Michael Phillips
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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This has come up with another user on the Avid Editors of Facebook, but have yet to see a response. I know that the issues has been taken back to Avid support and engineering. If I see something pop up on the topic, I will post back here.
Michael
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Apple became a luxury item to the wider consumer market as part of its extraordinary growth in a separate, but somewhat related market – music players and phones. Avid has tried twice to enter consumer markets, maybe three if you count the short-lived iPad editing solution before it sold off to Corel. It became clear that the Avid brand at the high end (Hollywood) had no impact when marketing to the consumer market. The whole “home to Hollywood” did not pay off.
But the “video” market has grown since those days to the current “video is everywhere” it whatever forms it takes from mobile to streaming. The issue is that Avid’s revenue have not grown along with it and other solutions are filling that gap. Avid continues to serve its existing customer base well, all the ones mentioned here, broadcast, news, studio film/television and Reality – and as noted, any situation that requires multiple editors, assistants, and collaborators to share the program creation process.
Perhaps the 12,000 subscriptions mentioned in the earnings call is telling for those “other” markets. That is the total number of subscribers in the past 18 months. What is not known is whether that is the total current ACTIVE subscribers or anyone who may have subscribed for at least a month. It would be interesting to see how that breaks down. If I recall correctly, 7 month to month rentals was the same as a yearly commit. How many month to month, versus yearly?
I feel that last year’s December 31 deadline to get on the support plan or pay for your license all over again should you want to upgrade was a “gentle” force to get more money out of the existing user base. There were thousands of systems humming away on v5, 5.5, 6, 6.5 and 7 – especially in those large collaborative environments as the cost of the upgrade is more than just the seats – but the entire environment.
As I mentioned, the Avid challenge is to get more money from the customer base – this is the whole Avid Marketplace concept to become an “Apple Store” selling goods and services for a cut of the revenue. This is highly dependent on having lots of seats to target and getting lots of developers to get on board making purchases form the Marketplace more appealing than any other alternative. I think Pro Tools has a lot better shot as it has always been considered a platform for third party development and one can easily argue that its plug-in architecture is better, easier, with more performance than other formats so developers are more than glad to get on board. Media Composer on the other hand is a snooze fest when it comes to plethora of choices and price points, and AVX is not a popular plug-in architecture and is only used in Media Composer, arguably the smallest of the seat count market.
The other challenge is growing the number of seats, and that means competing with Resolve, Adobe and FCPx to feed that Marketplace. And that is a huge challenge. I believe the CEO mentioned (again) in this earnings call that they will start aggressively marketing into this “tier 3” market. Perhaps that will make its debut with Media Composer|Free.
Michael
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You are seeing the difference between LongGOP encoding and I frame encoding used by DNxHD, ProRes, etc. LongGOP can maintain reasonable quality at very low data/storage rates, whereas I frame encoding cannot. You can try transcoding to one of the XDCAM codecs if you want, which is LongGOP albeit at a different data rate. SD DVD was most likely in the 8-12MB/s MPEG2 range whereas XDCAM HD will be 35 MBs. Then you are converting that to H.264 which can go even lower, or let’s assume the same data rate. In NTSC 23.976P, JFIF encoding at 14:1 was roughly 12MBs. HD will require more, just do to size.
Michael
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I believe Avid’s challenge is revenue growth. For one, keeping existing customer base which is studio, broadcast, etc. and getting more money out of them as well as growing into other markets with solutions. It is the latter they are facing more competition. I can do a basic search on Film Industry Network for any given city (even LA) and will see in order of jobs available favoring Adobe and Apple. Now we all want to work on features, studio work and such, but that’s not where all the jobs are unless you are in those cities. If you look at the overall media industry – the system use is not Avid. I did a search for editing jobs in Boston and there were 185 jobs for Adobe, 27 for Final Cut Pro and 21 for Avid. So once those 21 jobs are filled, the thousands of new job seekers hitting the marketplace can either wait for the next Avid job or go for one of the other jobs.
Avid’s strategy of releasing free (feature reduced) versions of Pro Tools and Media Composer is recognizing the fact that the next/younger generation are unaware or have no experience in using them (more MC than PT, I would think). Also, the whole revenue strategy of the Avid Marketplace is based on having a large number of seats and developers. As of now, Media Composer has the fewest seats and developers. Maybe that will change.
Also, I do not believe Pro Tools and Media Composer will ever go away, it a long-shot it may just not be Avid.
Michael
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Very strange indeed. Glad you found a workaround.
Michael
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When using Amira embedded LUTs you have to transcode with baked in. Avid does not support Amira LUT information as metdata once trancoded.
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Avid’s native effects do not offer any control over motion blur. There may be more control if you have Boris other AVX effects, although I cannot point you to one specific one to use. Most people would go to After Effects. If on Windows, you could try the free Fusion from Blackmagic.
Michael
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You are also losing a lot of motion resolution in the process as frame will need to be dropped to maintain duration. Basically it is dropping 150 frames and blending frames to result in the 29.97 every second. That, combined with the high shutter speed as Job is mentioning, will give it a very stacato look and would need some frame blending to make it appear as though it were shot at 29.97fps.
Michael
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Yes, 30p (29.97p) is about the worse scenario you can have going to 23.976p. For some stuff, you can remove the redundant frames, then play back the resulting frames at 23.976 which will change its speed, but offer the best image quality as nothing got blended.
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got it. Will take a look at it later this afternoon when I get the time. Stay tuned.
Michael