Avid

Rick Young of MacVideo interviewed me last September in Amsterdam, when I was working at NAB. He asked me about my thoughts on the Avid vs FCP debate.

Here is that interview.

Now you get to see what I sound like.

Avid announced today that they will be rolling Avid Express Pro into Media Composer cutting the price of the software version of Media Composer from $5000 to $2500. This means that Avid Express Pro will be discontinued by the end of Q2, 2008 (meaning by the summer). This also means that the software will now be in a more competitive price range with Final Cut Pro. I know that now I will be getting it...as soon as I wrangle up $2500 (I did just buy a new system after all).

So after dropping NAB once then reappearing, Apple has decided to join Avid and skip the NAB show floor altogether. This is an incredibly disappointing decision for a company that supposedly supports over 800,000+ Final Cut Pro users and countless other pro-apps users.

The New York Times reports that Warner Brothers has now lined up in Blu-Ray DVD corner effectively giving the Sony format about 70% of the high definition DVD market. They'll continue to release movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until May and then switch exclusively over to Blu-Ray. This leaves Universal and Paramount along with Dreamworks as the only major studios backing HD-DVD.

As a production company that had to jump into Blu-Ray production in support of one of our clients, this is welcome news for us. I have to say, if you have not seen Pixar's "Cars" and "Rattatoule" on Blu-Ray disc, you have not seen the true capabilities of Blu-Ray. Jaw dropping is the only way I can describe what these movies look like in HD. Better than what it looked like in the theater.

Full article on the New York Times website.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05disc.html?ex=1200200400&e...

So first we hear of Avid's pulling off the NAB 2008 Show Floor. During a lively debate in the Business and Marketing Forum, one Cow user noted that Apple had suddenly disappeared from the Show Floor Exhibit Map. I was looking over the Exhibitor List and Apple is not listed there either.

So by all outward appearances, Apple has pulled out of NAB 2008 as well. At least off the main Show Floor. Now Avid has been known to have had cash flow issues over the past few years as Apple's Final Cut Pro has made huge inroads in the Post Production community. So I attributed Avid's decision to leave the Show Floor as purely a financial move meant to better use what resources they have.

So we've had a lot of discussions on the Final Cut Pro and Apple Color forums about what can we use to replace the current Broadcast CRT monitors that are EOL? I've not been overly impressed with the current crop of LCD monitors out there. My favorite to date, the Panasonic 1700W and 2600W are both good, but cannot completey replace my Sony CRT Broadcast monitor.

This is Part 2 of a 4 Part series on Starting and Running your own business in the creative industry. In Part 1 of this series, I posed the question, “Are You Ready?” A link to Part 1 is at the end of this article in case you missed it. If you’ve thought long and hard on this and your answer is “Yes,” then let’s proceed with Part 2 of this 4-part trilogy. Here we’ll explore a lot of questions on setting up your company and getting ready to open those doors!

Hi everyone - I've been pretty silent for the last few months because I've been hard at work on a new Creative Cow Master Series DVD - "Internet Killed the Video Star: A guide to Creating Video for the Web." The 4.5 hour DVD will be available very shortly. Feel free to spread the word.

Here's the basic description of the DVD:

Originally post on The Editblog

Does that say 14 hours?

One question we see a lot on the forums, in fact there was another one today, is "How much storage will I need for X amount of video?" Our friends at Digital Heaven have created a wonderful free widget for those of you on Mac OS 10 computer systems for this very thing.

We've arrived in Sunny Las Vegas! Checked in to the fabulous Flamingo hotel which we really used to enjoy for the penquins in the outdoor habitat, but they checked out last year so it's not quite the same. Still gotta love staying in the "original" strip hotel that started it all.

With Avid’s new version of Media Composer 2.7 they are introducing a feature called ScriptSync. The basic idea behind ScriptSync is that Avid will take an imported script, “listen” to the take, and then line the script accordingly.

Ok, it's NAB time and I've been receiving quite a few of those "MUST SEE" emails touting everything from Apple to Avid to everything in between. Today I received what has to be the dumbest PR I've ever gotten from someone who teaches Avid. I'm guessing this person doubles as a Porn Spammer on the side because it has all the qualities of the endless junk email I receive. Well, here, you can judge for yourself.

So a recent thread in the Creative Cow Final Cut Pro forum about Internal vs. External RAID's got me thinking more about the subject. I'm a firm believer in external RAID's and really don't have any desire to install 3 or 4 drives inside my Mac Pro tower.

I went to another blog that explained the value of rubber keyboard covers for different programs. I thought that is a very novel idea, protection plus all the shortcut key labels. WRONG!!!!

Hello,

This is my first attempt at a blog post, so be kind....

I just wanted to share a really cool experience I recently had using avid Liquid....for Broadcast use.