Avid lets people go on continuing loss!

www.protoolerblog.com/2011/10/27/avid-lets-200-people-go/

Wow,

Thanks for sharing Ben, is the FCPX 'effect' beginning to bite?

A bit more info from NMRUK

Form 8-K for Avid Technology Inc

The FCPX bug beginning to bite? Not sure what you mean.

Not a bug but the effect of the introduction of FCPX.

i.e people are not buying Avid

Are you serious ? Folks who would never have bought Avid have been buying it in greater numbers than ever recently because of FCP X.

Well then in that case I refer you to @editblog's comment saying that if FCPX hadn't been released it would have been worse.

Who is buying Avid? Anybody have any figures?

No, folks are buying PPro, not Avid, as PPro is very similar in function to FCP legacy. PPro has more market share than Avid to start with. And the switchers haven't been leaving in the droves some would have you believe. Apples major FCP customers have all threatened to switch, very few actually have. But these financial reports show Avid is having difficulties.

No, folks are buying PPro, not Avid...

Well to be fair, "folks" are buying both though I think the larger sales will surely have gone to PPro, which according to feedback has been selling in droves to the younger disenchanted ex-FCP market (which is no doubt where Avid would prefer to be), but from that same feedback I've heard, Avid scored well with the older editors who had previously defected to FCP. A lot of those purchases tho do seem to have been bargain hunting during the recent fire sale, with many snapping up both, but as to the actual "switching", yes I'd agree that many have not. In fact, over here quite the opposite, we went out and grabbed as many new licenses of v7 as we could (which was a lot), to tide us over for next couple of years ... no plans to switch just "yet", but certainly monitoring the situation as sooner or later the switch is going to happen, maybe to X if it gets its act together, but a switch nonetheless.

So, Avid's financial reports show difficulties, yes ... but as Scott and Peter note, it may have been worse without the extra sales generated lately after the FCP X factor kicked in. I suspect they are hoping to score well with MC6 upgrades next week (rumor), both to their stalwart users and those extra numbers that just jumped on the MC5.5 deal. I hope so anyway, as healthy competition drives the market to the benefit of us all ... and there are some great competitors out there right now from Adobe, Avid, Grass Vally etc ... and of course Apple who (in my opinion) are not out of the picture yet by any means, despite the naysayers.

But wait a minute. It's Friday night, I'm going to have to bow out and and address some other more pressing concerns ...

Cheers all
Andy

Selling in droves? Where do you get that information?

Adobe says their sales, have increased by 47 percent over the past 12 months. But that's 47 percent of their original market share of only 18 percent. And most of that for months before FCP X ever was released. They put spin on that in their press release to make it sound like they got tons of sales from the FCP X backlash, but all physical indications are they exaggerated that a great deal. And most of those FCP users are still using FCP more than PPro. Knee jerk panic purchases, and most are hardly being touched.

Avid and Grassvalley are offering discounts to FCP users, also. But PPro was originally designed by the same guy who designed FCP legacy and FCP X. So going from FCP 7 to PPro is the easiest transition.

But as far as folks leaving FCP in "droves", there's not one bit of physical evidence to back that up. Even Apple's own market data shows that to not be true.

In the mean time, FCP X sales are climbing faster, the longer it's out. I predict that with the next update, or 2, you'll see FCP X become very, very popular again. It already has a very strong following.

I got to watch the recent ProTools 10 announcement. They basically did a Steve Jobs event rip off, and very poorly. They even used the FCP X release term, "paradigm changing", when there is no paradigm changes in ProTools 10. It was a very small stage, a very small in-person audience, very little applause at all, and the online attendance was pretty small. It's a great upgrade, but people are not jumping on it like they do for new Apple releases.

Avid stayed old school and proprietary for too long, and are to this day having a hard time catching up. I hope they do well, because it is a better NLE in many respects than PPro. But the majority of the market is not brodcast and hollywood editors anymore, in fact they are a drop in the bucket now. It's a new market, a lower end majority market, and Adobe, Grassvalley, and Avid need to catch on. Adobe and Apple are closer to it than the others at this point.

It's a new market, a lower end majority market ...

Funny ... was having the exact same conversation with a colleague yesterday, tho we were being curmudgeonly and noting that a lower end / template tv mentality seems to have permeated the broadcast market too. 570 channels and nothing on. Bah humbug

I have 800 channels here, same thing, mostly garbage. And that's from "professional broadcasters". Now here in Louisiana, the third largest film market in the country, we have a recent explosion of indie film makers who've never done anything before, and have little to no money. The shorts, documentaries, and features they're pouring out are some of the most interesting, creative, amazing work I've seen in a long time.

Broadcast and Hollywood top end editors are a extremely small minority of the industry now, like it or not. And they have serious threats from indies. Hollywood is already feeling the impact.

As someone said recently, "Video editing is the new literacy."

I was hired (by an idiotic producer who made the decision without input from a single editor) to cut a 13 ep. reality series on PPro, since it edits AVCHD native! What we quickly found out was that while it sees AVCHD just fine, it actually can't play Linear PCM audio, without "conforming" it.

Which seems to take about as long as transcoding to ProRes. Seriously, who can't read Linear PCM? Every SONY camera has recorded to that format since, well... A long time? 6+ years? SONY!? Never gonna run into one of those in a "professional" workflow.

After stumbling about in PPro for a week, I eventually jumped ship, transcoded and cut the whole thing in FCP7, since it was a nice, established workflow.

Then the show was put on hiatus, since the producer had managed to squander all his money, and had 17 yr-old interns operating cameras, etc...

We're coming back in the next couple of weeks, and based on some tests I've done, and the newly free Automatic Duck plugins, we're actually going to be doing all 13 eps in FCPX. Which also reads AVCHD fine, and doesn't have a problem with Linear PCM audio.

Anyway, my experience with PPro was terrible. I'd like to spend a stress-free, deadline-free week digging into it, since I do hear glowing reports from people, but it just seemed clunky and nigh-unusable.

In any case, I'm very intrigued to see how things fall out, though I'm definitely a fan of FCPX.

I'm a sound guy, and I'm doing 80 percent of my audio work in FCP X now. Very rare I have to go to Logic anymore. And I've not touched STP since FCP X came out.

www.fcproxuniversity.com/FCPro_X_Univers...cording_tricks).html

Not to mention digital video audio standard is 48kHz / 16 bit PCM audio. Every DV camera records that format!