The Pro Video Coalition has the coverage of AVID’s Sunday night event. And AVID has a video at their web site, and you can sign up to get more info when it arrives.

Instead of 4K they have Flex Frame which lets you edit in either 720 or 1080, but have up to a 4k or 5k frame that you can pan and scan within (pretty lame since you can do 4K in FCP 7!). I am sure it will be a nice pan and scan, but still not very impressive.

And you can now treat any AMA folder as if is an AVID Media Folder, so it will automatically process, and can now transcode in the background (though I still prefer Premiere where you don’t need to transcode). And AMA is promised to work better. Background transcoding is great (though I would be happier with not having to transcode) and watch folders are a good idea, but nothing revolutionary.

Faster Audio waveforms is a much needed feature, as it always seemed slow and unresponsive. Still have to look at the waveform in the timeline for the viewer clips though, which is slow.

The price drop is a good idea, and is what it should have been since their $999 Final Cut Pro Crossgrade offer. $999 for Media Composer 7, and $1499 for Symphony and upgrades from 6.5 for $299 and $399 for earlier programs. I hate how 7.5 will be a paid update too, maybe they need something like creative cloud for $50 a month?

I hope there is more as this doesn’t seem like the revolution that will put AVID back in the black. I hope AVID manages to stick around, but I would think they need to start really making impressive additions to Media Composer and not just ho hum features.

Cinescophilia has the news that AVID has been notified that they may be delisted from NASDAQ because they are so behind on some of their forms.

Wow, further proof that AVID is doing incredibly badly right now.

I think AVID needs to innovate but I don’t want to see them go under.

Creative Cow has a short article on the dire straights of AVID. I didn’t realize that they were hemorrhaging money that much for that long, or just how much they lost on their consumer editing programs!

While AVID does have it’s place, I do think it is a dinosaur that needs a lot of updating, and a price drop to be really competitive. I don’t think FCP X is a competitor though. A 64 Bit FCP 7 could still take back over from the whole left by it’s passing, but FCP X just has too many things wrong with it to really take over for all professional applications.

SLCCut, has a an interesting letter to AVID on how they need to update to keep it in line with Premiere and FCP X if they want to stay relevant in the future.

Some of it I agree with, but some I don’t. Yes, the interface needs updating in a major way, the title tool needs serious updating (as does handling of still photos and the like, which he doesn’t talk about), but the organization I do like, though it could use more, like Meta search.

Still I do think many of us left AVID because we found something that worked better in many ways, and now are going back and while it has seen some great little updates, there is nothing groundbreaking in the latest version over much earlier versions.

And I know they are trying to please their old customers, but it is true that that will only work for current editors, and new editors may move to other tools if AVID does not add some inovation on top of their old venerable tools.