Serious Legal Stuff Happening at Avid

[Chris Harlan]

[Craig Seeman] “[Chris Harlan] “No. Its about the same.”

[Chris Harlan] “Again, about the same.”

Glad that I’m providing so much balance to the forum 😉
“

Yes! We’ve got you on Avid, Aindreas on Apple, Herb on Autodesk and Lance on Adobe. I’d say it evens out marvelously.

[Mario Rodriguez]

Avid will become the Blackberry of Video Editing Software… changed too late it’s policy and I would say the two years of “FCPX Beta” situation until 10.0.08 has helped them to get some new customers flying from Apple. But it is just a matter of time and FCPX will get it’s place again in the market. Apple is toooooo big to be oversight and is updating and updating FCPX every 3 to 4 months with great new features. You can only do that when you have a lot of money and Apple has plenty of it to get back it’s market slowly… they are not in hurry.

So tell me why should I pay $999 “per license” to edit with Avid? what can I do with Avid MC that I’m not able to do with FCPX for $700 less. And If I have 10 machines, we are talking of $9.700 less. You could say that for some big network SAS oriented companies, Avid is the way, but how many customer are those? 200? and Avid MC is the entry product, if you want the Symphony we are talking about big bucks here. Again what can Symphony do that FCPX can beside network editing? Adobe just announce also a network editing tool for PP CS6… at a much cheaper price.

Avid is dying, slowly or fast, but dying, it will be impossible to maintain their marketing strategy and fight agains Adobe and Apple on the long term. They are still too pricy just because Apple and Adobe are selling it’s software at bottom prices (specially Apple) and customers make their math. Hollywood producers alone won’t be enough to feed such a big monster. Avid must get smaller, sell divisions, forget about some products lines and concentrate on something that makes them earn their money. But as said, Avid MC and specially Symphony on the long term will be a death software, you like or not. Same as Blackberry, once business king now just a hot potato, they changed too late, same as Avid.

My own case.

Edited for years in FCP7 (as most of us) FCPX came out… tracks where gone, everybody screaming, there was no way to work with it… full of bugs everywhere and you needed it a brand new machine. No company can stand such a change but Apple, with it’s huge amount of cash can stand such a transition time without blinking, they know customers will be back again new or old ones.

OK… so I kept working with FCP7, then came PP CS6… wonderful piece of software, installed it and it works just as FCP7 but even better in many ways. But there are two problems. It is also full of bugs, slow in many ways even with CUDA, exporting renders can become a nightmare and it became now subscription software.

Got fed up from PP CS6 bugs, so tried again FCPX and you know what? I love it now, stable, fast, fresh, it just works, pay once use it everywhere, no license limits, no paying for updates, no subscription. Once you go through the new FCPX paradigm wall you understand how cool is this software. And so will be the way of many other producers, go to Avid or PP and years later back again to Apple

Give it some time and Apple will be back again… just a matter of time.

I’ll be using both, PP and FCPX as most editors do for living. But it will be a very interesting fight among the three companies.