This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] Avid's biggest challenges

Friday, February 7, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] Avid's biggest challenges

All that makes total sense. Good post.

With Best Wishes,
Roger Shufflebottom
+44 7973 543 660

From: chris magid <chris_rtvf@yahoo.com>
To: "Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, 7 February 2014, 1:10
Subject: Re: [Avid-L2] Avid's biggest challenges

Been a while since I posted on L2. But I just couldn't resist this question.

I think you could review many of the comments posted on this list over the years and find that many of them are still very relevant. This frames the issue to be a large one. The company is not responsive to the needs of the user base, over promises, under-delivers and seems to develop and prioritize ideas in a vacuum. That is a decade long trend.

There is one specific newer technical challenge which I would like to see solved which could make the angels sing again. MASTERING. This is no longer a digital cut world, at least around my shop. We are not sending material to tape very often. The modern day equivalent of "digital cut" is file creation.

No NLE is great at creating the various versions of files you need to satisfy broadcast, web and disk deliverables. So how are any of these "finishing boxes" if we rely on a collection of third party programs requiring export, transcode and etc to get there. Those applications are where the "finish" happens. Those tools have the last word in image quality. It is the output of third party tools which our clients see. They can be prone to error, color space issues, motion artifacting, compression cycles and etc. It is also a real pain in the tail to bounce sequences to and fro. Drive space is wasted in the process to boot.

So, my suggestion is to add built in file creations tools to MediaComposer which knock your socks off. These tools would be so easy to use due to their integration with the application. By drawing on the media already in use and by staying in the editing environment many common errors and issues could be avoided. The process would be far less clumsy. It should be nearly as easy as a "digital cut".

The above can't be some hacked on code. File creation has to be done right. Avid should provide mastering features for our most frequent needs which produce the highest quality results. This may be reason enough for users to stay with or adopt Avid software.

As it is now, I don't really FINISH anything in MediaComposer. It can't finish.

C. A. Magid
RTVF

On Thursday, February 6, 2014 1:12 PM, Jeff Sengpiehl <jeffsengpiehl@yahoo.com> wrote:

So, what do YOU think the biggest challenges are for Avid as a Company, going forward?

JDS