Tim Wilson
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Worth noting: Grant has said that the SDK is there for any developer who wants to write drivers for Resolve. He always hated closed companies as a customer, and won’t be that now.
That said, it’s easy to see why assume folks might not be in a hurry to add value to another guy’s company. It’s less easy to understand why they still think they’re competitors in any meaningful way. Maybe if THEY want to make cameras, switchers, grading software and control surfaces…but otherwise, why pass up the chance to sell hardware?
anyway, if BMD had the only I/O that works with Symphony after Grant buys Avid, it won’t be Grant’s doing.
I link to that interview above. Please check it out.
re: GVG, it says they’re outsourcing to another American company. Will that company be the one to outsource to China or wherever, or well the manufacturing still be done here? it’s not clear, and the cynical part of me (ie, 40% and trending upward) thinks I know why…..
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Hmm. Isn’t that an odd way to try and sell a product? You don’t need it?”
The price IS the marketing. One product is meant for a lot of people, the other is meant for hardly anybody.
You’ll differentiate yourself in 12 seconds, tops.
Not that you’ll LIKE it, but you won’t be confused. 🙂
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[Craig Seeman] “[Gustavo Bermudas] “it’s hard to assess if buying Avid will be a good investment for Blackmagic. ”
Blackmagic has no problem with free and cheap to move people up their chain. Resolve Lite. Cinema camera including full Resolve and Ultrascope. For BMD it gives them a fully integrated post solution.”
Remember there was initially great consernation about what DaVinci had to do with Blackmagic’s core business. Well, guessing BMD’s core business anymore is a mug’s game. The fact is that Grant buys what interests him, based largely around his experience as a CUSTOMER of all this stuff. His first job was running a DaVinci, so he jumped at the chance to buy the company and fix it.
What then? Dropped the price through the floor, improved the interface on two rapidly-developed upgrades, took support to a level it had never been, breathed life not just into Resolve but to an expansion of grading in general. I mean, grading was already blooming, but bloomed even more. His timing was perfect, even if it looked like plain old insanity at the time.
So what might happen with Avid? Dropped price, new interface, better service, pour some energy into a market ready for new energy, even if it looks crazy.
I asked him about buying Avid point blank. He laughed and COMPLETELY CHANGED THE SUBJECT. Dude. Laughed and COMPLETELY CHANGED THE SUBJECT. But he talked a lot about how glad he was that Avid opened up, because when he was a customer, he HATED what Avid was doing to him, screwing him over price on a closed system.
That’s what I love about Grant. Very blunt, not afraid to break balls, views everything from the perspective of a customer who, no matter how often he’s been screwed, remains delighted with this business.
I know that there are people who have real problems with BMD, but I promise that this interview will be the most fun you’ll have related to this business in the past year.
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/blackmagic-designs-grant-petty-we-want-to-blow-your-mind
Anyway, I doubt that it’ll happen for reasons that others have mentioned, but “incompatiblity with BMD’s core business” is NOT among them. He’s trying to run the table, and something big is going to happen sooner or later.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Help me out, Avid. If I don’t need standards conversion, but I need secondaries, it’s $5k?”
I get what you’re saying, that at some point, differentiation will bite you on the ass.
I was looking at two cars – one at the top of the “lower” line (for slender hipsters), the other at the low end of the “higher line” (for old people, overweight people, or both.) Same price, give or take chump change. There were KILLER features on the “lower” car that I feel like I SHOULD have on the “higher” car…but enough features, comfort, etc. on the higher one, and I’m enough of a geezer that I went that way.
Which is to say that I am newly sensitive to this dynamic in even more venues.
The thing about Blackmagic buying Avid: any other year, the biggest story of NAB would have been what Blackmagic did to Teranex. It used to be a bargain for its intended audience at $90K, so what did BMD do? Made it smaller, quieter, added Thunderbolt, and dropped the price from NINETY thousand to THREE thousand.
So if BMD bought Avid, I would expect to see Nitris hardware at the price of a Decklink. LOL
They didn’t quite go that far with DaVinci, but because I think a lot of people under-rate Avid hardware, you don’t really hear about that as much as the idea of “a guy who knows what he’s doing with rebuilding software brands.” Which is also true.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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[Chris Harlan] “Symphony could become a “their hardware only” thing, and MC could add secondairies, up its price a tiny bit, and be software only with the option of adding hardware.”
I like it!
Avid’s hardware was obviously historically limited, and at the lower end, obviously kind of overpriced, but as you move up the line, it’s actually really good. The performance of Symphony Nitris is off the hizook, so it makes a lot of sense to brand that way.
I’ll note that I used to sit next to the DS product manager, a system that at the time ran for $145K with storage — and all day, every day, he got calls from people asking him to RAISE the price. Another story, but an indication of the extent to which people respected the weight it could pull. That’s what Symphony should be laser-focused on: heavy lifting.
Then yeah, newly-muscled MC software-only, with the ability to keep using 3rd party hardware (check the COW – Avid’s performance with AJA is apparently better than FCP’s ever was) or hook up to Avid hardware as desired.
Perfect. Differentiation with clarity.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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I haven’t mentioned this, but if I ever saw anyone monitoring broadcast or feature footage on a computer monitor, I’d take a bat to it. Nonononono.
But we’re not talking about best practices for those kind of settings. The question seemed simple to me: my viewers will be seeing my work on a computer, and only on a computer…or a phone I guess. Is a computer monitor okay for this?
[Jeremy Garchow] “Most likely, you shot 709 HD, so why not monitor in 709 HD?
Because my audience isn’t seeing 709 and never will. You’re talking about an abolute, which is fine, but I think relative is far more important because….
….it’s hard to calibrate a computer monitor to 709 video….
Which is my point for Michael. He’s delivering to a computer monitor, which doesn’t support 709. He needs to monitor at something closer to what his viewers are overwhelmingly most likely to see – web movies delivered to a computer or phone.
If you have interlacing in your program, monitoring on just a computer monitor will not show the what is really going on as many times you are monitoring the signal at less than 100% of the video pixel size.”
Another question I don’t know the answer to: I know that viewing interlaced footage on a progressive monitor is begging for disaster, but what if you’re seeing deinterlaced video on a progressive monitor, when ALL of the people seeing your video is also viewing on a progressive monitor? That has to happen at some point in the grading process. What’s wrong with making that first step and monitoring in a way that matches the final output?
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…if you work with a company that sold off their consumer stuff to focus on pros!
I’m too stupid to know if this is a good idea, if it’ll work, if it’s too little too late, or will be the final thing that makes them crash and burn…but absolutely nothing about getting rid of their consumer crap looks like a bad idea to me. Everything about it looks like a good idea.
Still waiting for that show of hands. Anybody working with a company that sold off their consumer stuff to focus on pros?
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “If I was a new Avid customer and had no experience with the company, should I expect to pay an extra 5 thousand dollars for secondaries and perhaps Boris?”
No. Don’t. Why on earth would you? You’re exactly who Media Composer was designed for, so ignore Symphony. MOST people should ignore Symphony. That’s one of the things they’re trying to tell you with the price. This isn’t a product most people need or should even necessarily want.
Avid wants Media Composer to be the product that MOST people buy, which is why they price it the way they do. But as long as there are sales people and dealers, there will be options.
Seriously, the existence of Symphony isn’t stopping you from buying a product, any product, from Avid. I’d be surprised if any such person exists. There are many, many better reasons to reject a company than that they give you two options instead of one. Being known as the company with two options is the least of Avid’s issues, for them, their current customers or their potential ones.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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Staying a little more on topic (WTF???), saying tape is dead is like saying SD is dead. Of course it is. Absolutely, indisputably true.
Except where it isn’t, and won’t be for the foreseeable future.
That includes an awful lot of broadcast, which tsunamis notwithstanding, is still making broadcast masters on HDCAM SR. (We ran a whole article on hoarding…uhm, I mean supply management, of HDCAM SR last year.) It’s stable, reliable, and relatively inexpensive again, and you don’t have to worry about whether the NLE supplying your digital file is going to screw you.
Kind of interesting that Sony’s big push is for recording HDCAM SR to DISK — the format and the medium being two different things. Some of that is driven by their desire to advance technology rather than pushing old stuff that people don’t want…but like I said, there’s a lot more tape being used in places you might not expect.
Except where tape is dead.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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Joseph Bourke A lot of what’s in the Library of Congress is on paper prints – I don’t understand how that works, I’m guessing it’s like a contact print in still photography – I’ll have to read up on it.
The Library of Congress was in charge of copyrights 100+ years ago, when people were first trying to copyright movies. Moving pictures? Well, the way we copyright pictures is two copies on paper. So yeah, there was a process created that had rolls of paper with sprockets to print the entire reel of film onto paper.
There are a bunch of early films whose only “original” prints are on paper, including The Great Train Robbery and a bunch by Melies, whose son had brought many of Dad’s movies to the US for copyrighting in a country whose film business was starting to pick up steam.
The process for both paper and nitrate prints is classic DI – scan, clean, etc. – then printing back to film. Following a fairly basic protocol (25 degrees, 30% humidity), film can last thousands of years. It’s not even a matter of having film projectors in the future. As long as you have a light, a lens and a wall, you can get a pretty good idea of what’s happening.
Anyway, we ran a fantastic article written by the Library’s Ken Weissman that goes through the process, talks about the technology (including their consideration of digital) and generally finds a dozen ways to blow your mind. Great pictures of the archive, too.
It’s one of my smallest handful of favorites from among the thousands of articles in the COW library. You really, really need to check it out, kids. The Library of Congress Unlocks the Ultimate Archive System
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.