[Tim Wilson]

Sorry to get to this late. I hope the Duke is subscribed to this thread….

I don’t have the latest version of FCP installed, but I had the one from two years ago running on the same machine with both Xpress Pro and Media Composer software for a living. I didn’t see any issues with them both open at the same time, either.

Avid was a Mac-only company for its first ten years, and there are hundreds of them around in product management, design and engineering. I’m willing to wager that FCP was on 75% on them, and this is the first time I’ve heard anyone mention a dual boot system.

I’ll test again when I get around to installing the new FCS (I know, I know, hardly new anymore), but I swear this is the first time I’ve ever heard of any issues.

[Tim Wilson]

I edited the post above as a reminder that commercial messages, including for stuff for sale, aren’t allowed in the forums.

However, we have some great commercial forums that we’re building up.

Classifieds, for sale
https://forums.creativecow.net/viewforum/38

Jobs Wanted
https://forums.creativecow.net/viewforum/237

Jobs Offered – Higher Paying
https://forums.creativecow.net/viewforum/70

Jobs Offered – Low/no Pay
https://forums.creativecow.net/viewforum/236

We’re also building up a Services Offered directory. This one hasn’t been rolled out just yet, but you can get started by going to your Account & Settings (in the upper right of the Cow interface). Take a look around, there’s some truly great stuff there.

And at the very bottom, you’ll also see a link to advertise your business and services.

Okay, this is getting to be a commercial message itself. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Vegasosity.

My contact info is below if you have any questions or comments. Please get in touch there rather than taking the thread off topic.

Thanks,

Tim

Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
My Cow Blog
Join my LinkedIn network

[Tim Wilson]

[GrahamS] “you have my attention.”

I swear to whomever, I SWEAR I was working on this reply when I saw Graham’s post, so I moved this one down.

Cows, meet Graham Sharp, VP and General Manager of Avid Video. He’s the straightest-shooting guy in the business, and relentlessly customer-focused. When he was in charge of the European business, he had no use for posturing or going through the motions, especially at trade shows. Him becoming GM of Avid Video is the most encouraging thing I’ve seen from Avid in a looooong time.

And since I never had the pleasure of reporting directly to him, this doesn’t count as sucking up. 🙂

Anyway, here’s what I was going to say. This conversation is headed exactly away from what’s important about road shows, and irrelevant about tradeshows.

Let’s say that a tradeshow costs $4 for a vendor to attend. Let’s say that vendors could do everything they need to do with 4 people.

Tradeshows still bite.

Are tradeshows a good place to meet management, from product managers to GMs and CEOs of the multi-billion dollar companies that are most important to us? Are tradeshows a good place for you to expect a long conversation about your work so that these managers will understand your very specific and personal needs?

No.

Are road shows? Yes.

Are tradeshows a good place to discuss development strategies with the people developing those strategies?

No.

Are road shows? Yes.

Are tradeshows the best way for you to kiss your wife and kids every night before you go to sleep? The best way to keep your work on track and your clients happy?

Uhm, no.

Roadshows blah blah blah.

Look, I’ve done both booth time and road shows with Avid, Boris, Media 100, and even though I didn’t do any for Adobe, I certainly saw it in action. The people you want most to meet are at road shows. The conversations you most want to have are at roadshows.

Road shows are the place for meaningful communication. Trade shows are just about the worst.

So why should this be an either/or proposition?

Because the people you want doing the work are exactly the ones sucked into tradeshow planning, starting in October, and pedal to the metal from January to May. Is this really what you want them to do?

The advantage for companies opting out is that they free up as much as tens of thousands of person-hours to do exactly what you want them to do — fix the existing bugs and build new features. They free themselves from arbitrary deadlines.

Tradeshows are most valuable for you to meet the people you already know, and to meet some that you only know online. They may be an okay place for you to learn a few things about a product, but if you had the chance to talk with GM or CEO of your favorite company face to face, and sleep in your own bed, wouldn’t you make that trade off?

So this is about twice as long as I meant it to be…but typical for me. Neither Avid nor Graham need me to speak for them. This is me telling you that tradeshows are already irrelevant for anything important between you and your favorite vendors.

And my own experience that you’ll get the contact you most want, face to face, closer to where you live, from a road show.

This is a business forum. This strategy is good business. Once you experience this yourself, your word of mouth will be the best marketing imaginable.

The sermon is ended. Go in peace to love and serve your wife.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

Ric Ford’s Macintouch post on the “massive data loss” bug is truly worth reading. Actually, Ric’s page has been darn nearly daily reading for me for well over 10 years.

Of course, reading it to find the link, I discover that Apple has fixed the bug TODAY.

So it was true up until this morning. 🙂

Stories like this are a single example of why, if you have a Mac — and I think you do — you owe it to yourself to make this a regular stop on your internet rounds.

We have an OS X forum, but nobody thinks to go there. I think there’s a ton of stuff like this that we can be talking about…SHOULD be talking about. As much as I hate getting the class off topic, have any thoughts on this?

thx,
tw

tw

[Tim Wilson]

Wow, this almost never happens, but I have the exact answer.

You’re looking for the Bay Area Video Coaltion.

These folks are absolutely aces. Top notch in every way. They’re on Mariposa St. in SF, an easy drive from The Big Three highways. Even better, public tranportation from anywhere in the Bay Area.

They’ve also got a terrific FCP user group associated with them — the very first in the world, actually: the SF Cutters.

Check them both out, and do us two favors: as Walter says, please don’t double post, and please don’t use all caps.

Once you get the hands-on under your belt, swing back by here for any specific questions we can help with.

Good luck!

Tim

Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
My Cow Blog
Join my LinkedIn network

[Tim Wilson]

[DRW in Jeremy’s quote] “make certain to clone your system drive”

Yes, the absolutely correct thing to do, essential even.

But tread very, very lightly until the next Leopard update. There’s a very well documented bug in 10.5.0 where if there’s any interruption to the COPY process, your original data gets TORCHED.

This is something we’ve never seen before, in Mac or Windows, where a failed copy makes the ORIGINAL data DISAPPEAR.

Again, very well documented. I’d post a link to it, but it’s on my other computer and I’m too lazy to look it up. 🙂

This is surely one of the reasons why we can expect an update so quickly.

[Tim Wilson]

Speedy replies to the last few comments:

1) Avid has never had access to the bottom ninety-FIVE percent of the market. Never had a chance. It wasn’t a goal either: FCP-style success would sink the company in a heartbeat. The whole company is built for selling a few expensive things. It’s why the new products are almost all more expensive.

Quick note: the complaints I heard about Avid DS at $150,000 from its customers is that it was too cheap. I heard that several times every single day, in every kind of weather. This ain’t a business model that plays in our end of the market, but is doing for Avid exactly what they want to.

2) This condition is why Avid bought Pinnacle, whose sales model is meant for big traffic(11 million-ish units so far) with a heavy web component.

Bottom line: couldn’t build it, so they bought it. NAB’s not its most important show, by a long shot.

2) The number of newsrooms that have converted to fully digital workflows is in the single digit percentages. There are hundreds left. Avid still sells multiples of everyone else combined does, and growing fast.

Newsrooms are part of the story, but not the only story. Avid still has over 6000 seats at the BBC, and growing, with something like 2-dozen massive Unity networks. They told me so when I visited them — with a group of guys from Apple, Adobe, Grass Valley, and Quantel. We all heard the news at the same time. I’ve never visited CNN, so I don’t know.

We’re in the stage where Avid is building the entire business framework, just like they did with non-linear editing in 1989. Others were first. There were always competitors, many of whom did it better and cheaper, and ALL of whom were from bigger companies with a lot more money.

So let’s talk again about Avid’s newsroom business in 10 years, and again in 15. Maybe they’ll have done it again, maybe not. But that’s how long it takes to find out.

Or not. A couple of years ago, Grass Valley was dead in the water, the classic example of a company that squandered its lead and vanished from the market…until now, when they dominate in ways that neither Avid nor Apple ever will.

Same with Discreet. Everybody, including me, was sure they were dead many times. They were rumored to be takeover targets for Apple, Avid and so many others because the company was “on the ropes” — and now they’re not. They’re hotter than ever.

It’s a big, big world. FCP will win a lot of the games they’re in, maybe even most of them…but there are a lot of games they’re not even in, and don’t want to be.

Things change fast, unless they change slowly. But they change.

+++
Last but not least, none of this is a comment on whether Avid are executing their plans, or even a comment on whether their plans are worth executing at all.

Last, last, last — 3 years ago, FCP was the only NLE that I used. Still use it a TON. Nothing but love.

Just talking about the lay of the land is all. You can decide the rest.

[Tim Wilson]

Congestion on OUR server?!?

🙂

Anyway, the posts are deleted.

Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
My Cow Blog
Join my LinkedIn network

[Tim Wilson]

[Proper Modulation] “Avid is taking YET ANOTHER step to remove themselves from the future and dig themselves deeper into the ESTABLISHED market that thinks Avid can do know wrong and would never fathom FCP as an alternate.”

That’s where I politely disagree.

Look at the Apple booth. Fully of delighted fans, everything’s coming up roses, literally stampeding through the gates every morning.

People with negative energy to spread are rare in Apple’s booth.

Every bit as true in Avid’s booth, and all the others I worked. Most people come to trade show booths to be excited by new gear and new stories, and to reaffirm their wisdom in betting their careers on this company. I still think trade shows are soul-sucking misery, but the experience actually in the booth is pretty pleasant.

I worked more tradeshows than I can count, for 6 or 8 companies (please don’t make me remember them too clearly) and I don’t think I heard a dozen strongly negative comments in the 9 years I worked ’em. If you want to hear happy talk, live in the booth.

Compare this to my experience on Avid road shows…keeping in mind that I was hired because I knew NOTHING about Avid, but was an expert Final Cut Pro user. (Which I now know nothing about any more.) Seriously, I’d never launched an Avid app, never edited a frame with one before they hired me.

On a typical Avid road show, the demo monkeys like me were the ones on the stage.

In the crowd, highly visible (“David, raise your hand so people can see you”), you’d find the CEO, the video business GM, the COO, vice presidents for post and broadcast, every major product manager, support people, and sales managers there for the sole purpose of finding out from you if they needed to kick your dealer’s ass for you.

You can pick the biggest fish at NAB — NONE of them got to see all of these people in one room. The corporate wigs were spread across too many meetings for that to ever happen.

But ALL of them at every road show was engaged in one on one conversations, for hours. They visited facilities on the days surrounding the road shows. They lived and breathed constant customer contact.

And friends, they got an earful. This was anything but digging themselves in.

Not that there weren’t plenty of people who had nice things to say, or who followed up their “thanks” with a big “but.” (As Pee Wee Herman said, “Everyone I know has a big ‘but.'”

To circle back to your point about ignoring FCP, I’ll remind you that Avid hired me because I was an FCP whiz. Every product manager I knew was fully bilingual. Every development team had FCP installed on their machines. Every marketing team parses every Apple campaign. Every member of the UG teams gauge their success against FCP UGs.

That doesn’t even count salespeople, who I assure you made certain that everybody on the product teams stayed on top of everything about everything about Final Cut Pro.

You might say that Avid is learning their lessons poorly, or not at all. I think you’d find plenty of people at Avid who agree with you.

So you might not like Avid. Even after my tales you might still think they made the wrong call about NAB. But to your original points:

–Plenty of their established customers think Avid is falling short. Avid stands face to face with them, one on one, and hears the details, and gets follow-up phone calls to see if they’re following through.

–Which is why road shows are the opposite of digging in. They’re putting yourself in the cross hairs, getting your crowd liquored up on your dime, and handing them a gun.

Maybe they shoot, maybe they don’t. But the gun’s loaded.

Even when facing the angriest customers, the road shows were the proudest moments of my corporate career. They were truly profound experiences that were unlike anything even remotely possible at a trade show.

A final note that I did road shows for other companies besides Avid. I have the same thing to say about those experiences too.

But since we’re talking about Avid, I thought it might be helpful to have a perspective from inside the belly of the beast.

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

As A.Zander noted, the correct link was easy enough to find — you just had to paste the link from the press release into your browser.

The bad clickthrough was from an errant carriage return in the href. I just fixed the link, so check out the announcement if you haven’t.

Best,
Tim Wilson
Creative Cow