Avid in trouble?

I've no idea if stock price really does mean that a company is in trouble. However this site reports financial woes at Avid. www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/17543/

It's actually old news, but it's picking up. This came on the heals of news that Avid pulled out of NAB (the big US Broadcasting and video trade fair) in order to "focus on other ways of reaching their clients" (Apple also pulled out of NAB this year, though neither had big product launches to promote anyway). Since then Avid slashed the price of the software only version of Media Composer, in order to compete with FCP in the low budget market. (Avid also has the lowest price for student packages, though the educational licence is FAR more restrictive on use than the Apple education price licence, which is basically just the usual retail licence at a discount.)

MacDaily is right that FCP is gaining traction in the higher budget TV and Film world, but it's got nowhere near the dominance that Avid has. Apple has the lowest price and has kitted out Final Cut Suite with a treasure trove of additional software, but still cannot challenge Avid for rock solid media management. There is also the issue that there many film school and self trained Final Cut editors with lots of experience, but only in a capture-cut-'n'-export DV projects are getting work but without the proper training in workflow and data management that's required in a professional environment.

Assistant editors replaced by XML app?

Found this one on the dvinfo.net forums.

www.theassistanteditor.com
the automatic editing app for Final Cut Pro. It throws together a highly competent round cut based on the footage you've logged and captured. This Application shows the power of XML. For lazy editors, it will throw together a round cut based on keywords out oput a XML fil that can be imported into the assistanteditor.app, the exported back to Final Cut Pro. It's not quite as advanced as Avid's Script Sync app, but seems to aim at a similar attitude of speeding up workflow based on prior work done before editing (ie logging, transcripting etc).

Quite who will use it I don't know, it might be good form corporate video editors or some event editors in a hurry, seems ideal for throwing together behind the scenes DVD documentaries, but I can't see real documentaries using it, and, unlike ScriptSync, it looks useless for dramas. To be fair the site does say it's a first cut:

They are not expected to be emotionally compelling nor release grade “finished”. The Assistant Editor behaves as a beginner editor, not a craft professional who knows how to manipulate motion and tell a story across the whole documentary

Though frankly I always thought the first cut was about finding the stiry across the whole documentary.

It does require you to have really good, detailed metadata programmed into FCP so what it does is force you to push your organisation up front. So those threatened assistant editors will find even more of their time taken up with proper logging and data entry.

Ironically in his interview I linked to previously, Walter Murch praised Final Cut for allowing him to pass sequences to assistant editors to they could learn to edit features, here is another feature of FCP that attemtops to cut them out (terrible pun intended)!

Open Cut 1.0

Maybe you've heard about the infamous Red One camera. If you fancy getting you hands on some Red One footage to edit, you can enter the opencut editing competition. They're presenting it as an "open source: film project. Basically the winning cut gets to be the official version to the world and the winners will be listed as the official editors. They've released it under the non commercial share-alike attribution version of the creative common's licence, so intheory once you find out everyone who helped make the film you could convievavbly re-edit it and send it out yourself.

Sign up, (registration is $25) and send the organisers a 160GB hard drive and they'll send you back  the footage in 4K HD. You'll need Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 (no other editing system is Red compatible at the moment) and a pretty powerful computer to edit it on.

Walter Murch on the History of Editing

A fascinating interview: apparently, film editing was invented in Brighton, and non-linear hard disc based computer editing was in use in 1969!

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

I love the sound of his still image gallery database, a frame selected from every set up taken in the film, and then printed out, while also stored in a database and cross referenced to other edit log notes (you can see this in use in the documentary The Cutting Edge.) Someone needs to add this feature to Final Cut Pro or Avid, and SOON! How about a tool that allows you to output poster frames from QuickTime to iPhoto (soon to be on PC too), where you could then send them off to be printed by your local photo developing company of choice.