“But Methot, associate professor of visual and media arts at Emerson College in Boston, hasn’t touched Media Composer in years, and neither do the students in his classes. He teaches video editing with Final Cut Pro, a program created by Apple Inc. that’s become a major rival to Media Composer,” Bray reports.
“‘The investment to get into a Final Cut system seems to be quite a bit less than even a low-end Avid,’ said Methot. Yet Final Cut Pro is so good, it’s used to edit major Hollywood films like this year’s Oscar winner, ‘No Country For Old Men,'” Bray reports.
“Last month, Avid struck back by slashing the price of Media Composer from $5,000 to $2,500. Perhaps more significantly, Avid introduced an academic version, available to college students for just $295. Final Cut Pro is hugely popular in college video-editing courses, and Avid’s academic pricing is a bid to ensure that the editors of the future are comfortable with Avid software as well,” Bray reports.
“Meanwhile, Avid’s also eager to capitalize on the surging popularity of amateur video production. In 2005, the company spent $462 million to acquire Pinnacle Systems, the leading maker of home video editing software. Yet Avid CEO Gary Greenfield acknowledged that Avid is only breaking even in its home video business, and revenue in that segment declined slightly last year,” Bray reports.
More in the full article here.
The major reason our audio teams were forced to switch to the Windows version of Pro Tools was because the video guys insisted on using Avid, and the Mac would not work with Avid’s Unity server, which the video guys also insisted on using. Some of the audio guys say the Windows version is actually about as good and that Unity really saves them a lot of work by allowing them to edit from a common server and keep the time code in sync. I don’t know. I still like my Mac more than any particular software application. At home I still use the Mac version of Pro Tools, and it works great.
I used to use the AVID system back in the day, but even then there were things I could do so much easier in After Effects or Adobe Premiere.
I never liked their nickel-and-dime-you-to-death attitude, but back then you had no other option, mainly because they were the only ones providing an all-in-one hardware and software solution for the mac.
Well, times have changed. Current computer hardware is capable of handling many of the transitions and effects that once were only accomplished through the use of additional video cards. So now it’s come down to Software and to be honest I never was a huge fan of the AVID user interface. It was a chore to try to import other content such as titles or quicktime movies into their system. I hated it.
I’ve been using Final Cut Pro since the first version. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t hold me back when I’m trying to implement my ideas into a project, which AVID always seemed to do.
I still know a few people that swear by AVID, but slowing they are seeing the light.
If you saw the documentary, “Can Mr. Smith Get To Washington Anymore?”, the entire trailer and all the titles were created using Final Cut Pro.
Reality TV shows still are 97% Avid due to the massive number of edit suites and media management required. Apple is improving in this regard (active database management). I still have FCP projects on my home system that become unlinked from media all too often. That would be a nightmare on a show with over 100,000 clips in the system (over the length of the series). And losing your renders for just soloing a video layer is unforgivable. But Reality TV is a very minor slice of TV production. A friend of mine recently said an Avid rep claims outside of LA, few customer care about a Mac version. With the changing Mac marketshare,that is shortsighted thinking.
The people that swear by Avid – are either the business owners who have sunk so much money into it they are trying to save face or the operators who work for the owners who have sunk so much money into it.
Avid is a dinosaur nobody will mind becoming extinct.
“Avid is a dinosaur . . .”
With a big head and tiny arms.
That’s right because apple rules, no one can ever be better than them and final cut studio rocks!
Avid is the quintessential example of ‘The Old Guard” in production. They are from a time when an off the shelf computer could not non-linear editing. As computers became capable by themselves, Avid needed to adapt….and didn’t. They stck to building hardware and allowed their software to become dated.
It is just like the old producers that used to have $500,000 in editing equipment and charged outrageous prices for short videos. Once talented people could buy a $3000 set-up and create better productions, they were doomed.
And of course, Avid isn’t alone. Look at all the other industry-leaing companies that failed to adapt….and then just failed….
PictureTel, VTech (not the toy company), Digital Creations and even Electronic Arts (DeluxePaint)
“Apple has simply been undercutting AVID in prince point, moving north to match”
I have to somewhat disagree. I was working at a TV station that used Avids when FCP came out. We installed one FCP station and it quickly became a favorite. Not because of price, as we didn’t buy it, but because it was easier to learn and use, and it handled graphics 1 million times better. On the media composer, you had to create a color version of your image or animation. Then you had to create a matte for that image or animation (twice the rendering!!!!). Then you had to bring each into the avid separately and match them together. With FCP we just had to create one file and render one animation. This saved TONS of time.
“Looking back, for the most part, professional Mac users held the line and were loyal to the platform.”
We held the line. And we (Mac users of all segments) are winning the war.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1505
avid needs to be bought by adobe or microsoft
Anyone ever curious as to why PIXAR (owned by Steve Jobs) does NOT use Final Cut Pro – They only use Avid Technology.
They tried to use FCP…but had to switch back to Avid.
hmmm…maybe Avid is still good something.