Walter – where are you (on the Medea news !)

[Walter Biscardi]

Honestly, I don’t have a long reply to this. I actually heard about this about two months ago from several resellers. It didn’t seem like it was major news at the time, they just said AVID was purchasing Medea because Medea was somehow tied in with some of the Pinnacle technology so it made sense to also purchase Medea.

I was just part of the AJA / Apple HD Workflow tour yesterday in Atlanta and they were running an ADTX during the show and also discussing Facilis. Facilis actually impressed me from a tech support standpoint where a local, small production company was having absolutely no luck with their TerraBlox array and were ready to just return it and switch to Medea. The owner of Facilis flew down to Atlanta with a new unit and personally installed and set up the new array. Definitely called going beyond the call.

I really don’t know what I’ll do when I need a new array. It really comes down to how are the products going to be supported? By the run of the mill AVID techs or is Medea going to be kept whole including their support team? That will play heavily on my decision.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[David Battistella]

Bob,

This might be AVID’s answer to Apple’s X-serve san strategy. It will drive their drive purchase cost down and help them stream line the technology. They might make Medea a strictly AVID produc the way X-serves serve FCP.

The push for large broadcast sales seems to be tied to these large shared storage solutions, but it’s a bit like making cookies in large batches, they aren’t always as tasty as the small batches that moom makes. This is what makes HUGE so attractive to boutique post. Very reliable, fast, fiber based solutions in Stand alone rooms.

Sure, it’s nice for a large group of editors to have their hands into the one big hard drive cookie jar, but you know that you are going to get soem broken pieces with everyone grabbing at the same time.

It’s great that there will be other options out there, but i think that Apple is going to make it’s big stupid move at NAB. that will be that FCP extreme is going to be completely Apple hardware dependant. It will be X-serve raids or nothing, keeping with Apple’s history of chopping the knees of it’s own third party develoopers. so look for another editing program to pop up in the name of democracy.

It always amazes me at how this natural greedy evolution occurs, eventually ruining great products in the name of making them better.

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Bob Zelin]

David writes –
that will be that FCP extreme is going to be completely Apple hardware dependant. It will be X-serve raids or nothing

reply –
I was not aware of this. I guess we will see in a few weeks.

bob Zelin

[Walter Biscardi]

Just got off the phone with Don McDonnel at Medea and I have to say, I’m feeling very good about what is happening there right now.

Tech support service is about to get even better, which is a good thing. Medea will still be selling the Medea product line, they are not changing all the naming over to AVID. The same engineering / testing folks like Dan DeBruno are still going to be there and in fact they are going to be adding more engineering folks to the team to better respond to any changes that Apple throws to the OS and the new Intel architecture. You’ll also see a lot more of Medea marketing now as well.

So for initial reactions to the deal after speaking to Don McDonnel, it’s still going to be the same Medea that we’ve all grown to love over the years. I’m going on 8 years now (maybe 9) that I’ve run Medea drives and have never ever missed a deadline due to a drive related failure. It’s hard to beat that.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[David Battistella]

Bob,

This is an absolute hunch on my part. I have no substantiated anything on this. I am basing it entirely on trends. FCP extreme, if it is going to be 2k and all of that will most likely require a very fast drive array that can handle 4:4:4 streams. That said, I hardly see apple partnering with HUGE to bring this solution, I expect they will bundle it as a Hardware/software solution to sell more machines and more xserves.

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Ramona Howard]

I’m happy for Medea and the crew as they have always been strong supporters of us on the Linux side. In fact we are finally putting in a RaveHD/Medea Fiber combo in at USC that has been in the works for some time. I hope that Medea products continue to grow and expand and would only hope they continue to offer other platforms the same options that Avid will see.

Medea has always been a company with strong development and even stronger support, let’s hope it continues…..

Cheers,
Ramona