Avid kept their promise

Creative COW by Walrter Biscardi

Avid kept their promise. I'll explain that statement shortly. And before we go any further, this is NOT a full early review of Media Composer 6. These are some of my "Avid from a Final Cut Pro" point of notes. If you want to read an outstanding, indepth early review, check out my buddy Shane Ross', "The More Open Avid Media Composer."

First I'll let you know that yes, I have been beta testing Media Composer. That might sound weird because quite honestly, the last time I used Avid for a full project was in 1995 at CNN. I was one of the first group of editors to be introduced to this "new technology" in '93 I believe and I flat out LOVED the concept of computer based editing. Then Media 100 for 6 years, and of course most recently, Final Cut Pro for almost 11 years.

I've told this story before, but I was not able to tell the "rest of the story" until now. This past April while at NAB in Las Vegas, I was invited to an Avid breakfast event. It was ironically the Tuesday morning that the SuperMeet was held. What I expected was several dozen to 100 folks at some sort of a marketing presentation. What I got was 25 minutes at a small table for 10 with CEO Gary Greenfield, Senior VP Ron Greenberg, CTO Tim Claman, Senior VP Chris Gahagan, Executive VP Ken Sexton, VP Christine Viera and Sales Manager Luke Smith and a few others. That got my attention. In all my years running Final Cut Pro I never even had a one on one meeting with anyone on the FCP team.

Mr. Greenfield started by saying nothing was off the table, ask the team anything I want. Naturally, the first request was "Open up the Avid to my AJA Kona boards." Over the course of the 25 minutes, all of the Avid executives basically tip toed around giving me a straight answer on the Kona boards and re-iterated "we're listening to our users." It was clear the product would be more open and almost certainly support AJA projects since the two companies have a long history together but nobody would come out and say it directly.

Then as the meeting ended and we were shaking hands, Mr. Greenberg leaned to me and said, "We'll have you in an Avid before the end of the year." Now mind you, I'm the guy who spent 10 years telling the editing world you DON'T need to use Avid. Save money and use Final Cut Pro! And here is the CEO of Avid telling me straight out, my AJA Kona board will be working with the next version of Media Composer AND it will be out before the end of 2011. Of course I could not say anything publicly about this until now. But Mr. Greenberg and Avid kept their promise. read more...