Jack Guthrey
Forum Replies Created
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[Craig Seeman] “Why? The ones you have stopped working or suddenly sound worse? The product line was sold, not discontinued. I have no reason to replace my M-Audio BX5a.”
I just used that anecdote to show that the announcement did not excite any concerns of Avid leaving the marketplace here.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
[Craig Seeman] “If Avid wants to prioritize value over price they need to focus on it. If they want to focus on price and volume they need to focus on that. The problem is they don’t have a business model that makes sense”
I agree with this 100%. Avid really needs to show this industry what it’s really about.
[Craig Seeman] “Absolutely NOT! Avid is not an NLE company. The market for Isis Interplay etc. hasn’t change because of FCP. At least not enough to impact their downward spiral.”
I should have clarified. There are a lot of facilities that are FCP reliant and actually have an infrastructure built around it. That infrastructure basically gets EOL’d with FCP7’s death. Avid is the only one that can really pick up that business and expand upon it.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
[Walter Soyka] “guys like most of us here”
You’ve hit the nail on the head again, Walter. It seems most of these “SKY IS FALLING!!” posts are all speaking on MC vs Adobe vs Apple or BMD making Avid available to the everyman. That’s not Avid’s game and not their market.
I do think Avid needs to directly show the entire industry what its wheelhouse is. I see IBM commercials on TV. I’m never going to buy a thing from them – I know what they do though. People need to know what Avid does. Especially the cool stuff like Interplay Sphere. What could be nice as well is showing an integration of a single guy on software quickly and easily handing off to a larger facility for finishing, broadcast, archive, etc.
I also would love to see and ISIS 1000 – basic shared storage that can be expanded upon when the time comes. That’s probably a pipe dream though. Avid only sells enterprise grade things and enterprise drive arrays are anything but cheap.
What’s been funny to me is coming here and seeing all this speculation when here at the office (about 80% of our business is Avid) the biggest kerfuffle was that now we have to find a good replacement to the M-Audio AV40s.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
[Craig Seeman] “The whole crossgrade lost them money. Why bother with it if it’s not a viable model?”
The crossgrade was definitely a loss as a lot of lone-man software editors bought it to have another option. The question down the road will be how many facilities bought it and end up replacing their useless FCS and Xsan with ISIS/Interplay.
What I’ve already found is that many non-Avid facilities are starting to become reacquainted with Avid and all the workflow benefits that come with it.
[Craig Seeman] “MC/Symphony should really just be the NLE tool that goes with Unity/Isis system sales.”
For a lot of facilities – it is. They buy into the infrastructure and just use whatever NLE works with it.
[Craig Seeman] “If people are buying MC/Symphony and going with other storage solutions, that’s not serving Avid’s financials. That people are finding other viable storage options with Avid’s “front end” NLEs, that indicates a problem (IMHO) also.”
That would be going back to a ‘closed’ system which used to be one of the major things people complained about. I don’t think it’ll be too long before there is an ISIS price drop (though it already isn’t far off from competitors) and you start seeing more and more of it.
I believe Avid is “sitting pretty” with all the FCP shakeup. People want infrastructure and the only company pitching a true end-to-end solution is Avid. As more and more third parties begin to integrate with Avid Interplay (StorageDNA comes to mind) the entry point for the full workflow becomes more manageable and I think we’ll see more and more shops rolling in an Avid environment.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
I am very confused on this reoccurring statement of “over-priced servers”. I need clarification – is the idea that hardware server prices will drop significantly or that Avid’s server prices in specific need to drop? I have found Avid’s price to be quite inline with competitors.
One of Avid’s problems is that they have not reeducated customers. They aren’t the locked-down, closed-off system that people came to know many years ago and their prices are not out of touch with competitors either.
Their marketing in general has been pretty lack-luster. Most people in this industry aren’t aware of the full Avid workflow and that’s an issue. We all gear lust and Avid has some of the lust-iest stuff.
If a company were to buy Avid, they’d have to keep a lot of product afloat. Broadcasters and large facilities that have bought into the Avid ecosystem by the millions of dollars will not take easily to product EOL nor would they look kindly to a consumer oriented company obtaining a very pro oriented one.
What is most interesting to me however is that most people clamored when Apple dropped the pro to focus on consumers and aren’t cheering that Avid is doing the exact opposite.
I’m not at all worried that any of Avid’s NLEs will disappear – Media 100 still exists in some form. Someone will buy that piece which of course is the part that most people associate Avid with. As stated many times, Avid makes it’s money off of ISIS/Interplay and services/solutions. The comparison to IBM may be an extremely apt one.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
Of course, Tim makes a great point.
The best monitoring I ever had was waaayyy back in High School when I used this terrible little CRT TV. It just happened to be the exact same TV all the classrooms at the school (which I was producing for) had. I always knew exactly roughly (again, crappy CRTs) what my audience would see (unless teachers turned it off).
Anyway, watch on what your audience watches on.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
Remember that color accuracy is only one part of what makes monitoring necessary – you are also looking for interlacing, motion artifacts, under/overscan, etc.
The ColorSync inclusion is a bit of “aha!” magic on Apple’s part but you still will not see field/frame issues and you are (usually) limited to 8bit color depth.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
The Matrox MXO2 mini is fine as long as you don’t need to ingest from tape and are ok with not having “professional” outputs (no SDI at all). I’d strongly consider the AJA IO Express.
You are completely correct – there are no cheap solutions. One of my favorite sayings is “You have to pay to play”
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
I typically steer people away from homebrew computers as Avid does not qualify them.
That being said, i’d switch to a Quadro graphics card and would look into adding a Blu-Ray burner as cheap as they are now.
Also, no I/O? Even if you never ingest, having an output out to a decent, dedicated monitor is so much better than relying on the inaccurate monitoring inside of the Avid software.
I can’t explain the discrepancy in price on the eBay MC6 but I’d be wary.
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems -
I AMA to XDcam on our Terrablock to no ill effects but I also don’t heavily edit, just some cuts and AAFs to get into DaVinci (edit, transcode, aaf, DaVinci).
I have the same question Richard has – if it is DNxHD, why AMA link it? Just import and go.
And to clarify, you want to ingest to the new NAS/SAN, log the footage in MC and then consolidate it to the Unity? Do you ever plan to push off the Unity to the NAS/SAN for ‘archiving’ projects/footage? How many systems would be using the new NAS/SAN?
Jack Guthrey
Carolinas Account Representative
Marshall Graphics Systems