Avid’s finally taken the action many have been calling for. It’s decided to simplify its product line, dropping Xpress Pro and lowering the price of Media Composer. Details here.
The consensus in various forums and mailing lists is that this is another example of too little, too late from Avid. I respectfully dissent. Too late? Only time will tell. Back in May 2006 I suggested it was time to put Xpress Pro out to pasture to gasps from Avid marketing types in the audience. Too little? That’s harder to say. By maintaining its distance from Final Cut Pro in terms of pricing, Avid is saying that it doesn’t compete on price with Final Cut Pro. Now Avid has to articulate its justification for that strategy.
Media Composer has several features that justify its premium price. My three favorites are Animatte, FluidMorph, and ScriptSync. It doesn’t take many hours saved for a facility owner to justify the $1,200 price differential over Final Cut Studio. ScriptSync alone can pay for itself its first week in use.
Avid’s primary failing to date has been getting the word out. I’ve lost count of how many experienced editors I’ve run into who don’t understand what ScriptSync, Animatte, or FluidMorph does. If editors don’t understand a feature, you can bet producers and facility owners don’t either. Pricing Media Composer at $5,000—a $3,500 premium over Xpress Pro—virtually assured no one would make the discovery on his or her own.
I’ve run the numbers. On a recently completed Final Cut Pro multi-camera project, FluidMorph and ScriptSync would have saved the client twice the new cost differential. But the post production supervisor tasked with selecting the project’s editing platform --a bright guy-- didn’t know enough about either to consider the potential advantage Avid offered. And that’s Avid’s fault. No post supervisor can know everything, especially when vendors don’t make a clear case for choosing their product. Buying NLEs has become too much like grocery shopping—look at the price tags and throw the lower one in the cart.
Avid’s new student pricing strategy—$295 for students with valid college IDs—should help, but killing the dongle would help more. I teach at a university. The program is Avid-focused, yet the majority of my students prefer Final Cut Pro to Media Composer. Don’t get me wrong. Final Cut Pro is a worthy editor, and it remains my first choice for several types of projects, but my Post Production I students haven’t logged enough hours in the editing suite to discern which NLE is better for which project. What they have learned is how to share one copy of Final Cut Studio among a dozen students. They go home over breaks and edit their own projects on pirated copies of Final Cut Pro. Avid has to compete with free for the hearts and minds of student editors—and bank on the fact that when they get paid to edit their choice will be Avid.
It’s a risky strategy, but it would show that Avid is serious about the student market—and serious about its future in the NLE space. Once they’ve gotten addicted to those Avid-only features, they’ll be able to justify the price of an Avid solution to employers and clients.
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those 3 features look cool. avid’s website’s a little incoherent; it took a while to find explanations.
I totally agree with you about dropping the dongle. It would radically increase the number of avid-proficient editors.
Posted by on 03/17 at 01:56 PM
Thanks for the informative article! Its the first I’d heard of a price cut at Avid. And I commend your reluctance to prognosticate - as they say, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future!
Also, you make an excellent point about the the 3 key avid features that set it apart. I’m FCP’ing a doc right now with 50+ hours of interviews that ScriptSync would’ve made mincemeat out of. And I have relied on Animatte in countless situations, and it always makes me come out like a hero with my clients. Its a great fix-it tool. An FluidMorph just rocks.
I would add the fact that x and y coordinates of motion effect are individually keyframeable and tweekable to the list. In FCP you only have the motion path. Avid provides much greater control (B spline on x axis, hold on y, anyone?)
Also, and this is a big one. In order to access clips in bins in other projects, you have to open the whole project in FCP, whereas in Avid you can access the bin at the finder level and open it directly. Its seems trivial, but trust me, when projects get big and start to multiply, you can spend a lot of time waiting for projects to open when you’re looking for clips.
One situation that occurs in is multi-episode, multi-editor shows where there are several episodes being cut at the same time by different editors, all tapping into the same media.
Which brings me to one final feature that Avid has over FCP - Unity bin sharing. Avid allows editors to uses a shared repository for projects, which permits any editor to open any bin at any time, and automatically prevents anyone but the first to open a bin from saving to it. In FCP version control has to be done manually, and I’ve been in productions where that required a full time editing assistant. It can be a huge headache.
So - to recap before I get flamed for touting Avid over FCP or any such nonsense, there are some features that Avid could do a better job of marketing, so that customers could decide if they’re worth the extra coin. In many cases, perhaps not. I use FCP a lot and I like it. But there are at least a few situations where I’d advise a client to pick avid of fcp.
Posted by on 03/18 at 07:57 AM
I completely forgot to address something I didn’t entirely agree with: the dongle. Your article seems to endorse software piracy for students, and that troubles me. That students CAN pirate copies of FCP doesn’t mean they should. And I’m troubled that you’re encouraging avid to make it easier for students to steal the software they use. You say that “Avid has to compete with free for the hearts and minds...” when what you mean is Avid has to compete with stolen.
I think there is a strong case to be made for an academic version of avid that doesn’t need a dongle (perhaps a year-on-year renewal scheme?) However, the dongle can also be seen as a feature, not a bug. Its what allows avid to ship PC and Mac versions of the software in the same box. It allows you to LEGALLY install it on as many computers as you care to. For example your on-location laptop, your main workstation, the mac at your country house, and so on. To do that legally with FCP you’d have to buy 4 or 5 copies, and suddenly your software costs just leapt by another $6000 or more.
Indeed, this could work for your students, too. The school could simply assign each student a dongle for the duration of the class and they can cut whereever, whenever, and ON whatever they like.
Posted by on 03/18 at 08:12 AM
Being both an Educator (Adjunct Professor at Calif State Univ Northridge) and a reseller/integrator for Avid MC & Liquid… the news about Avid reducing their pricing and dropping the Xpress came as wonderful news. Getting rid of Xpress was long overdue; it was essentially Media Composer Junior and lacked the true power of Media Composer. For video-to-video projects not requiring the advanced features of MC, we find that Liquid is a great way to go.
I am thrilled that Avid is now making MC available to students & faculty for only $295.... and agree that they should not promote piracy by eliminating the dongle. The dongle makes it possible to keep the software on multiple workstations, and to just move from location to location. (By the way, VideoEditSystems.com offers an internal USB, so that a school can keep the dongle locked inside the workstation to prevent unauthorized removal.)
Lowering the price on professional Media Composer makes sense and is long overdue. They will sell many more copies; and, let’s face it, their actual retail cost for burning a copy of software that they already have is miniscule. Every new sale means new profit!
We have a lot of issues with FCP. Rendering is far too long; and we are locked into using the Mac. PC is a much better platform; and is much easier to network. The needs of HD means that the computers must have top of the line Nvidia graphics processors, a fast CPU, and many other features (such as the new Seagate “video” hard drives) that Macs are way behind in.
Finally, in spite of the brilliant ad campaign by Apple against Microsoft, the bottom line is that Avid is the worldwide standard for professional editing. For every individual feature film or TV show that Apple takes credit for, there are hundreds of films & television episodes that are Avid.
So, do we want to train filmmakers how to be popular at the local coffee house, or to be able to meld into the professional workforce?
I vote for Avid Media Composer (for film) and Avid Liquid Pro or Chrome (for video). Actually, I keep copies of both programs on my PC, and use whichever one is appropriate for the project.
Posted by Fred Ginsburg on 03/18 at 11:39 AM
Sooner than later, FCP will have all of Avid’s features.
Apple is relentless when it comes to upgrading FCP.
This will mean the end for Avid since Avid has the dongle and can’t be pirated by starving students.
Posted by on 03/20 at 06:08 AM
“The needs of HD means that the computers must have top of the line Nvidia graphics processors, a fast CPU, and many other features (such as the new Seagate “video” hard drives) that Macs are way behind in.
Finally, in spite of the brilliant ad campaign by Apple against Microsoft, the bottom line is that Avid is the worldwide standard for professional editing. For every individual feature film or TV show that Apple takes credit for, there are hundreds of films & television episodes that are Avid.”
I think that pronouncing Avid “the standard” is becoming increasingly problematic - Walter Murch, Coen Brothers, etc., etc., are the kinds of filmmakers that *determine* the standard… we are entering a world where *both* Avid and FCP are “standard"… as a freelance editor, I can tell you that knowing *both* is becoming more and more critical.
There are numerous examples of FCP handling HD projects just fine… proven workflows that have been executed hundreds of times.
To say that Macs are way behind in “processors”, is simply ignorant. I’ll be more than happy to put an 8-core Mac Pro up against any PC workstation! To call FCP the “coffee house” editor is *so* 2004!
As a sometime Avid user, the price drop for Media Composer is welcomed, certainly, but how much does it really mean at the end of the day if you can’t harness it to a Kona 3 or Blackmagic-based workstation? Part of the benefit of going with FCP is it’s flexibility and scalability.
Posted by Christian Glawe on 03/20 at 09:01 AM
Common, Avid is very pirateable on a PC, but sadly no one has ever got around to making a dongle crack on the Mac side. Unfortunately for Apple that’s meant buying a computer from them is not an option until I get around actually purchasing MC which is, for the first time, looking like an option after the price drop.
Just so you know, I work on an Adrenalin for money at a post house but learnt how to use the software at home on a cracked version. Oddly enough when someone asks me which platform I’d like to edit on I tell them Avid as i still haven’t got around to playing with the newest version of FCP.
Posted by on 03/20 at 04:26 PM
It’s pretty obvious that the article doesn’t encourage software pircay, but address’s it’s place.
And in terms of Student video and film production, Both Apple and Avid should be hitting that market more openly. To foster early relationship[s with young filmmakers.
It is a VERY distinct advantage to Apple currently.
I made it through University that way. I started on Avid and Media 100 and some light use of Final Cut, but the limitations of access I had to both Avid and Media 100 were really frustrating. And then I started running Final Cut 3, and all the through to 5 using illegal copies. It’s the same with Premier, a lot of people in my department while at University opted for a PC based solution, and Premier was it for the time.
Having a MacBook running Final Cut 5.1.4, or even a Hackintosh with Final Cut Studio 2 is far more cost effiecient than spending $5000 plus. And even more for an Avid solution.
Especially in Canada, where our student loans are a literal debt sentence, and the neither the institutions, or the software manufacturers offer any kind of REAL substidy for working within their environments, or the ones that do sacrifice some professional functions in educational versions.
I agree about the distinct advantages for each platform, but Apple has provided a far more accessible entry level platform for FInal Cut Studio. And for my Money Final Cut Studio 2 is my preferred post solution.
The ProRes codec alone has optimized my workflow to be that much more efficient, even if it is still a closed codec.
Color is also a great piece of software, that can only get better with every update.
Posted by Benjamin on 03/24 at 12:49 PM
My two cents here.
To be a valuable freelancer these days you are probably better served by knowing both pieces of software. As a professor at a university we are sure to have our students know Avid and Final Cut. Both work really well.
One Avid advantage in bigger facilities is the whole Unity universe. The Unity works really well and offers great flexibility. It’s so integrated into Composer that most other solutions seem clunky. But again for the average editor in a single setting, this is not really going to matter.
Posted by JB on 03/25 at 07:27 PM
The piracy debate continues to rage (alongside Mac vs. PC and FCP vs. MC).
Let’s just face that pirated software is a fact of life. There are advantage to buying it (access to latest versions, fewer bugs,regular updates, etc.). Those advantages make it worthwhile to businesses. But it’s meaningless to a student who doesn’t yet know anything about an NLE or how one compares to another. Even at $295, the price is too high for many, many students. Given the choice to NOT BE ABLE TO USE AN NLE AND THEREFORE FAIL TO BE COMPETITIVE AFTER GRADUATION versus PIRATE AN NLE SO THAT YOU CAN LEARN IT AND BECOME EMPLOYABLE ON THAT NLE, well it’s obvious which way a student must lean.
And anyone who doesn’t think that every major software manufacturer has data showing that priacy helps future sales is naive. Whether a student pays $295 now or runs pirated software now, the company that wins the student’s “heart and mind” wins their future business!
You can moralize and lament it and offer to throw all those broke students in jail if you want. But it’s just a fact of life. Get used to it one and all.
Posted by Helena Handbasket on 03/27 at 07:13 PM
this is not for publication but i once worked for a man named Tom Capra, by chance is he related? He was at ABC when i was a new engineer/cameraman. I really appreciated his drive way back when ABC was Almost Broadcasting Company or Aways Be Cheap before Roone Artleidge. If you know him, thank him for his inspiration....
gabe romero
Posted by on 04/07 at 06:49 AM
I will never again buy a product that requires a dongle. The people who want to cheat can download cracked version. Dongles get lost and break. They inconvenience the legitimate buyers. They have cost me time and money. NEVER AGAIN!
Posted by Rob on 05/01 at 08:32 AM
What do he mean?
Posted by Laptoper on 05/13 at 08:05 AM