Premiere Pro. If a newbie has an easier time picking up FCPX. The MC UI certainly doesn’t hold any advantage and may be a greater obstacle than other NLEs. Maybe that’s not as harsh as Chris’s comments but I haven’t heard anyone talk about the MC UI as equal to or easier to grasp than any other NLE on the market.
“I do agree with most of that. It takes a bit of work, as does X. As far as the UI goes, I definitely prefer Avid’s. I find X a bit candy-coated.
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[Chris Harlan] “Maize-like? Really? Doesn’t feel like a modern app? I’m sorry. I find these silly statements.”
I’m aware that lots of existing Avid fans (which I’d guess you are) don’t see any of this. It was rather the premise of my previous post.
I could point to some objective characteristics of the Media Composer UI that make it feel dated — its multi-windowed approach (there has been a strong shift in UI design to panes rather than separate windows), the style of its UI widgets and the fact that its toolbar icons aren’t antialiased, the fact that on the Mac it appears to still be using deprecated Carbon text rendering libraries (this is trivially easy to tell if you know what it looks like), its extensive use of modal dialogs, etc. And I can point to completely bizarre, non-standard UI, like the way it handles setting preferences or configuring keyboard shortcuts. I can also point to really odd workflow behavior, like the way it can only work with MXF files in numbered subdirectories in an Avid MediaFiles folder at the top level of a drive, and the fact that dragging an MXF file from the Finder into a bin does nothing useful — but oddly enough it will offer to do something useful if you drag in non-native media.
But really, it’s hard to make this case to someone who doesn’t see it, because it’s the sort of thing that you either see, or you don’t. I wear a fair number of hats in my present position, and I’ve worn even more over my career — I’ve done UI design and software development professionally, among other things. Media Composer simply does not work the way an app designed from the ground up by competent UI/UX people in the second decade of the 21st century would work. It works, frankly, like an app from a couple of decades ago that has had a huge number of features grafted onto it — because that’s exactly what it is. There are signs of this all over the place in, say, Photoshop as well, but Media Composer is by far the worst offender among apps I come into regular contact with in this industry.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “But really, it’s hard to make this case to someone who doesn’t see it, because it’s the sort of thing that you either se”
Drivel. But for what its worth, I have also noticed that a number of X users seem unable to see the sugary, sparkly, diabetes-inducing, unicorn-frolicing, my-little-pony-like UI of X for what it is either.
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[Chris Kenny] “It works, frankly, like an app from a couple of decades ago that has had a huge number of features grafted onto it — because that’s exactly what it is. There are signs of this all over the place in, say, Photoshop as well, but Media Composer is by far the worst offender among apps I come into regular contact with in this industry.”
It’s the interface that time forgot!
Steve Connor
There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum
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[Chris Harlan] “I do agree with most of that. It takes a bit of work, as does X. As far as the UI goes, I definitely prefer Avid’s. I find X a bit candy-coated.”
X is taking a different approach at building its base. It’s attractive to newbies since it’s intuitive for that crowd.
For experienced editors it may be between MC, PremierePro and maybe Lightworks down the road a bit. It’s possible that MC would the most challenging (talking about UI not simply features). We can certainly see it by the number of FCP7 houses taking a serious look at PremierePro due to the easier learning curve for the FCP7 editor.
The way I’d put it is that while MC still leads in some features, as they stagnate, others will catch up in that area, In the mean time it seems MC is losing the UI battle as well. It may well be that its UI plays a big role in people looking at PremierePro.
So if MC UI is daunting to the newbie and FCP7 users are attracted to PremierePro that would seem to put MC behind in the UI area. It means to me that people in different markets are looking at other NLEs precisely because of MC’s UI.
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[Chris Harlan] “Drivel.”
Sit a new user down with Media Composer, FCP X, and Premiere. In each app, have a project/event already created and named appropriately. Give the user a folder full of video clips in whatever format is preferred by the NLE. So that would be DNxHD MXF files for Media Composer, ProRes MOV files for FCP X, and, well, Adobe doesn’t have an equvilant codec, but let’s just say ProRes MOV files there as well, which should work fine.
Ask the user to import the footage into the app.
With FCP X or Premiere, the user will see the appropriately named event/project and drag the footage in. This will work. Alternatively the user will look for some kind of ‘Import Footage’ command, and will find one and use it. This will work.
In Media Composer, you have to go create a /Avid MediaFiles/MXF folder, then create a numbered folder within it (numbers only, please!), then quit Media Composer, place your media in that folder, re-launch Media Composer, access the Media Tool, check all the correct boxes (which is a little confusing in its own right), and then drag the clips from the resulting window to your bin. This is completely undiscoverable, and, frankly, crazy. And it’s not an isolated example.
If you’re the sort of person who learns software by reading manuals and memorizing steps, maybe you really don’t see why this is any harder. If you’ve been using Media Composer for 15 years, maybe it hasn’t occurred to you to question this in a very long time. But if you’re a new user who learns software mostly by exploring it — which is how most people seem to prefer to learn software — Media Composer is very nearly impenetrable gibberish.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Harlan] “Drivel. But for what its worth, I have also noticed that a number of X users seem unable to see the sugary, sparkly, diabetes-inducing, unicorn-frolicing, my-little-pony-like UI of X for what it is either.”
LOL, so true!
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
[Chris Harlan] “Drivel. But for what its worth, I have also noticed that a number of X users seem unable to see the sugary, sparkly, diabetes-inducing, unicorn-frolicing, my-little-pony-like UI of X for what it is either.
“Also Drivel
Steve Connor
There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum
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