[Tim Wilson]

[andy patterson] “I am not sure it was the HDV codec.”

It was absolutely not the HDV codec. That article was pulling stuff out of thin air based on what THEY found compelling in Liquid, which is fine, but it never came up internally. Avid’s commitment was to 100% native HDV editing, and they wound up shipping that feature very late as a result.

(And, in retrospect, the most successful implementations of such formats tends not to be native, imo.)

In fact, it was so late that Avid had to jump through some considerable Sarbanes-Oxley hoops to talk about it at NAB that year. (Again, I was there. I was one of the people doing the official talking.) SOX says that you have to ship within 90 days of announcing it, or you can’t recognize that revenue until you DO ship it. The sitch was that the new version of Xpress Pro was in fact ready to ship, but the HDV feature set was going to go into the next quarter.

And this is where SOX is an incredible drain on productivity that the subscription model entirely removes. Product managers had to do surveys — NOT bs online bs surveys that are the opposite of information; REAL surveys with names and addresses that would have to pass muster at the Justice Department…which actually still meant something back then LOL — of customers to get a sense of how much they REALLY wanted this, and how much they’d REALLY be willing to pay with or without that feature (ie, no HDV no sale, at one end to, eh no biggie I can wait or, I actively don’t care about HDV at the other end….plus, I’d pay this much MORE for an upgrade with this feature, and a zillion other iterations), and then assign a specific dollar value to that feature.

So the message I pitched on stage, 12 times a day, and in dozens of press interviews, was, “Upgrade today and get all this nifty stuff, and if you want native HDV in September, you’ll only pay”…whatever that dollar value was. I want to say $49, but I could be wrong.

The point being, product managers had to stop managing the product to go out and conduct actual science related to business management and spreadsheets and such. I believe in SOX, and the relative absence of stock-related scandals since then speaks to the relative success of the program, but this kind of work was not why I got in the game.

In the meantime, this split pitch allowed Avid to recognize all the revenue they collected. People who didn’t need HDV didn’t have to wait, and people who wanted it knew when it was coming, for a nominal separate fee.

At the same time this was happening, Avid’s codec energy was going into DNxHD. Other than camera codecs, there was zero interest in building anybody else’s editing codecs into the system.

Punditry is all very nice, but facts are nice too. ☺

EDIT:

TO CLARIFY THOUGH! I don’t mean to suggest that we didn’t have TREMENDOUS respect for Liquid’s tech. We absolutely did. We were gobsmacked by what they were doing. FANTASTIC stuff.

But there are reasons you buy the company — BROADCAST — and reasons why you keep selling the “value add” software (and hardware! Some terrific hardware too!) in the rest of the product lines, because it really did add value to the customers who wanted it, even where the values reflected in those products diverged from the values of Media Composer development.

To use background rendering as an example: deprioritized in MC in 2005 because of its emphasis as an offline tool. You want background rendering for online-quality work? You need DS or Symphony. Or folks were doing that in color suites, with teams of VFX people, or on dedicated After Effects boxes. What have you. In any case, NOT a huge emphasis on it in offline editorial.

Whereas a phrase like “offline editorial” was worse than gibberish to a Liquid customer, because they were doing it all themselves on one box, and NEEDED background rendering at full res, including uncompressed. Which is to emphasize that we didn’t mistake “one person doing it all” with “low end” per se, but it represented a fundamental divergence of developmental intent.

And with DNxHD, the original emphasis (before 3rd-party hardware became widespread) was on mezzanine file management, archiving, and security. I sat in presentations to studio execs who were concerned with piracy of data streams and digitizing film stocks, and things that had absolutely zero to do with easily editing HDV. The codec needs of the two audiences were entirely irreconcilable, which is why nobody tried to reconcile them.

So when members of the press asked me, “Why is Liquid still around?” of COURSE I pointed to things like background rendering, one-window interface, the HDV codec and the like. Those were the ACTUAL REASONS.

And when Liquid customers asked me, “Should I be looking at Media Composer?” my answer was, “Not if you haven’t looked at it already. Not one single feature that you love in Liquid is in Media Composer. None of them. Keep using what you’re using, confident that Avid is putting new development and sales resources into it that Pinnacle hasn’t been able to for a while now”, which was all true, and was true for years to come.

The ONLY reason this looks confusing is if you’re looking at this in terms of Liquid VERSUS Media Composer, which never happened internally, or at Liquid as any kind of driver of the deal, which it wasn’t. This was PRIMARILY a deal to bring in Pinnacle playout servers, Deko CG, and other related BROADCAST products, tech, and teams in Avid Broadcast. The rest was to EXTEND Avid Post’s reach into customers who wouldn’t give Media Composer a second glance, without forcing Avid to change MC to meet them, thanks to Avid (née Pinnacle) Liquid.

But there was nothing about Liquid itself that drove a meaningful part of the purchase.

Of course, seen another way, one technological trick that was highly intriguing (especially to me, managing my part of Xpress Pro) was that Pinnacle had done a marvelous job stratifying itself using hardware and UI tricks, but the exact same tech driving Deko broadcast CG was driving the $99 Pinnacle Studio. I say this respectfully to the many people at Avid (including myself) who wrestled with this in Avid Post, and I don’t think we were doing nearly as well at the time.

(I’ll skip commenting on the present, because I’m completely out of touch with these issues these days. But I’ll also observe that I was heavily involved with graphics as the product manager of Boris RED, and dealing with various levels of feature sets with Boris Graffiti, Boris FX, RED, and the Boris Title Generators bundled with Final Cut Pro. I deeply cared about ALL of these issues.)

To put it another way, Liquid was a testimony to the fundamental soundness and extensibility of Pinnacle’s tech, up and down the market, in broadcast, post, and even consumer spaces — but the best way to understand it is still as a value add to the primary impetus of the deal in broadcast.

As always, my opinion…but the Liquid part of it was also part of my job. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Thomas] “Wasn’t Avid’s reaction to FCP, to buy Pinnacle to kill their hardware IO for FCP?
“

Absolutely not. I was not only at Avid at the time, I was the Senior Product Marketing Manager responsible for Avid Xpress Pro, Avid Xpress Studio, Avid Liquid, and eventually the software-only version of Media Composer (internally affectionately known as MC Soft) in this very span. While some of the final shoes dropped after I left Avid to come to the COW in 2006 (eg, the end of Liquid in 2010 — although they provided phone support through 2012), the dynamics were all in place while I was there.

And while the actual decisions about all this were being made over my head, I was in meetings where the decisions were discussed, and I was the one tasked with implementing them in this part of the market. So yeah, this is all my opinion, but it’s a view from from very close to the stage.

The first thing to note about Cinewave is that there are posts in the COW going back to 2002 lamenting that Pinnacle had given up development on Cinewave. There was some excitement when there was on OS-compatibility update in 2004, but no new features in ages. Pinnacle had long since moved on. When Avid acquired Pinnacle in 2005, there were zero Cinewaves in stock, zero on the production schedule, nobody left on the team — so when Avid took it off the books, it really was strictly a bookkeeping exercise.

Indeed, Carl Calabria, aka The Father of Cinewave, had come to Avid as the VP of Hardware Engineering in 2003, long before the Pinnacle acquisition. (Not long after the acquisition, he became the overall VP of Engineering.) His arriveal at Avid in 2003 may have been the last straw in Cinewave’s demise under Pinnacle’s aegis, but again, customers had already been talking about the lack of development of Cinewave before then.

With the 2005 acquisition, everybody who was still at Pinnacle was invited to stay on, to keep doing what they were doing. The object was to grow that business, and the revenue that came along with it, by adding additional resources — including in post, dramatically expanding the footprint of Pinnacle’s channel by adding it to Avid’s channel.

The real driver behind the acquisition, though, was Avid Broadcast. Broadcast sales is necessarily a consultative process, because nobody on the planet sells 100% of the gear. Other brands are ALWAYS on the ticket (for anything from switchers to satellite uplinks to cables — nobody makes it all) — and in 2004-ish, the two things being written on many of Avid Broadcast’s tickets were very specific products that Avid didn’t have: playout servers and character generation systems (including the database-driven tech behind them, and the 3D tech that often extended to virtual sets). Frequently, those from Pinnacle were winding up as part of the deals.

There are a ton of other little doo-dads in there that Pinnacle made that Avid didn’t (post folks have no idea how byzantine broadcast installations can be — often scores of products, with blueprints and charts galore to track them), so rather than give the money to Pinnacle for products being developed to Pinnacle’s agenda, it became attractive to acquire the company, integrate its products and technologies, and drive the development of key product lines that were part of every sale anyway, so let’s make sure it all keeps working to our advantage.

Other drivers of the deal were the facts that Pinnacle was struggling on a number of fronts, and Avid’s stock was skyrocketing. The deal was struck on March 18 2005, when Avid stock was at $62.95 — Pinnacle was gonna wind up with about 15% of Avid’s outstanding shares, a huge premium over Pinnacle’s own stock at $4.97.

Worth noting: Apple’s stock at the same time: $5.80. Not a typo. Less than a tenth of Avid’s price.

It was also already clear that Apple’s needle was starting to move because of iPods, not computers or NLE software. (You can see laments about this in the COW forums going back to 2003.) There’s NOTHING that Apple was doing that Avid was chasing, imo. This wasn’t how we were talking about it AT ALL.

Please note again, the Pinnacle deal was being driven by Avid Broadcast, where Apple had no play to speak of. And Avid wasn’t chasing anybody there either. They had by far the largest market share for the burgeoning newsroom digital conversion space — not quite at the 90%+ level of feature production, but not far behind iirc. (Speaking strictly of numbers at the time — I don’t know Avid’s newsroom market share is these days, but they have a much wider product portfolio. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve actually grown their share since what it was then, as they have in feature and episodic editing).

The acquisition was a chance to immediately grow from a $700 million company to a billion dollar a year company — yes, small in Apple terms (still “only” $13.95 billion in 2005), but Avid wasn’t chasing Apple, and Apple wasn’t making a billion dollars a year from broadcast, professional audio, networked video post, storage, et al. Avid had its own agenda, and it was to be a bigger, better Avid.

We can debate the wisdom of that plan, but I’d certainly argue that Avid’s downturn starting in 2007 had nothing to do with FCP, either (indeed, Avid’s revenue doubled between 2005 and 2007), but rather Avid’s own inability to execute on what was apparently overreach in the short run. That they successfully focused their business in the right direction in the longer run (again imo, but I think that this is hardly controversial among their customers; quite the contrary in fact) but have a stock price still in the doldrums is why I continue to hope that they go private (a strategy that helped Quantel/Snell, Dell, and a bunch of other companies who don’t rhyme with each other). But that’s another story.

Not that Avid was ignoring post in general, or with Pinnacle deal in particular in 2005. Avid acquired Medea in the same timeframe, M-Audio for studio monitoring, etc., had done some aggressive partnership and bundling deals on the software side to go with acquisitions particularly in audio, and with Pinnacle saw an opportunity to expand into the event market, where Xpress Pro was frankly the wrong product. Much too Media Composer-like. LOL NOT that Avid felt a need to compete with FCP on this front using Liquid, since you can’t use a Windows-only product to compete with a Mac-only product, and Avid’s Mac product line wasn’t clicking with the mass market in low-to-mid-post, nor was it intended to.

(Not that it wasn’t doing just fine where it WAS intended to, mind you, but I think that FCP folks have long misunderstood the basic outline of what Avid was and wasn’t trying to accomplish vis a vis the mass market, eg, not as much as you’d think. They specialize in products for specialists, whereas entire vectors of the debates here hinge on the extent to which Apple targets specialists, or is content with servicing them opportunistically.)

Hence Liquid was an opportunity to not have to leave all the money on the table in a substantial market. The push coming from anyone was from Adobe…but again, this wasn’t something that Avid was targeting per se. Liquid was compelling technology to reach a market where Avid had no play…but it was by no means easy money. Adobe had gotten a huge burst of energy from the Macromedia acquisition announced the month after Avid’s Pinnacle deal (THE news of NAB 2005), and they made very plain that they were out to run the table in every part of post, not just the event market.

(I should probably note again that this is my opinion, and I’m positive that some other folks who were there at the time would see it differently — but this was the set of priorities as I understood them then, and the plan that I was executing on a daily basis. And we’ve certainly seen nothing from Adobe to suggest that they’re content having only a few corners of the market to play in! They want it all, and then some.)

Further downmarket, Pinnacle Studio was doing INSANE money selling in $99 boxes in Circuit City. I don’t think Avid ever split out the numbers publicly, so I won’t do that here — but you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. LOL It was serious money. Again, not that Avid was trying to compete with iMovie — you can’t compete with a free Mac-only product with a $99 Windows-only product — but same story. All of the team was kept on, to keep doing what they were doing, now with additional resources, in order to help pay for the overall deal.

I didn’t have anything to do with that end of things, but I invested massive effort into developing the Liquid user community, dealer channel support, etc. These were passionate folks, who believed deeply in Liquid tech, which we were also very impressed by. Ironically enough, the newest version of Liquid was very FCPX-like: one window, insanely nimble, with a lot of extra power (albeit presented modally) that neither FCPX nor anyone has really attempted at the same degree — outstanding CG (DIRECTLY tied to the broadcast engine of Deko that was one of the core drivers of the whole thing), a terrific integrated DVD authoring interface (the best I’d seen), and the best multi-format support on the market — including uncompressed.

(Also unlike FCPX: there was a button you could push to get the old interface back if you wanted it, simply sacrificing the power and ease of use of the new version…but hey, it was freshly updated and fully supported, even if feature neutral vis a vis the old version.)

It happens that Liquid (with the Blue hardware configuration) was the only Avid product that supported uncompressed video at the time. Avid DNxHD had been rolled out the year before (with the technologically indistinguishable ProRes to come 3 years later), and 2K files were starting to come in at the higher end, but uncompressed was a nice box to check off. At NAB 2005 just weeks later, one of the featured stages in the booth was Liquid running uncompressed on newly-acquired Medea storage!

My larger point is that uncompressed wasn’t a priority for Avid in 2005, but it was nice to now have something to offer a customer for whom uncompressed was an immediate need. And that was the point of keeping Liquid around — to extend to adjacent markets for whom Media Composer was not an option for reasons that included missing feature sets and non-targeted use cases. Nobody using Liquid had seriously looked at Media Composer for a single second, and vice versa.

Hence the idea that buying it to kill is every bit as nonsensical as anything about the purchase chasing FCP. I was there. It didn’t happen that way.

The ultimately (if definitely not immediately) disposable product was Avid Xpress Pro. THAT one was responding to pressure from FCP in some ways — specifically, for a software-only support product for Media Composer — but obviously not in others.

(You can fill in your own long list of the ways that Xpress Pro fell short of FCP, and I bet mine is longer. LOL Don’t forget that I came in from being an early adopter of both Media 100 and FCP. I respected it for what it was, and rode under its flag with pride, but I knew what it wasn’t, too.)

It was inevitable that Xpress Pro would go away once MC Soft evolved and natural market forces pushed its price down to below what Xpress Pro had been in its final days.

I exited stage left before all that came to pass, with the 2006 rollout of software-only Media Composer (and Avid Interplay — a very busy NAB for me that year!). I actually spent the months following NAB 2006 showing MC Soft to FCP user groups, which I’d been presenting to for Boris FX since 2000 — including the 5th-ever meeting of LAFCPUG, 17 years ago this month! And my very VERY last thing at Avid was after I’d finished my time at the Avid campus, a road trip presenting to the FCPUG run by our old friend Keith Larsen in Connecticut.

To be honest, I was surprised that Xpress Pro lasted for another couple of years, but not at all surprised that Liquid carried for years after that — again, 5 years as a product, and supported for 2 more years after that. Certainly enough to set to rest the fiction that Avid bought it to kill it. It died a natural death as Avid focused on exactly what they should have been focused on in post, where Liquid lived: dual-platform, team-oriented, feature and TV editing. There’s a point at which opportunism turns into distraction, and my guess (having been gone for years by then) that Avid may have stayed on past that point as much for fondness for Liquid tech and customers as for business opportunity.

I really don’t want to skate past that. I effing loved those folks. They were passionate people who in some ways went back to the Media 100 ethos I’d come up in, of having taken out second mortgages and going all-in on family businesses as later-life careers. (I was in my mid 30s in the early days of Media 100, and one of the younger folks in the game. Much different now of course.) They were playing for keeps, and their enthusiasm was infectious, and helped keep me around probably longer than was good for me in the scheme of things, but I still treasure every cycle I spent working on Liquid and its community — and it was a huge part of what I did my last year-plus at Avid.

I was also nuts about the Pinnacle product folks I got to work with, in both post and broadcast. Some of the sharpest, most user-focused folks I’ve ever come across. In that sense, a great fit for Avid. Even in the admittedly dark-ish days of the early- to mid-aughts, we (and I’m proud to say “we” in this context) at Avid never hesitated to stand in the fire, face to face with our customers, not just behind the rope at trade shows, but in user groups, in their facilities, breaking bread with their employees and families, being accountable from top to bottom.

I remember one VP getting the shit kicked out of him at a customer event on his birthday. He didn’t mention that to the unhappy customers to slow them down, which would have been a natural impulse, at least at the bar afterward or something. But no. He was there to be on the receiving end of whatever. What he said to us afterward was that we’d had it coming. We weren’t doing well enough. We needed to do better.

And they have.

[Shane Ross] “They are listening, and because of that, we are demanding. And I’m SURE there are many things you’d like FCP-X to do, or some feature you wish it had. But is there a similar way to let Apple know this? Adobe sure has a way for users to let them know what they want.”

Apple has ways to take feedback of course, including through the app itself. I personally know that many of the folks there are exactly as customer-focused as you’d wish them to be, but public accountability the way that Adobe and Avid (among others) are doing it? That’s not traditionally been Apple’s style. ☺ Apple doesn’t build its teams or processes that way.

While most Apple customers are happy enough with the outcome, I simply refuse to believe that they wouldn’t be happier if they insisted on the same level of accountability from Apple displayed by other industry leaders, and Apple actually did it. Nothing bad comes from public accountability, and it’s silly to argue that it does.

Which is of course exactly what Steve Jobs argued repeatedly, from the very beginning to the very end. I’m sorry he’s no longer with us, but I’m not sorry he’s no longer at the helm. Apple has done much better since then, and I think they can do a lot better still.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Jerry,

Apologies for the delay replying!

These are all excellent points. We’re bringing a new IT team up to speed, and this is something I’ll have them look into.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Garrick,

No way to undo that, but no worries, either. This happens quite regularly, and where appropriate, we quickly turn the post back on, no harm done.

In fact, my loose estimates lead me to believe that most posts are accidentally flagged by the person who made the post!

Thanks so much for your thoughtful inquiry, though, and my apologies for the delay replying!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Mark] ” it turns out that one of my email filters was blocking the messages because the header had “amazones.com” in it. “

Yikes! Thanks so much for the extra research that revealed this! We have in fact moved to Amazon Web Services for hosting, which has done great things for the site, but our email service has been a mess. This may well be why.

I’m glad you’ve sorted out your problem, and grateful for the tip that may help us sort out ours!

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Bob,

Just for grins, try logging out and clicking the “forgot password” link. It won’t actually reset your password or anything, but it will trigger an email. See if you get that.

If not, there may be something else afoot. What I’d normally suggest is something you’ve already done, whitelisting us. The next suggestion after that would be creating a filter that sends us to a specific folder (which is what I do, since I get enough COW email notices that it would otherwise swamp my email). That way, the emails aren’t just going through, they’re being sent somewhere specific.

Anyway, try the reset email first, then try a filter, and let me know what you see.

Thanks!

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Tim doesn’t keep FCP X in the forum title as cheap way to swindle clicks from passersby, he keeps it in the forum title because this place is about how X’s new philosophy compares to the pre-existing philosophy that almost all other NLEs use some variation of. “

Bingo! Absent FCPX, there’s no debate. In fact, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years at this point. There’s never been a debate forum here, period, before FCPX. We tried, heaven knows, if only because it seemed like we OUGHT to have at least one. Ultimately, though, the shape of this thing depends a lot more on the 300,000 members than it does the 3 of us who work here, and you the members let us know when you were ready to debate. It was with the announcement of FCPX. The first 200 or so posts went up while the debut presentation was still underway, being driven by the people in that room.

To another point of yours, Andrew, the current mix of threads on my version of the forum index page is FCPX in 10 of the first 11 threads, and no, I’m not including this one. That’s 90.9%.

So, I guess there’s “Half Full vs Half Empty Debates”, but I’m not sure how 90.9% FCPX threads at the top of the page turns into somehow a lot more than half empty.

(And honestly, you’d be shocked how few people ever see that page anyway, relative to the high volume of traffic that moves through the forum as a whole. Nearly all of our traffic comes in directly to threads and posts, whether through search, or subscription….and do keep in mind that I’m also looking at the numbers of people who read the forum without posting, a number that I know isn’t as accessible to the rest of you.

Also, if any chucklehead looks PAST the Apple FCPX forum on the Forums index page — and yes, we made sure that the FCPX forum comes BEFORE the Debates forum in the listing — then they get what they get. There’s not the least ambiguity in the names. Want to talk about FCPX? Go to the FCPX Forum. Want to debate? Come here…although I maintain that the quality of conversation here is richer and more robust, certainly more diverse, than any monocultured FCPX forum, so keep coming here anyway. ????)

This particular thread is entirely typical of a thread in this forum that DOES start on some other topic — say, Premiere, or Resolve, or any number of non-software topics — in that ALL threads eventually suck FCPX into them.

That’s ultimately the nature of our little community-within-a-community. No thread stays away from FCPX for long. Nor should it, nor could it. Virtually ALL threads here are FCPX threads.

Which is also why I’m not buying for a minute that “THE” debate is over, because there was never just one debate. There have been a zillion of ’em. And yes, SOME of them ARE over, sort of, but some of the longest-stewing are still going on at this very minute. Others will arrive with the next rev, or the next Mac or whatever, which will bring the next wave of new customers, and the next wave of HIGHLY inappropriate rejoinders that “We settled this four years ago” — well, no, obviously “we” didn’t.

The irony is that I think the only way any debate is settled is when you stop moving. “I’ve bought my computer, I’m not looking at other software or platforms, I don’t use products from other companies. I’ve made all the decisions I need to make. I’ve settled.”

See the irony? Exactly the kind of thing so often decried in people who settle anywhere else.

But when you stay in motion, staying attuned to the full context of our creative enterprise, there’s ALWAYS something new to debate. Every new release, not just from Apple, but from everyone, creates a new set of lenses through which to view FCPX, Apple, and the many, many other things we talk about every day.

(Contrast this with the Adobe debate forum, which really WAS only about one topic, and that one really HAS been settled. That’s also why I doubt that the forum will spring back to life — the people who shaped that forum as a venue to vent vented, then largely vamoosed. But hey, the forum is there if anyone needs it. YOU shape the forums. I just work here.)

Look, my feeling is the same as it ever was. The current name is the 4th or 5th we’ve had for this forum, so it’s not that other names are out of the question. I do like this one, though. It’s concise, and serves as a warning: try to start a thread on another topic, and it WILL be an FCPX thread soon enough. ????

But if there’s a next name, whatever it is, it too will have “FCPX” in the name, because that’s the only reason we’re here and the only thing we keep coming back to, and it will have “Debates” in the name, plural, because there’s more than one debate.

Yr pal,
Timmy

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW
????

[Tim Wilson]

You guys make it sound like they did it on purpose — thought carefully about how their phones should be set for optimum performance in these specific conditions — which would imply that they had any awareness whatsoever of their camera settings, and/or how to change them, and/or why all-Auto Focus/Auto Flash, all the time might be something worth thinking about adjusting, plus some kind of understanding of why some specific adjustments might be better than others.

I’m not sure most people even know that these things CAN be adjusted….on top of those other factors (what, how, why, etc.). That seems like a lot to expect a civilian to keep up with.

Not to suggest that you should be any less annoyed by them. ????

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Ralph,

No, your picture should stay right where it belongs. Is it missing for you right now? Because for me, it’s showing up fine!

If you need me to, I can try to reset it from here.

Thanks,
Tim