I disagree it think avid wanted the DS very much, it's the editors that didn't want it as it never sold well.
They tried to push it incredibly hard as the only avid hd solution when all people wanted was an hd symphony.
As a flame guy at the time there was no way a serious online vfx guy would use a pc - we had refrigerator sized sgi onyxs, so the fx market didn't want it. Avid tried to compete with a proposed sgi tool called Maestro (? Only saw it at an nab private showing) but never launched.
The offline edit crowd of the time was Mac based. Film guys getting used to a mouse, no one wanted a pc as windows still launched from a dos box that you typed scary commands into. NT 4 wasn't the friendly os people use today and I would never have left my os 7 avid for the hell that was windows networking and graphics drivers (what's a driver? I just switch the Mac on...)
It wasn't just DS that sold poorly in fact it was the best selling of a bunch of software products at the time. Alias advance, Getris hurricane, color graphics dpmax all were crushed by the quantel editbox/Henry and Autodesk flame/smoke.
Ds only survived by avid grafting a media composer like face onto it. But I find it amusing how now it's fine everyone here thinks it was the greatest thing ever. If you'd bought one each they'd still be making it...
Ds had some cool features but it was also a bit if a dog to use. The early vector paint impressed for dust busting being able to be reapplied to a regrade without having to do more work was great but in reality the memory limitations if storing all that data meant it was flakey and crashed frequently. Lack of true 3d compositing, limited expressions and an aging code base made it an increasing irrelevance in the face of dirty cheap node based compositors like shake nuke and fusion.
Autodesk too are struggling with the end if the hero compositor era - vfx is about lots of kids on lots of cheap boxes now, toxik was their great hope in that arena now replaced with the hope of smoke on Mac for 3 grand. But even that is struggling to find its home in the new post landscape.
Why? Same reason DS failed. Online comping takes a lot of effort to get good at. If you have to choose to work that hard you have to know you will get paid to do it. On any movie there are one or two editors and a couple of assistants while there are 400 nuke artists. From a sheer cost reward position if you was starting out you'd learn nuke. Add to that the glamour factor, as a junior would you rather Roto King Kong or a can of beans?
Ds never engaged the vfx community and so never gained traction as abox worth learning. Same with IFX piranha - I love it but who has one that would pay me to use it. That's why despite the wailing here about how crazy avid was they made the right choice, media composer fusion link is the smartest thing I've seen avid do in decades. If you want the power of ds add fusion to your suite it's cheap and you can pay a kid peanuts to do the hard stuff for you.
Disclaimer I run avid resolve and smoke in my current company. I prefer nuke to fusion but for the price fusion is a great deal and it's almost irrelevant which node based system you learn they are all small variations on a theme.
Best regards
Mike
All typos are Steve jobs fault not mine.
Back to DS again...But Avid never wanted (or understood) DS...
Sent by magic over t'interwebResolution independence?JDSJeff Sengpiehl | Chief EngineerChainsaw, Inc.Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail,it was sent on recycled bytes.
On Feb 6, 2014, at 12:13 PM, Steve Hullfish <steve4lists@veralith.com> wrote:Beyond that, I'd say that they need the ability to ingest, edit and export 4K and have finishing tools that are good enough to stand against the rest of the industry. Maybe rolling some of DS's capabilities into standard MC. Better color correction.
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