Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Chris Harlan] “But that’s not the problem. People buy X because its from Apple and in the Apple fold, and Apple can sell X as it does because X is basically loss-leader. To suggest that Avid could benefit by directly competing with X on the ground that Apple has established is silly. “
I believe it would be fundamentally possible to develop an NLE and profitably sell it for a few hundred dollars a copy, it it were sufficiently accessible to have appeal to the broader editing market rather than primarily to just the broadcast/feature niche. I doubt Apple actually loses money on FCP X. And Resolve shows that if a tool is compelling enough, it doesn’t have to be from an Apple or an Adobe for people to pay attention to it.
I like FCP X’s timeline paradigm, but it’s clear that not everyone does, and Apple clearly alienated some folks with the way FCP X was introduced. If, two years ago, Avid had had an app on the market that was as user friendly and inexpensive as FCP X, built on a modern engine, available on OS X and Windows, and that had a traditional timeline and workflow features FCP X didn’t then (and in some instances still doesn’t) have (broadcast video I/O, EDL and OMF exporting, etc.), Avid would have cleaned up.
That didn’t happen, as far as anyone can tell. Think about that. Think about what it says about Media Composer’s appeal to non-Avid editors. When Apple axed FCP 7, MC should have been the overwhelmingly obvious choice for people who didn’t like X. It wasn’t. Instead it seems like the most common choice has been to stay put, and wait around for Premiere Pro or FCP X itself to get better.
[Chris Harlan] “Yes, Avid has problems, but I don’t see creating their version of X as even remotely an answer.”
The idea that Avid needs products with more mainstream appeal isn’t just some crazy notion of mine — Avid itself appeared to believe this a few years ago. But they addressed the issue mostly through acquisitions (of e.g. Pinnacle), basically failed to ship compelling products, and never really structured things in such a way that adoption of more mainstream products would plausibly lead to sales of higher end products.
Fundamentally, I believe a company in the NLE market could be quite successful with a model very much like Blackmagic’s — free/cheap ‘Lite’ software to pull people in, more expensive ‘pro’ versions of that same software, to provide a clear upgrade path, and reasonably priced hardware. Add in server software, etc. to support the customers who need collaborate editing (a traditional Avid strength) and I bet you could make it work.
Of course that doesn’t mean Avid, the corporation that exists today, necessarily has a clear path to successfully transition to this model.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Oliver Peters] “I’m not piling on here, so forgive the question. You seem to be a fan of FCP X. No problem, but for the sake of clarity, how much seat time do you have editing with it in a client-supervised environment?”
I don’t really do client-supervised creative editing.
I know there are several editors now exclaiming “Ah ha! Why should we listen to anything this guy says?” But the reality is that what software wins and what software loses in this industry is really not determined by whether you can do a particular kind of edit with one key press in one NLE vs. having to grab the mouse in another. It’s determined by price, by larger workflow considerations, and, in the long run, by what software is most accessible to new editors.
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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] “Yes! I think making Avid X would be the final bullet in the brain pan.”
That’s exactly the problem. Given the likely reaction from Avid’s present user base, that might very well be the case. But the alternative is for Avid to slowly waste away. This is not a prediction — it’s what has been happening for years 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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[Oliver Peters] “I think Avid’s problems have very little to do with whether MC needs to be more rewritten more than it has been.”
Technically true, in the sense that MC isn’t actually a huge fraction of Avid’s revenue. Avid’s downturn really started as commodity hardware got powerful enough to displace their specialized hardware. That trend is ongoing and irreversible.
But finding a wider market for their video editing software could perhaps help offset some of that.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I kind of don’t get why a colorist comes in and starts lecturing the room on anything he can think of.”
Good point. What could a colorist, online editor and post facility owner, who regularly uses all of the major NLE environments as part of complex workflows, has software development experience, and has considerable knowledge about the history of the computing industry, possibly have to say about video editing software or the future of video editing?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Oliver Peters] “For the most part all of this is entirely irrelevant. If you compare performance on most Macs between FCP X and MC 6.5.2 today, FCP X is clearly a worse performer. There are more memory leak issues, the UI is laggy and media handling is sloppy. So whether ported or written from the ground up, the proof is in actual results. Then let’s factor in that by rewriting X from the ground up, many of the features editors have relied on were completely dropped, forcing most established users to either stick with FCP 7 or add a lot of workarounds and extra utilities to use X.”
There has been a fairly extensive discussion about why I believe Avid needs to consider a ground up rewrite, and your post pretty much ignores all of it.
But yes, feature, performance, and stability regressions in your initial release(s) are one of the expected costs of rewriting. We saw the exact same thing with the first couple of releases of OS X, in spades. Does this mean Apple should have kept Mac OS on its ‘Classic’ foundations forever? Twelve years after the OS X transition, if we think about what that would look like, I think it’s very clear it would have been a huge mistake — that today, Apple would be in a far weaker position had they not transitioned Mac OS to new foundations. I believe that Avid is making such a mistake right 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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[Jok Daniel] “”With a complete rewrite of its code base, Avid freshens up the under-the-hood technology and puts the foundation in place for new features making more efficient use of 64-bit operating systems.” https://www.studiodaily.com/2011/11/top-five-media-composer-6-features/
“Avid has taken the opposite approach. In rewriting MC6 as a 64-bit application, a job that took two years to complete, Avid has kept the familiar way of working.” https://provideocoalition.com/ssimmons/story/avid_media_composer_6_is_announ...”
These appear to be quotes from others who are also assuming that 64-bit means a rewrite occurred. It doesn’t.
[Jok Daniel] “”Avid also decided to rewrite all their code from scratch, but instead of one big hit, they have been progressively rewriting their code for the last three or four releases, if not longer.” https://www.philiphodgetts.com/2011/11/64-bit/“
This confirms that Media Composer was not rewritten between 5.5 and 6.0, and was in fact not rewritten from the ground up at any point. Over several releases, more and more code was progressively made 64-bit ‘clean’ (and/or updated in other ways), but there was no break in the continuity of the codebase.
Despite the “Avid also decided to rewrite all their code from scratch” language, it is extremely unlikely that no code dating from before this process remains. Even if that were the case, replacing code one ‘module’ at a time doesn’t really provide an opportunity to rethink the basic structure of an app, which is a big part of what Media Composer, in my opinion, requires.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[MichaelMaier] “In that case, just send it back to the VFX guy to correct it? :)”
Sure, time and budget permitting.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jok Daniel] “MC6 is a complete (64 bit) rewrite.”
Porting to 64-bit does not require rewriting all source code. It mostly just requires cleaning up code that makes non-portable assumptions about the sizes of data types. MC6 does not appear to be a full rewrite, Avid has not said that it’s a full rewrite, and the technical feasibility of Avid having pulled off a full rewrite in the time between MC 5.5 and MC 6, or of having done a full rewrite that maintains the level of backwards compatibility that MC 6 maintains, is virtually zero.
It’s still the same old codebase.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[MichaelMaier] “But it also means to depend more on the VFX people, which always complicates things. Do you see any problems with just grading after? Grading the finished shots that is.
Besides, I’m not talking shots with only one or two elements.”There are two downsides to grading afterwards. One is that depending on where you take the grade, there’s a possibility that artifacts that weren’t visible in the ungraded shot — like imperfectly matched black levels for different elements, edges of rotoscoped objects, etc. — may become visible.
The other is that if you’re working with raw footage (like R3D or ARRIRAW), whatever settings were used to decode that footage to do the VFX work will be baked into the VFX shot. So, for instance, if you’ve decided to change the raw white balance of a bunch of shots in a scene, but there’s one VFX shot containing elements that were ‘developed’ with the in-camera white balance, you might have some tricky matching issues.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.