Scott, I don't have direct experience with Discreet Logic products, but I read and hear a lot about the company. They are in a much different market niche than companies like AVID and DATX. Discreet Logic's Flame compositing software is the mercedes of the post-production FX market for feature films and commercials, in other words, very high end and expensive. It's used for things like wire-removal (flying rigs), blue-screen compositing, inserting actors into period footage, etc. Their software runs on the SGI platform. SGI has also been suffering recently. After all, how many times can you sell a high end product like this until you saturate the relatively small market? True, the demand for these kinds of special FX has been growing ever since the release of Terminator 2, but it is still a tiny market. Microsoft is now actively going after this market with their SoftImage software running on high-powered Pentiums under Windows NT. Recent price/performance comparisons I've seen are very impressive.
My experience is that technological tools for the creative industries are in a constant downward spiral until eventually they lose their status as costly capital-intensive investments and become the equivalent of cheap paintbrushes for the artist. It's useful to look at New England Digital and its history in the music/recording industry. New England Digital was on the forefront of digital audio/keyboard sampling technology in the mid '80s, and produced keyboard workstations costing $250,000 on up. Frank Zappa was an early adopter, and had a system that cost a cool million. The company eventually went bankrupt as lower-cost solutions arrived, until today you can get many of NED's groundbreaking functions with a few hundred dollars of off-the-shelf software and a capable Macintosh.
Adobe is the software leader offering low-cost tools for the post-production community. Adobe's After Effects compositing program is used in television and in feature films for compositing, because it can output images in film's 4,000 line resolution. It's no Flame, but people are using it to do similar work, albeit on slower "consumer" platforms. But as the Macintosh Power PC become more like a workstation and less like a consumer computer, the speed and capabilities will increase. And Adobe Premiere is the defacto standard for off-the-shelf nonlinear editing software. It comes bundled with most hardware video digitizing cards. So far, Premiere's capabilities hasn't completely matched the proprietary editing software from AVID or DATX, but it is getting closer with each new release. I believe Adobe will/has become the Microsoft of creative visual software tools.
MetaTools is another company which offers critically-acclaimed, low-cost video/graphic software. Their demos at NAB were jammed with jaw-dropping attendees, and many were lining up to purchase the software at the show. Some of their programs sell for $99, yet do things that are quite amazing. Their lead software designer, Kai, of Kai's Power Tools, Bryce, etc., is a big believer in empowering the artist with cost-effective tools. |
