Jeff, i'll try to relate this all to SGI out of respect for this forum. Avid has products that run on SGI, they come from a UK shop that merged with Avid two years ago.I have used the Matador, and later Illusion, software since 1991.it is strictly for compositing video and film frames. i think ILM has 300 seats. great stuff but a lot of very low cost packages now do 90% of what Illusion does for $40K. Adobe has Premiere and After Effects for under $1K. and this stuff is comming onto the SGI. (Premiere runs on the O2} In the core business, video and film editing, there are now 15 good packages at pc prices, and today every platform can playback and capture video real-time. big trouble for avid. i strongly beleive Adobe will wind up in as strong a position in film and video as they are in print. Again, the opportunity for SGI to do very well in this market as ATV is introduced is dependant on how fast they open the pipe at the desktop level. INTC's investment will lead to the pc generacising of Avid's technology, good for INTC, bad for Avid. Andy wants to sell lots of 1200 mgz Pentium III's. if everybody "needed to do video editing",a Pentium II won't be enough. the next big wave of customers, IMHO, are weenies who want "plug and play" and want Unix hidden. I think the time spent doing Indigo Magic could have been spent making Unix features accessable, instead of imitating the Mac. (a real smart windowed shell) video and film folk are "artists" who have tens of thousands of files to manage.
and yes my friend is competing directly with Avid. (BTW, he's an Ohio State grad, worked for Csuri in Japan for 10 years.)
enjoy your weekend,
vincent |
