[Michael Trenton]

And yes, I also agree that as a professional, the $299/year should not be a limiting factor. Avid’s challenge for revenue growth is to go beyond it current “pro” market with offerings in order to increase seat count, which then attracts third party developers, which then supports a Marketplace strategy, etc.

I think if it is indeed Avid’s goal to expand beyond the traditional pro market in order to increase seat count, basically tapping into the vast youtuber, corporate video and real estate/wedding videos market currently being dominated by Premiere Pro and FCPX then first of all they need to adopt a more competitive pricing strategy.

$49 a month for Media Composer alone (1-year agreement) versus Premiere Pro at $19 a month (1-year agreement) or if you want to you can get the entire Adobe CC suite for those same $49 (1-year agreement) giving you access to literally all of Adobe’s software including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Audition and Media Encoder.
And Avid’s $1299 perpetual license versus FCPX perpetual at $299 (add another $100 and you’ll get Motion and Compressor included).

With those prices I can’t see how Avid will ever be able to win a bigger piece of those markets (presuming that is even their goal of course).
Those $49 a month ($35 for 3-year agreement) by Avid should have at least included Symphony and Pro Tools etc as well in order to make a somewhat more attractive and competitive deal versus the competition.

To say your perpetual license becomes “worthless” is not fair. Is your 2012 Symphony license “worthless”? You’ve been using it (or have had the ability to use it) for 5 years to cut as many projects as you want on it. It will still work in 5 more years.

I guess outdated is a better term. And if I ever want an up to date Avid Symphony it means I’ll have to pay up $2048 for a new MC license with the Symphony option.
But I agree my choice of words probably weren’t the best and if I’m lucky I can still go on to use my current Symphony v.6 license for some time, although I may have to adopt some transcode workflow in order to edit with some of the newer 4K codecs I’ll be using. I’ll do some tests and see how things work out.

[Michael Trenton]

Things change and have to.
Do Adobe have a perpetual licensing model?
Or was the only option to move to rental at a reduced rate?
Not fair there either.
I’ve always considered purchases like MC to pay for themselves in 3 years or less. After that its just icing.

I understand things change and obviously me not understanding the consequences of this change is on me. If I had been aware of the change in time then I would definitely have started paying that $299 annual fee in order to ‘save’ my Symphony license from becoming worthless, but alas I can’t turn back time so here I am now.

As you point out Adobe has done away with perpetual licenses, which caused quite some controversy back when everyone were forced into a subscriptions based license model. I don’t support that move by Adobe at all as I believe both alternatives should have been kept available instead of shoehorning every customer into Adobe’s preferred license model (in Adobe’s defence their subscriptions are very reasonably priced compared to Avid though, even though that’s no excuse).
So in that sense Avid is, in theory, doing a good thing by offering both subscription based and perpetual licenses to their customers. My only beef here is the customer unfriendly approach they have with their perpetual license upgrade practices.
Basically it is a ‘forced’ annual subscription fee with no chance of a buy-in if you skip that annual fee for even a year. To me that seems very harsh and unfriendly towards customers who’s paid up $1299 and then maybe paid $299 annually for several years on top of that.
Perpetual license holders are in effect being held hostage and forced to keep paying up that annual $299 in order to not loose all chance of ever upgrading their $1299 license in the future. In a way that’s just another form of subscription based licensing in my opinion.

To add to that (if my poor math skills aren’t playing tricks on me) it seems it takes a whole 9 years(!) before a perpetual license actually starts paying off versus subscription based license, which is, in my opinion, also a very perpetual license unfriendly policy.

[Michael Trenton]

Its really no different to the Adobe model. Your best bet is just to go with the monthly or yearly subscription just as you do with Adobe.
A lot of marketing and effort was spent over a long period to flag with users the need to put their old licenses on support when the change happened. And rental like Adobe was what many folks wanted.
From Avids point of view what have you put in their coffers in the last few years?

I agree the subscription model per se is no different than the Adobe model so I’m not knocking them for that, but it is their changed policies regarding perpetual licenses I have a problem with here.

A perpetual license cost a lot of money and a policy that renders such a license worthless in terms of future upgrades if you are to skip only one year of their $299 support deal is what I feel is completely unfair. It’s pretty much a perpetual + $299 subscription deal in my eyes and not a true perpetual license.
Previously the policy used to be if you skipped upgrades then the only consequence would be you had to pay more when finally upgrading which was a fair policy in my opinion, but now they are punishing their perpetual license holders forever if not paying the annual upgrade fee.
I mean would it really kill them to have something similar to the old arrangement where you can buy back in if skipping a few upgrades? It certainly would be a way better strategy to win back previously loyal customers like myself. Instead the cost of buying back in is so high I may not be able to afford it.

As far as your question of what I’ve put in Avid’s coffers for the last years then that’s exactly $0 as my last upgrade was in 2012, I admit that. However through the years I’ve paid them thousands of dollars from first purchasing an MC license, paying for MC upgrades, then later upgrading from MC to Symphony etc. That is a LOT of money that is now worth nothing to them.

[Michael Trenton]

Thanks for confirming my suspicions Warren.
Not a very friendly change of upgrade policy by Avid then. It used to be if you skipped an upgrade or two all that happened was you’d pay more when upgrading, not have your license rendered worthless.
Buying a whole new license again is gonna bleed my budget dry, particularly if being forced to pay a $299 ‘maintenance’ fee in top of that in order to keep the license from becoming worthless in a couple of years. Very dissappointing move by Avid.

[Michael Trenton]

I’m hesitant to say a different transverter will work due to TBC errors in your VHS deck. I have heard that sometimes using a camcorder with composite or SVideo input, in EE mode, and taking Firewire out sometimes minimizes some of the TBC error…

Hopefully your tapes are first generation, and not ‘dubs’…. Dubs create all sorts of problems due to multiple TBC errors all beating against one another….

Yes I didn’t want to spend more money buying another pro converter due to me not having a TBC deck so that’s why I took my chances with the consumer oriented Magix solution as I figured because most consumer VHS decks probably are no-TBC ones it wouldn’t have made sense for Magix to sell a converter dependent upon a TBC deck to regular consumers.

I do have a working HDV camera laying about which accepts analogue video in through composite (no s-video unfortunately – the Magix converter has s-video though). So far I haven’t tested if whether it’s capable of outputting the video directly through firewire though (as I’ve thrown all my 4-pin FW cables out, but I’ve now ordered a new one for testing), or if I have to record onto a tape and then ingest the tape afterwards. However If it does work I’ll have the advantage of recording DV stream quality. It will be through composite though and the Magix does video through s-video so I wonder if I will get any real quality bump by going the DV stream route (instead of Magix MPEG2 conversion) or if the quality loss from composite (VS Magix s-video) outweighs that advantage…?

My tapes are first generation, but they still look like crap on my computer screen, but I guess that’s as expected given the source. Too bad I’ve not kept any CRT screens.

[Michael Trenton]

Update:

I gave up on getting the Intensity Shuttle to work (wasn’t able to test running the video via a DVD/Blu-ray player since none of mine have analogue in Connections) and instead bought the consumer based Magix Rescue Your Videotapes 8 solution which gets the job done.
It’s a bit of a hassle though as the Magix software only allows for the videotapes to first be captured into their own proprietary format and then I have to export an MPEG2 file in order to use the file outside of their own software. Albeit it is time consuming and I’m sure inflicts some quality loss it does seem to work and offer decent enough picture quality (given the nature of the source material).

[Michael Trenton]

UPDATE:
I’m gonna buy an s-video to HDMI converter and see if that makes a difference. I know it’s probably a long shot, but it’s the only thing I can think of right now (with the exception of getting a VHS deck with TBC, but I’m not sure how readily available they are).

Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Tendak-Composite-S-Video-Converter-Upscaler/dp/B00V2ULHBS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1485286534&sr=8-3&keywords=s-video+to+hdmi+converter

[Michael Trenton]

So I recieved my Intensity Shuttle today (I went with the external one rather than the 4K Pro internal one) and unfortunately I’ve run into some issues.
Like someone mentioned previously the lack of TBC in my JVC HR-S6950 VHS deck is the likely culprit here. Basically the Intensity Shuttle itself seems to be working just fine, but the video is having loads of black flash frames (what I assume is dropped frames caused by the lack of TBC?). It will usually look just fine for a couple of minutes, then there will be a couple of minutes where there will be some minutes with lots of black flash frames and then it will look just fine again for the next few minutes. And so it goes, so that renders my captured footage unusable unfortunately.

So I’m a bit at a loss of what to do now really. Is the only solution to find some second hand higher end VHS player with inbuilt TBC? Or is there some other capture device on the market that has this inbuilt?

And is it even possible that those cheaper consumer based capture solutions (e.g. Magix Rescue Your Videotapes) are potentially better suited at handling this task? I mean if you needed a high end VHS deck with TBC in order to make Magix Rescue Your Videotapes work then I assume there would have been almost exclusively negative feedback on such a device from the majority of customers out there with non-TBC consumer VHS decks?

Btw
Nice videos comparing the Intensity Shuttle to the ADVC 110 there Andy. I was particularly surprised to learn GPU acceleration resulted in poorer image quality when monitoring.

[Michael Trenton]

Regarding the Intensity Shuttle, does the included Express software allow me to monitor picture and audio real-time in full-screen while I record the VHS tapes (or will I need to hook up an additonal monitor to provide full screen playback)?

[Michael Trenton]

”Please be aware that the Shuttle can be fussy about which particular USB 3.0 chip set your computer has inside – it may or may not work unfortunately. If you have issues, the Intensity Pro 4K has the exact same functionality as its external brother, but goes into a PCI-e slot in your desktop, and uses a less-convenient breakout cable arrangement. But does the same thing.”

Hi Jeff! Thanks for making me aware of the internal PCI based Intensity Shuttle Pro 4K.
When I googled the Pro 4K at first I thought it would make the most sense to go for that instead of the external USB based Instensity Shuttle due to, as you mentioned, the USB being possibly finicky and also the support for 4K making it more future proof, but then I saw some reviews claiming that it’s fitted with a small fan that apparently runs very loud (to the point of being almost unbearable according to one reviewer) and this had me a bit worried and raised a few questions.

Does the fan run all the time (even when the card is not under load?) Does the fan really run that loud? And does it run that loud all the time or is it only running loud when the device is being pushed really hard (e.g capturing 4K at 10-bit)?
I guess these worries makes me think maybe I ought to go for the fanless external USB based Intensity Shuttle for now.

”I would think you’d need a TBC too – or at least a VHS with a built in TBC, otherwise you’d get rolling/ unlocked pictures. I do need to capture some family VHS so if this is possible with domestic VCRs I’d love to hear…”

I see. I didn’t foresee any problems of that sort, but once I get hold of the capture card I will first try recording directly from my domestic VCR at to see if it works fine or not without TBC and report back on my findings here in this thread.