“It’s difficult to see what turnaround can be engineered at the 21-year-old company,” Barron’s reports. “Avid’s grip on the video-editing and post-production technology field has been loosened dramatically by Apple, which swooped in with low-priced offerings that have increasingly gained adoption among independent film makers and editors.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s products have also increasingly gained adoption among major, mainstream film makers and editors, than you very much.
Barron’s continues, “‘It’s as if a good friend is expiring,’ says Jon Alpert, an Emmy award-winning documentary film maker, who used Avid computers to produce shows for HBO such as 2006’s Baghdad ER… Describing himself as an early adopter of Avid, Jon Alpert has since switched to using Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Systems that would cost $80,000 to put together from Avid can be had for a few thousand dollars with Apple’s Macs and its ever-expanding array of products.”
“‘It is really, increasingly, financial suicide to consider using Avid,’ when the same work can be done with Apple gear, he says,” Barron’s reports. “Alpert’s color-correction expert, who ‘swore he’d never switch to Apple,’ this year made the transition to Apple’s program, dubbed ‘Color,‘ with relative ease and is now ‘quite happy.’ Worse, film and TV’s next generation is growing up on Apple’s cheaper platform.”
Barron’s reports, “Avid still has fans, but the devotion gap, if you will, has narrowed substantially with Apple. A recent survey conducted by Piper’s Olson of 112 post-production video specialists found 45% using Avid machines and 41% using Apple, with the latter having jumped from 32% just a year ago.”
Full article here.
” Worse, film and TV’s next generation is growing up on Apple’s cheaper platform.” “
By worse, they mean better, right?
Avid was always too expensive and too Windows centric.
Classic example of a company that dominates a market and then fails to adapt. Similar to…..
Atari
AOL
IBM (Their Computer Business)
Microsoft
PictureTel
Horse & Buggy Manufacturerers
…like a dying dinosaur on its last breath…
“Avid was always too expensive and too Windows centric”
Not true, Avid used to be Mac-centric…..and too expensive
Their biggest problem is they tried to focus on high-end clientele and ignored the smaller guys. The smaller guys used Adobe Premiere and eventually FCP. When they became the bigger guys, Avid was not in the picture.
Furthermore, Avid stuck to expensive, proprietary hardware. Once off the shelf computers had the horsepower to compete they were stuck.
Avid did it to themselves with help from Microsoft. About 10 years ago MS invested in Avid with the requirement that they only release certain new products on windows only and slow down introducing updates to current mac versions. Apple quietly responded with Final Cut Pro.
Avid thought they were cutting Apples throat but the knife got redirected.
I think it is interesting how all these writers use words so carelessly.
The Apple product is not “cheaper” it is “less expensive”. Less expensive to purchase, operate, maintain, and upgrade.
You don’t say, just wait till the new breed of Video and Film editors that is just now starting to enter the work force. This group learned on Final Cut, they can do more, faster, get better results, and are more productive. It’s a no brainer going forward and that is TV, Video, and Movie production will be with Final Cut. The same revolution has been occurring in the music studios were ProTools (an Avid product) is no longer the industry standard. Apple’s Logic Studio is the premiere and preferred Digital Music production software and platform. It’s dominance is growing daily.
If there is a company that would fit Apple’s strategy and is getting ripe for a buy-out it’s Avid.
And Avid does have some software and hardware that Apple could benefit from by incorporating the little bits into Final Cut and Logic.
Avid also make the music composition software – Sibelius – that would complement Logic (if Apple were interested in buying Avid, that is).
“…like a dying dinosaur on its last breath…“
Whoa… slow down with the hyperbole there, silverwarloc.
You’ll note that Avid still holds a 44-41 lead against FCP. That hardly constitutes ‘its last breath’. Now I much prefer FCP to Avid, but Post-Production houses are still divided.
I can see the growth of Final Cut continuing as hardware/software budgets get squeezed further. A good thing for Apple and FCP… but please, less of the cheerleading and more analysis of an industry you clearly know little about.
@ quad Core
IBM is not out of the computer business, just the cutthroat desktop PC business.
They still rule in the midsize and mainframe market. If you think that is not important, well that is what runs the back end of many e-commerce, governmental, and other huge database operations.
IBM is still significant today. On the other hand, I predict that Microsoft in 2020 will be less significant than IBM is today.
As someone who upgrades and installs both Avid and FCP editing systems in Hollywood I’ve seen this progression firsthand. A lot of the debate is already behind us – people just don’t argue the merits as fervently as a couple years ago. Avid has a huge installed base – a solid system and most importantly a huge base of trained editors. Those systems will be functioning for years to come. But the trends are obvious – FCP is the growth platform; Avid is shrinking. There is no longer any stigma to being an FCP editor in an Avid world – and Avid editors are cross-training to FCP in droves. And the sales guys have also seen the writing on the wall – their fat commissions from AVID contracts are fast becoming a thing of the past.
Things rarely go well when an ‘activist investor’ gets involved.
Several family members work in TV for major networks on the news side here in NY. Over the past couple of years, most of the studios have moved from Avid to Apple.
@ quad Core
For a second there I thought Horse & Buggy was the name of a company.
LOL
Avid needs to focus on the truly high end: the 4K and higher resolution with deep color stuff. Apple is not (and won’t be for some time) focused on that segment. Avid can market themselves as providing support for the highest resolution and best color segment of the industry.
They should go for the segment that is now taking the classics and rescanning the original camera negatives of films and TV shows and creating true digital archives and highest quality outputs from that. These archives should be “8K” or higher and have deep color in order to capture the full information in the original camera negatives. This is far beyond the realm where Apple is playing.
Apple will eventually get there, but it may give Avid another decade of breathing room.
Who stole my cheese?
Mmmm, I remember using Media100 as an inexpensive alternative to Avid back in the day. Avid really screwed the pooch by a, not aggressively targeting the youth/indy/education markets, and b, getting in bed with Microsoft (yeah, what a shocker there!). There were a ton of Apple-based Avid shops that suddenly found themselves out in the cold–and many decided to stick with Apple rather than switch to Windows to continue using Avid…. Ooops!
My old beige G3 came with Avid video editing software. It functioned, but that’s the best you could say about it. It had the lamest, most dumbed-down, clearly-ported-from-another-platform-with-no-thought interface I had ever seen (except for the UMAX scanner software that came with their low-end scanners). I made two short “home movies” with it, but the awkwardness of doing anything with it didn’t inspire me to do more. They updated it once then killed it. It was only two years later that we got iMovie (which also wasn’t so hot on the first go ’round).
“You’ll note that Avid still holds a 44-41 lead against FCP. That hardly constitutes ‘its last breath’. Now I much prefer FCP to Avid, but Post-Production houses are still divided.”
Go to any university film and video program and it’s 90-10 for FCP., 90-10 with students, 90-10 with independents. The high-end post-production houses are their last holdout; Das Bunker.
Thank you very much.
@spinaltap
Logic already includes software notation that competes well against Sibelius — some reviewers prefer it to Sibelius. And Logic blows away Sibelius in other aspects of music composition.
Here’s a great tutorial about the Logic Pro music notation software:
http://prischl.net/LNG/index.html
Avid/Digidesign/M-Audio……..all the same company, only have themselves to blame for this. They cannot seem to get their products updated to the latest OS versions in a timely manner. Pro Tools still isn’t “certified” for OS X 10.5, and Vista was just recently.
They also, in the Pro Tools area, have 2 product lines that are basically the same……LE and M-Powered.
Smartest thing they have done was buy M-Audio, but they really need to stay ontop of the software end providing drivers and releases in a few weeks after an OS update, rather than months.
i have a great story and want to make a movie. this is probably the best to ask for help, yes, really.
kontrol at comcast dot net
best “place” /;-)