Brickwad:

I don't know if Dshulkin and SandmanX82 are one and the same person

Just for the record, we are indeed not each other.

SandmanX82:

Nope, no Final Cut reseller here.  I've worked with Avid exclusively for 6 years.  I can count on one hand the number of times I've used Final Cut pro in that time...

(SNIP)

...I always notice Avid people say that Final Cut users are ignorant to what Avid is and can do, and therefore there's a lot of misinformation going on around there.  After any amount of time here, I can say the reverse is true as well.  I see a lot of people saying things like "once I had to use FCP and it put my project behind by 5 days" and so on and so forth.  I can guarantee it's for the same reason that FCP users hate and think Avid is too slow...users are not familiar enough with the program.

You contradict yourself here. Are you intimately familiar with FCP or not? I am well grounded in working with both of them now. My facility is running almost 50 percent FCP at times. I can tell you without a doubt that FCP is slower overall in our world.

There are companies successfully using FCP. Pietown productions and Bunim / Murray productions are two poster children for FCP. I know the folks running both companies and I'm very familiar with their operations. They have very strict rules and guidelines for how everyone works there. No one deviates from them. These are set up to workaround the various bugs and shortcomings of FCP. This works for their world.

They can't bring in a one day freelancer as it would take half the day to get him up to speed on how to work in their world.

They don't work with tons of different formats and different delivery formats on a daily basis.

Bunim / Murray has a series now which is shooting XDCAM. They are sorely wishing FCP could handle the proxy workflow like Avid does. So they just bought more storage and work at the full 35 Mbps resolution all the way through. This is a lot when you shoot thousands of hours of footage per series. But they are on XSAN and they can just add more XRAIDS to the storage pool to deal with this.

Bunim / Murray also has the editors render to their local drives. This avoids the problems of losing renders on XSAN. But it means you can't easily move a project from one room to the next. Something we do daily.

Pietown was using the Rorke shared storage solution. This left them trapped at an old version of FCP for a long time as Rorke didn't handle going to OSX and then Intel very well. I think they might finally be on XSAN, but I haven't checked lately. 

Using Color to color correct their shows is a problem with both companies as their shows can keep getting revised right up to the time of output. Going back and forth between the two apps is ridiculous. So they are still using the cheesy three-way color corrector in FCP that you have to manually apply to each shot. Takes tons more time than coloring in Symphony.

Both companies still use ProTools to mix their shows. Soundtrack Pro isn't there yet.

In my world, I handle a lot of FCP projects that we are either just outputting to tape (Digital Service Station) or actually doing an online and color correction on. This arrive in the multitude of ways FCP allows you to work, each with it's own unique set of issues.

For example, we standardly tell clients to render out a QT movie of their project and bring that to us to output. This avoids the mess that is always associated with relinking to all the media which is not automated like it is with an Avid. Invariably they will have put some of their media in some bizarre folder on some other drive attached to their system so they won't have it. Not like just copying the Avid media folders.

Tis system works great until they bring you a 720P 23.98 DVCPROHD project to go out to tape. There is now real 720P 23.98 tape format so you have to go to 1080P 23.98. The Kona handdles that in RT with no problem.... except..... the 720P DVCPROHD codec is a little bastardized format. It isn't truly 1280 x720. It is 960 x 720. This is fine in FCP because it knows to stretch it. But when you export this as a QT movie from FCP, it changes it to 1280 x 720. Now when you bring it back into FCP it wants to render it since it is the wrong size!

That is just one example of the myriad ways you can get screwed with FCP. Personally I prefer the Avid approach of "you can't do that" to the FCP approach of "Do whatever you want, but it may not work later".

If you have only used FCP the number of times you can count on your hand, then you shouldn't be so adamant in these arguments. If you had the cross system experiences I have, you might be a little more ready to see the value of Avid products.

They are priced correctly now. Symphony needs a lot more tools. And Avid needs to do some serious educating of the market place about their added value in time savings alone.

Working with a small productions company, I will not agree that Avid is not for the low end of the market.

My experience is with larger projects, 60 min plus, we loos 40 to 80 working hours in every non Avid project due to rendering, or loss of media or loss of rendering, or refusing of rendering and so on.

In the low end of the market, assume we can bill 50$/h (or in our part of the world, 50€/h). 40 times 50 is 2000, so in every larger project, we loss $2000 to $4000. At the end, we need five such projects during the comming years and the Nitris is payed. (In most cases, Nitris is overkill for our future needs in the HD-market, e.g. all inputs, but that is another story).

And I just talk about relability, not the extera money we can earn with less rendring time and more HD output streams and so on.

Berga, no one is  saying that Avid isn't for the low end. Just that  they have not done a very good job positioning themselves to market to the low end of our business.

Terry, thank you so much for that detailed rundown of the business side of purchasing commoditized NLE software. That's exactly what I am trying to say about the cost of using certain NLE packages. We too run both systems side by side daily and the operating costs of other software packages more than outweigh the extra we pay up front for our Avid bays.

Don't get caught up in the hype and the sticker price is all I'm sayin'

Brickwad:

I priced out a Mac Pro system with monitors for about 12K. For an extra $250, you get THREE years of phone support, and if during those three years the thing craps out, they fix it.

Brick, you get that same deal whether you are running Avid or FCS so that's a wash.

BLKDOG:

Brick, you get that same deal whether you are running Avid or FCS so that's a wash.

Hey 'Dog,

My point is about the support contract on the computer, not which app I run on it. I think if an Avid support contract was similar in spirit to Apple Care and was more moderately priced, the value would be there, and I would buy it. If not for the phone support, for the "assurance" on the hardware.

Not comparable at all. Your Apple computer breaks. You either take it to an Apple store if you have one nearby, or you ship it to  Apple. Either way it can be weeks before you get it back. Meanwhile you don't have a computer.

Your Mojo breaks (this just happened to me a few weeks ago) and you call support. I had a replacement the next day via Fedex. One night of downtime as opposed to weeks.

Your Avid supplied HP computer takes a dump, you call Avid, they call HP, an all three times this has happened on any of our systems, the HP guy was on site within a day or two installing replacement parts.

Apple support sucks by comparison, so don't use it. I'm not saying I agree with Avid's rapacious support prices, but I never renew my contracts with them past the first year they come with. I am saying you can't compare the products.

TCurren:

You contradict yourself here. Are you intimately familiar with FCP or not?

Sorry, let me be a little more clear.  As far as a handful of times, I'm referring to real work.  However, I have used it many more times outside of "real work" situations, and my wife also has it on her computer.  I've also worked at places that have used it.  So in some ways I'm intimately familiar with it, although I'm still more familiar with Avid.

And I understand that there are workarounds that need to be made for Final Cut.  I've never meant to say that FCP is the end all, be all of solutions, and I'm sorry if I come off that way.  But in the same respect, Avid also has workarounds of it's own that people with FCP people don't deal with.  I'm sure most people here feel that they would rather deal with Avid's workarounds and shortcomings, because they're not as important as FCP.  That could very well be true for many people.  I just don't like when I say something like "I wish you could turn on and off visibility of specific tracks like you can in FCP, instead of just turning them off from the top down".  Then I get a response like "That's stupid because FCP loses it's renders when you do that."  Okay, fine...I'm not saying that it has to be the EXACT same as FCP and lose renders...I would just like that ability is all.

In respects to this thread (which has really strayed from the original topic at hand...no thanks to me I'm sure), I agreed that Nitris should be priced more expensively (although I personally don't think the price is justified in being THAT high...but that's just me personally.  I know others feel differently)...but I'm with the other poster that thought that they were going to come out with something to compete with AJA and Deckline and the rest.  It's fine if you want to have hardware that gives more and charge more for it, but why not throw a product in the mix that doesn't do the hardware accelleration and just provides all the I/Os you could want and make it priced within the competition's range?

TCurren:

Your Mojo breaks (this just happened to me a few weeks ago) and you call support. I had a replacement the next day via Fedex. One night of downtime as opposed to weeks.

But the places like AJA or Decklink (I assume decklink, although I've only worked with AJA before) would do the same thing.

TCurren:

Apple support sucks by comparison, so don't use it. I'm not saying I agree with Avid's rapacious support prices, but I never renew my contracts with them past the first year they come with. I am saying you can't compare the products.

Point taken. However, the last time I had Avid support, which was a few years back, it cost 2K a year just to get them to answer the phone. If I wanted hardware assurance, I had to pay even more - I forget the amount. Now if things have changed since then, I stand corrected. Because of the support pricing policies, I'm still working on 1.8. It serves me very well. However, this year I'm doing a major equipment purchase and I'm including two Symphony Nitris DX systems. I WANT to get assurance, but I don't want to be taken advantage of. By the way, I have had to actually use apple care only once. I took it to an Apple authorized repair facility, and had it back in two days. I do, however, realize that there are lots of horror stories about Apple Care.

TCurren:

Your Mojo breaks (this just happened to me a few weeks ago) and you call support. I had a replacement the next day via Fedex. One night of downtime as opposed to weeks.

SandmanX82:

But the places like AJA or Decklink (I assume decklink, although I've only worked with AJA before) would do the same thing.

Decklink support sucks but you're right that AJA is great. However, that's not Apple support. Different issue entirely. To compare, you would have to be able to call Apple, they help you narrow your problem down to a bad Kona card, they contact AJA and your new card shows up next day.

That would be a true comparison to Avid's support system. 

Again, I'm not defending the ridiculous pricing, just trying to compare Apples to Apples. (Pun intended)

SandmanX82:

It's fine if you want to have hardware that gives more and charge more for it, but why not throw a product in the mix that doesn't do the hardware accelleration and just provides all the I/Os you could want and make it priced within the competition's range?

NOT AVID SPECULATION FOLLOWING.

Avid would be smart to be working on that kind of stuff now. Remember the current hardware was started on at least two years ago.

There seemed to be a lot of interest in Avid at the Matrox booth with MXO and they were hinting at tighter integration to follow.

Brickwad:

Now if things have changed since then,

Brickwad:

I WANT to get assurance, but I don't want to be taken advantage of.

Ditto. There was supposed to be an answer on this after NAB 2 years ago and again 1 year ago. The silence is still deafening.

BLKDOG:

Berga, no one is  saying that Avid isn't for the low end. Just that  they have not done a very good job positioning themselves to market to the low end of our business.

The problem with positioning them ot the lower end of the market is two. First, the lack of some sort of low budget HD-monitoring, but I hope Avid know that.

Second, they almost screw up everything then they did not explain what the Adrenaline/Mojo did/does. I, and I think lots of other, interprete this as a cover up for an overpriced output box (Especialy Adrenaline), which gave nothing more than different outputs and inputs. Not more complicated than Canopus DVStorm did some years before.

In my opinion, Avid must speak clear what the DX boxes does and not does. This explanation must be on the website, in text or in an white paper. It must also be in clear english so everybody can understand what they do. Without that, Avid will alway have discussions like this.

Ofcourse the information must not be done by marketing department because every marketing mumbu jumbo will increase the suspecious.

And as I show in my last text, even a small studio/production company can easy get the returns of investments from Avid and their DX-boxes. But it requiers that You do paid jobs and not working with non-budget projects there every cent is an expenditure and You have no incomes.

berga:

Avid must speak clear what the DX boxes does and not do

I think the answer is rather simple. Mojo DX does nothing but (limited) I/O. Nitris DX actually contains hardware codecs, and therefore can improve performance in certain areas (like capturing compressed HD), and has more I/O.

If my maths are right, amortizing a 15K US$ Nitris DX box would be around 33 US$ per day based 3 yrs and 150 billable days/yr. Any company car will cost more than that.