RE: How long are we prepared to wait for an answer from avid?
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Tom said:
I am not saying that Avid is necessarily
following the same business practices, but it seems very reasonable that the
Symphony Nitris product completes the "total conform" workflow for Media
Composer fans, and maybe Avid is done with this series of editors. Avid may have
taken this opportunity to put a new product in the hands of Symphony fans
(remember that group has been standing around with nothing new for a long time
too). Stockholders are happy with new sales to that Symphony market, and Avid
gets a window and a revenue stream to develop their next generation editor. No
way to tell, but that is the free enterprise
system.
Hi Tom, I'm not
sure the next generation editor you
are speaking is on the way. Avid
stategy since a few years is clearly based on "external' soft/prodcuts buying
and assembly more than real innovation (ex: Softimage DS with elastic
reality, illusion, marquee.... and today
probable drop
out.) And I'm not sure we are waitting for new "editing" systems actually. We are all in the HD/DI "fx&composinting" time now...
In fact, I don't think DS
operator's/owners do really mind about what Avid does with Symphony products and
MC fans. Our problem is simply that the expensive DS
to Symphony "crossgrade" is clearly a downgrade for DS
operator's/owners. So the significant questions for us are: 1. Are
there yes/no any clear Avid's plans for DS's HD&DI workflows
development after V8 ? (V8 announced lately and without any major
innovation) 2. If
not, which future can we wait from Avid in the next 2 years to
stay/get positioned effectively on those high-end markets ? (Symphony
is just a HD finishing system > no modern
compositing/no DI) 3. If
yes, why continue to trust a company that do not even condescend to
communicate with his top-product client base and clearly
respect certain potentials customers with the detriment of the others
? Without any clear response to those questions in a very short time, Avid will simply oblige us to look elsewhere where our future is.
-----Message d'origine----- Here is a little story some of you may be
familiar with.De : owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-ds(at)Softimage.COM]De la part de Tom Edwards Envoyé : 5 janvier 2006 04:48 À : DS(at)Softimage.COM Objet : Re: How long are we prepared to wait for an answer from avid? Back in the 1900's this particular high profile company made linear editing systems. They made a wide range of products over the years. Some were really very good, so good that other companies copied almost every basic function of their design (including the color keycaps). Some products were very bad, and nobody copied anything. Then a time period came along (about 18 months) where all the customers were challenging the company to fix the things that didn't work quite right or at least add some new features that other manufacturer's systems were able to do. Nothing seemed to be happening. Sound familiar... Well this company just didn't seem to respond to any of these demands for a long time (did I mention it was 18 months?) Then one day the company unveiled a new system that, while not perfect, was light years ahead of other systems because it was built on a new hardware platform, new OS, new interface, lots and lots of new features that NOBODY else was doing. The company..... CMX The product ..... The OMNI Did CMX abandon the 3100, 3500, 3400, 3400A, 3600 edit systems? Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it. End of life did come to the new development of features on those systems. But there are still some of these units still in use and the CMX company went out of business in the late 1900's. Did CMX build a better mouse trap? You betcha. For those who endured the development of the OMNI (we were one of four alpha sites - started with version 0,.0 - painful) that edit system turned out to be a great decision for the company and the end user. (We still have two Omni's running - great compilation reel assembly systems - in their 12 year and still going - by the way we moved on past version 0.0 , we are running version 14.6 beta - yep, was in beta test when the lights went out!). Oh yeah, did I mention that I can make HD tape to tape edits with this OMNI using Sony's SRW-5500 tape decks? And then the 2000's I am not saying that Avid is necessarily following the same business practices, but it seems very reasonable that the Symphony Nitris product completes the "total conform" workflow for Media Composer fans, and maybe Avid is done with this series of editors. Avid may have taken this opportunity to put a new product in the hands of Symphony fans (remember that group has been standing around with nothing new for a long time too). Stockholders are happy with new sales to that Symphony market, and Avid gets a window and a revenue stream to develop their next generation editor. No way to tell, but that is the free enterprise system. up on soapbox... By this group's own acknowledgment, maybe that's not so bad - referring to people's testimonials that are still on v3.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x Equinox system and making money every day. Personally, it does not seem to be too risky to buy into the product line at any point. Nitris dollars can certainly be recovered if used over a long enough period of time. Only caveat is whether Avid will assure the system for that long, but so far their track record of support time on hardware seems to be reasonable, at least that has been my experience. I am not some crazed Avid cheerleader, but in reality, they have not done anything really that uncommon for a public company of their size and overhead. back down off the soapbox. Just my $.02 Tom Edwards MTV Networks Chasteen, Howard wrote:
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- References:
- Re: How long are we prepared to wait for an answer from avid?
- From: Tom Edwards <tdcone(at)bellsouth.net>
- Re: How long are we prepared to wait for an answer from avid?
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