I went to an Avid demo here in Dunedin NZ last month - just to see what all the fuss is about - and yeah it is a nice system - but way too pricey for me.

The most interesting thing I took away was the fact that the Australian who was running the demo spent the whole session completely ripping on FCP - I came away thinking that FCP must be causing them some grief in the market place for them to be obsessed with it to that extent.

I seriously doubt that FCP will beat Avid in the high end production scene for some time (unless they start packaging pre-configured ultra optimised workstations) but I reckon that it is kicking Avid-DV to touch in the niche production scene as FCP has by far the best price/performance equation available.

I disagree. I made a film for the Seattle International Film Festival last year (3rd place, woot!) and not one of the film makers we spoke to used Avid. Too expensive, they all said. For the price of an Avid workstation, they could get a G5, FCP, and have enough money left over for a nice Sacthler tripod. And many of these people were big time, some having had actually realeased their films.

Avid has had a huge headstart here. The mere fact that we can actually draw comparisons between Avid and Apple in NLE is a testament to Apple's Team of programmers and their hard work. Yes Avid is worried ..all good companies are but Apple has no desire to sell 80k video systems. Apple loves to co-exist picking the low hanging fruit and that is what Avid doesn't like. For instance Avid would love to keep their $2k and under programs DV only. Final Cut Pro is HD at $999 which puts the squeeze on Avid.

Next year will be even better. Final Cut Pro 5 will be a large update(seeing as how 4.5 was tweaks, bug fixes and HD support) and now that the Production Suite is here it's going to remain affordable.

My guess are Apple will add a DAW aimed at keeping FCP stations away from Pro Tools and a 3D app in the future. That would round out their offerings very nicely without overburdening themselves.

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
I disagree. I made a film for the Seattle International Film Festival last year (3rd place, woot!) and not one of the film makers we spoke to used Avid. Too expensive, they all said. For the price of an Avid workstation, they could get a G5, FCP, and have enough money left over for a nice Sacthler tripod. And many of these people were big time, some having had actually realeased their films.

That's great news to see FCP used in such volume - and congrats on your 3rd.

The point I was trying to make - but probably didn't - is that over here in NZ at least, there is a huge amount of fear in breaking away from Avid in the bigger organisations - they view FCP too good to be true, and a neat home handymans NLE in many cases - "how can NZ $12k worth of hardware and software do more than $120k ?" especially when there has already been a huge investment in Avid. The attitude is absurd but I see it regularly.

I firmly believe that FCP will enter these markets big time - but it will take a groundswell from down below (where I lurk!!) - which is happening.

For the meantime I am just happy to charge near-Avid hourly rates for FCP overheads! - lets hope FCP doesn't become the industry standard just yet!

That's what scares Avid - is that Apple basically dropped to low end to a place where they can't see. Even for heavy advanced users, FCP pro does 80% of Avid for a mere % of cost - there's also a lot less support needed (aka: maintenance contracts, etc ...) where the real margins are for Avid.

And for editing houses and studios, it's a new overhead-margin business - even on something as simple as DVD menus - unless you're creating DVD menus for Lucas on the SW trilogy, DVD Studio does so much so simply that it's much harder to pad the hourly rate - like the transition from nonlinear editing, there will be benefitiaries and those they get left behind.

Here in UK media/film education there's still a bit of a perception that Avid skills are needed, at least by some lecturers and students, but that's changing perceptibly. Where once there were queues for the few Avid stations, now the bulk of students work up their movies on FCP on eMacs, or purchase FCP for their own PowerBooks or G5s. Avid hasn't gone, but it's much less critical, and this will begin to feed through into the industry as students graduate.

Avid didn't help their cause a few years ago, even prior to FCP being an option, when they began to see their software as more important than the OS/Hardware, and suggested (quite strongly at a number of events I attended) that anyone who really wanted to do serious work would be wise to move to Avid on Windows NT. They more than hinted that they were considering eroding (if not dropping) Mac support, and I think they thought that colleges such as ours would just say "right, if Avid aren't interested in the Mac then we'd better move to Windows". Instead we began to look around for alternatives, switching some work onto Premiere on Mac and SG. When FCP launched we were much less wedded to Avid as a complete solution, and students had begun to see that there were alternatives.