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Reader SurveyBroadcast Thyself
Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
No Avid at NAB. Others have made that same move before, although none so central to the modern NAB landscape as Avid. There was another time when Avid wasn't at NAB: 1986, the year before the company was founded. There were NAB shows before Avid — although, to be accurate, I've never been to one.
I do, however, remember when it was worth discussing whether someone had “gone to Avid” or was still cutting film. After a brief flurry of controversy, pretty much everyone stopped asking, and the rest is the history that made Apple Final Cut Pro possible.
Avid changed everything about one element of the postproduction process and catalyzed the quest to change everything else, including things competitors did better. The technology came into a world where reliability was literally impossible with white-box systems and there were really no workstations that individual humans could afford.
You got what Avid could do, which was a lot. You didn't get choice, and in some ways, you didn't get a lot of say. You did get to be part of something that makes a journalist wish that “paradigm shift” hadn't been worn out on lesser things.
Since then, HD and other data-based capture methods have changed things at least as much as, if not more than, nonlinear editing did, and the Internet will finish the job as everything except the glass becomes a desktop computer. Avid has changed; competitors have changed; users have changed — and there are many, many more of them.
Now everybody is in a new kind of pain: the pain of IT and all the incompatible messy handoffs, compression algorithms, file formats, and mysteriously crappy looking deliverables that go with that. Freedom is not free. So now, according to Graham Sharp, vice president and general manager of Avid Video, Avid's going to do something about it. He says the company's still-vigorous R&D engine will now be pointed at the many pipeline problems that Avid is finally willing to hear about from their users. This includes problems with Avid technology, but also other, more generic problems up and down the pipeline that Sharp says can benefit from Avid ingenuity. New plan, new marketing requirements — such as listening closely to small groups of top professionals in their places of work. And in serving them, eventually serving the masses that don't attend NAB. Meanwhile, watch for Avid/Pinnacle to change how Best Buyers think about editing software.
When I got the press release this week from YouTube announcing the winners of its Project:Direct International Film Challenge, I thought, “Perfect.” As Avid takes a pass on NAB, YouTube wants to go from being biggest amateur network in the world to competing on the blurry line between pro and personal.
So once again, into the breach. I think Avid has to market differently — especially if it wants to change something about the world, again.
