More on Apple and Avid
While taking a first look at the Mac version of Avid Media Composer 3.0, HDFilmtools.com reveals among mostly positive comments a few glimpses of the Avid experience, leaving little doubt how Apple managed to grab pro-video marketshare:
I backed up all my project data in the event of catastrophe. (I’m crazy, not stupid) I installed the upgrade, restarted the computer and….
Kernal Panic….Argh!
That’s right, the grey screen of death. I’m thinking, what a drag. Why do I always do this to myself?
— Avid Media Composer 3.0 Mac – First Look, HDFilmtools.com.
It sounds like Avid may have improved things…
In the old days I would have had to pledge my first born, or purchased a very expensive yearly support contract. Avid now offers what I believe is a fair price for per-incident support but better than that, on this call they were kind enough to comp me a 24 hour support ticket!
…but customer relations remain bumpy, as someone points out in the comments, saying the product is still too expensive and dedicated to the Avid line alone—hard issues to resolve for a vertical company being undercut by a cheaper and diversified competitor with market momentum.
Question: Didn’t Avid allow Microsoft to infuse it with bribe money to convince Avid to either slow or kill off development for the Mac version? And then Apple took that challenge to video editing and bought/developed its own, FinalCut? If true, then belieguered Avid is simply experiencing two expected things: It found out what going to bed with MS hurts, and a sort of poetic justice.
If you read slightly farther in the article, you will see that the kernel panic was due to the reviewer’s failure to do the upgrade correctly.
“My issue stemmed from immediately installing 2.8 on Leopard when I first bought it. Why you ask? Because, I didn’t read the “read me” file. (Ugh!) Confirmation once again that it pays to RTFM (read the fabulous manual). After walking me through uninstalling and then deleting some remnants of the previous version, I re-installed, rebooted, and voila, problem solved.
…The fact that it runs flawlessly on Apple’s latest operating system and hardware is the ice cream on top of the pie. From my first week of working with it, Media Composer 3.0 is a winner.”
FCP certainly is cheaper overall considering what comes with the package, but as a long time Avid editor and current user of FCP, I can say that both have their strengths and weaknesses. They are both excellent tools. I prefer Avid, but my clients have both, so I must also.