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MillimeterNAB 2006
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Barry Braverman, S. D. Katz, D. W. Leitner, Steve Mullen, Dan Ochiva, Jan Ozer, and Jeff Sauer
Perspectives from the show floor
Software-only Avid Media Composer
NLE Musings
By Jan Ozer
As my plane banked away from the Las Vegas Strip, I took a moment to reflect on how quickly the market had evolved in such a short time. From a handful of large players selling expensive, largely proprietary systems, it became a market increasingly dominated by smaller companies selling standards-based products, usually in “suites” that squeezed out smaller players.
I thought about how consolidation had reduced the number of choices available to the typical user, and shook my head remembering how seemingly invincible brands had disappeared, almost as if they had never been. I lamented that in the endless chase for the high-end, enterprise trophy customer, that small fry (like me), who helped the smaller companies get traction in the first place, were increasingly lost in the shuffle.
NAB 2006, you ask? More like Comdex 1999, or thereabouts. But substitute Avid and Quantel for IBM and DEC, Adobe and Apple for Microsoft and Lotus, and DPS and FAST for WordPerfect and Lotus 1,2,3, and you have two markets evolving in very much the same way — albeit several years apart.
All markets are organic, responding to similar forces and working in known patterns that bring about more or less predictable results. After four days of immersion in the NAB world, it's instructive to ruminate on the happenings of the past few years and perhaps predict what might occur over the next few months.
Driving it all, of course, is Moore's Law, which inexorably brought the mainframe to its knees and continues to throttle companies like Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics. In the video world, the sellers of big-iron editors are feeling the same hand around their throat — tighter on some than others.
Like IBM before it, Avid's reaction, at least at NAB 2006, is twofold: Attempt to own the enterprise workflow, and extend your market to smaller customers (e.g. IBM's AS 400/PCs/notebooks). The workflow engine, in this case, is the new Avid Interplay, according to the company, “the world's first nonlinear workflow engine that fuses integrated asset management, workflow automation, and security control into a single system, delivering a business-wide workflow for postproduction and broadcast settings of any size.”
Strategically, Interplay's value increases over time and usage; it becomes the cement that bonds users to other Avid and (significantly, Avid points out) non-Avid products, which seamlessly work with Interplay.
With a starting price of $18,000, Interplay will naturally appeal only to larger companies producing more complicated projects. While thriving, this market segment isn't growing nearly as fast as the small shop market that has taken to Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro like ducks to water.
To appeal to these users, Avid introduced a software-only entry into the Media Composer family with prices starting at $4,995. Of course, Avid also sells Xpress Pro starting at $1,695 and Liquid starting at $499, which are more in line with prices for Apple Final Cut and Adobe Premiere.
If history is the judge, Interplay has more chance of succeeding in large shops than any Avid software does with small- to mid-size customers. IBM recovered by expanding its range of products and services to mid- to extremely large-size customers, while once-invincible DEC was swallowed by Compaq, which, in turn, was later acquired by HP. In fact, it's hard to think of any examples where a hardware company that built its business selling to large, enterprise customers succeeded in going to small businesses or hobbyists — though IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun, and many others have tried.
It's not that Xpress Pro and Liquid aren't highly functional products, because they are. At this product level, however, almost all competitive products are highly functional, and when feature parity exists, other factors, like price, ease of use, operating system, and integration with other programs, drive the purchasing decision.
One unique value add for Xpress Pro is that the interface is similar to higher-end Avid products, so once you climb the learning curve, you're off and running. On the other hand, Liquid's strengths include great format support, fast performance, and integrated authoring, all starting at less than $500. This makes Liquid great for hobbyists and some casual business users, though many will be discouraged by its cryptic interface. In addition, many producers will quickly outgrow Liquid's authoring capabilities, which don't include multiple subtitle or audio tracks, or playlists.
Liquid doesn't work as a feeder product for higher-end Avid products either, because the interface is completely different. Clearly, Liquid offered significant value to Avid in the Pinnacle acquisition because its wonderful multiformat engine enabled HDV support in Xpress. It also now drives the Studio line of products. Avid has consistently stated its intention to keep Liquid alive; however, how long will this intention make sense given the limited market that the product serves and the improvements in authoring and other functions needed to continue to serve that market?
Another recently acquired product, Canopus Edius, has a similarly murky value proposition for producers looking solely at a standalone editor. Though Thomson Grass Valley has pledged to keep the Canopus brand alive, the Canopus website now calls the program “Grass Valley Edius Pro,” and one of the major justifications for the acquisition was to add a more “effects-intensive craft editing” combination to Grass Valley's news production products. Though the Edius Pro 4 feature list looks great, one wonders whether future development will be centered around the independent user or to strengthen the workflow of the Canopus/Grass Valley products.
Then there's Sony Vegas. Sony has been the perfect parent, investing plenty of money, keeping the subsidiary separate, and not pushing a Sony-inspired agenda into the product. Still, though technically very capable, the Vegas suite doesn't offer the breadth of features offered by Adobe or Apple, and probably never will.
Objectively, it doesn't appear that any of the larger companies are well positioned to unseat Apple and Adobe's dominant role with the small- to mid-scale producers. So now let's examine what Adobe and Apple have been doing to swim upstream.
Small companies compete with big companies by banding together to provide similar features and performance at a much lower price point. The effort usually starts slowly, in terms of both true performance and product acceptance, then gains momentum and, ultimately, product acceptance.
We saw this in the 3D design market, which was originally dominated by companies such as Sun, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and HP. All these vendors have proprietary architectures with high-speed buses, RISC processors, and top 3D graphics processing to supply the power and throughput necessary for high-end design.
Then processors evolved from Pentium 3 to Pentium 4 to Xeons with hyperthreading that could work together in a dual-processor system. System buses evolved from ISA to PCI to AGP and now PCIe, supplying the necessary throughput, while the gaming craze brought high-end 3D performance to the mainstream. Throw a 64-bit OS into the mix, and you have inexpensive, open-system computers with high-end design performance that would have cost $100,000 only five or six years before.
Similarly, with the release of Final Cut Pro, Apple has relentlessly pursued film and high-end broadcast production, the last bastions of the big iron editing houses. Apple benefited from increasing bus and processor speeds, and enlisted the help of vendors such as AJA and BlackMagic to ingest the high-quality, high-bit-rate formats necessary for film and HD production.
Inexpensive, high-speed storage systems from companies such as EditShare and 1 Beyond provide multi-user access to the fast, voluminous capacity necessary for film and other movie-length projects. When you combine these components in a PowerMac G5 Dual system and meld them together with the QuickTime file format, you have the performance and functionality of a high-end editing system in an open environment — at a fraction of the cost.
From a marketing standpoint, the results have been spectacular. The popular book Behind the Seen by Charles Koppelman (New Riders/2004) documents Walter Murch's work with Final Cut on Cold Mountain, certifying Final Cut's chops in the film world, and helping the tool become standard fare in broadcast schools and other educational institutions. But what does that really do for the mainstream user?
In the case of the computer market, the rising tide of increased processing power and 3D graphics boosted all the boats in the harbor, dramatically improving the overall performance of even entry-level PCs. With Apple's focus on high-end customers, however, the mainstream smaller users have been underserved — at least to some degree.
Even if all of the 100,000 NAB attendees were FCP users, which certainly seemed the case whenever you walked by Apple's always packed training theatre, that's still only 20 percent of the 500,000 total user base that Apple announced at the show. One gets the feeling that Apple is focusing on that 20 percent to the exclusion of the bread and butter that's paying the bills, if not providing fodder for case studies and TV commercials.
Beyond feature deficits that we've complained of before (see my Final Cut Pro review at digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/prods/fcp5_review), most notably the inability to efficiently edit different formats on the same timeline, Apple's suite-only pricing certainly isn't customer-centric. Perhaps the rumored Final Cut Extreme will give Apple a platform for addressing very high-end needs while focusing Final Cut more on the mainstream user.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how Apple Boot Camp erodes (or doesn't) Apple's monopoly in mid-range editing on the Mac. The thought of editing in Adobe Premiere Pro and authoring in Apple DVD Studio Pro is tremendously appealing, and products like Sonic's DVDit might fill the huge gap between iDVD and DVD Studio Pro. At the lower end, Adobe's Premiere Elements can dance circles around iMovie, and perhaps the intrusion of Windows products into the Macintosh world will force a long-needed redesign for Apple's flagship consumer product.
Though a generation or two behind Apple, Adobe is obviously enjoying the same general computer infrastructure improvements and partnering with the same companies for HD ingest and output. Adobe's strategy for domination is the suite integration approach pioneered by Microsoft with Office, though hopefully Dynamic Link will have more legs than Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).
To its credit, Adobe has done a wonderful job making suite components look and act alike, and also upgrading previously weak-sister components such as Encore (see my review at digitalcontentproducer.com/videoedsys/revfeat/video_strong_showing) to best-in-Windows-class status. However, Adobe didn't (yet?) add the one Dynamic Link feature that would benefit virtually all suite users: the ability to insert unrendered Premiere Pro sequences into Encore.
The company also took one step closer to suite-only pricing with the current version of the Adobe Production Studio, which has one serial number for the suite and is designed to be loaded on only one machine. Previous versions of the suite had separate serial numbers for each product in the bundle, so you could install Photoshop on your graphic designer's computer, Premiere Pro on your editor's computer, and so on.
That said, Adobe also continues to dance with the folks who “brung them,” so to speak, doing the best job of all prosumer editors of meeting the needs of mainstream users. This includes a relatively easy-to-use video editor (Premiere Pro) with a wide feature set and the recently upgraded Encore.
However, it will be interesting to see how Adobe evolves the product going forward. Clearly, at the high end, there's a need for more than four cameras in the multicam feature, but there's also a laundry list of features available on consumer products and other prosumer editors that need to find their way into Premiere (and Final Cut, as well).
These include 6X tape scan before capture; automatic movie generation (à la Muvee); better support for Smart-Sound and other technologies for creating background music; a multi-trim tool that allows you to more quickly cut desired scenes from a long clip; and the ability to insert multiple transitions into an edited movie, which would save literally hours on some multicam projects.
The big question is whether Adobe will “look up” to film producers when triaging new features for inclusion in future versions, as Apple seems to have done, or “look down” at mainstream users. Interestingly, one of the most useful features in Premiere Pro 2.0, integrated DVD authoring, came from consumer sibling Premiere Elements. Granted, it's easy to add features that have already been developed by other groups within the same company. Still, hopefully this indicates that Adobe will look in both directions when choosing new features.
Avid Liquid supports the Avid Open Timeline, so you can mix DV, MPEG I-frame, MPEG IBP, uncompressed SD, Windows Media, DIVX, and MPEG-4, as well as HDV, in the same timeline. My favorite feature: You can create and customize menus and navigation, preview and modify the DVD from the timeline, add a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix, and then export a finished DVD right from a timeline.
Canopus will ship another NLE that fully supports 24p and 24F (from the Canon H1) at the end of June. Edius Pro offers multiformat support, realtime mixed SD/HD editing in the timeline. Version 4.0 ($699) will offer new features, such as multicam (up to eight cameras) support and nested-sequence editing. The new version also has improved trimming tools and parameter-based keyframe support for color correction. Version 4.0 supports Windows Media and includes Edius Speed Encoder for HDV for fast HDV video output.
These coming NLE options join Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 with CineForm's Aspect HD in supporting 24p.
— Steve Mullen
