Mercer:

I truly hope they don't buy Baselight. Avid's mania for all things subscription, that prospect would send a shiver down my spine, LOL!

Shivering!!!

AndrewAction:

To be fair BM brought one of the, at that time, industry standard Colour grading programs and brought it into their existing infra structures

Just like Avid bought Softimage (DS, XSI) which gave them access to some of the best technology in moving image creation at that time.

They destroyed all of it.

Jeroen van Eekeres:

I personaly do not know what price Avid should ask for a license in that case. Somewhere in between the price for a Ultimate yearly subscription license at $500,- and $1300,-. Let's say $900,-?

Premiere Pro offers everything MC Ultimate does, for the price of MC Standard. And shared projects don't require proprietary servers or 3rd party software, so the real world TCO is even lower. And the graphics toolset actually works, instead of being alpha-stage. And the grading toolset is modern and powerful. And the media engine takes advantage of modern tech, so you don't need as much "distributed processing" for encoding.

The price of MC Ultimate is already unjustifiably high, what would justify 900USD?

(I do have to admit that I somehow admire their ability to charge these outrageous prices.)

Jeroen van Eekeres:

I believe good long term leadership and management should be able to provide the best product roadmaps forward with insightful options with relatively simple processes to add/remove them to our licenses. But that is just my 0,02$ opinion.

Is this the leadership that managed Sibelius' dev team so brilliantly that it resulted in Sibelius' most formidable competitor (which keeps taking users away)?

Dragos:

And shared projects don't require proprietary servers or 3rd party software,

Though it does not, the current implementation of project sharing with Premiere is extremely poor. This is the 3rd iteration by Adobe of Premiere project sharing. I hope they have a 4th one.We had several shows give up on it even though the entire team are seasoned Premiere editors.

But I agree with the criticism. ProTools session export should be expanded to perpetual license owners. Symphony toolset should have been updated a decade ago. And the death of DS is tragic.

Dom Q. Silverio:

Though it does not, the current implementation of project sharing with Premiere is extremely poor. 

Interesting, to me the Premiere Productions feature is pretty much an improved version of Avid's shared bins/projects.

What makes you describe it as "extremely poor"?

Dragos:

shared projects don't require proprietary servers or 3rd party software, so the real world TCO is even lower.

Dom Q. Silverio:

Though it does not, the current implementation of project sharing with Premiere is extremely poor.

And that has been the status quo for so long that it has become the main reason to stick with Avid and look no further for many.

But that makes the criticism

Dragos:

Is this the leadership that managed Sibelius' dev team so brilliantly that it resulted in Sibelius' most formidable competitor

Dom Q. Silverio:

ProTools session export should be expanded to perpetual license owners. Symphony toolset should have been updated a decade ago. And the death of DS is tragic.

not less valid.

Call me naive but I still believe Avid has a chance to still get it right and create the best product roadmaps for Media Composer and the Mediacentral product line with insightful options and a relatively simple processes to add/remove them to licenses. Although the way the market is moving forward and how Avid has been adopting to it the last 2-3 years isn't making me very hopeful they will.  

Jeroen van Eekeres:

And that has been the status quo for so long that it has become the main reason to stick with Avid and look no further for many.

Again, is this about PP's relatively new Productions feature/system?

I know about their failed attemps with Team Projects, but Productions is them admiting Avid's approach is best and copying it (and even improving on it, at least apparently).

Dragos:

is this about PP's relatively new Productions feature/system?

Their Teams thing was a joke, but I have to admit that Productions gets it pretty right. Indeed it can be seen as a complete rip-off of the Avid bin system, to the point that I advise people cutting big projects on PP to use it instead of the single project which always ends up being bloated and RAM thirsty.

Still prefer editing on Avid by a long shot, but they shouldn't rest on their "project sharing" laurels.

Getting back to the License question, I haven't seen a post-production house leaving v2018 yet. Especially the big ones with lots of media to deal with. How does Avid milk those?

pierreh:

How does Avid milk those?

Perpetual support contract renewals or subscription renewals. The licenses are still backwards compatible.

Dragos:

What makes you describe it as "extremely poor"?

1. Performance. It attempts to emulate the Avid bin structure but it fails miserably. Each "bin" is actually a standalone Premiere project. Opening 3 or 4 large ones and your computer grinds to a halt. The whole point of "bins" is to use computer resources more efficiently. Even with a loaded HP z8 computer, it can really slow down the edit system. Providing a "producer" station (low powered computer meant for screening and/or string-outs) is not viable as it will likely be unusable.

2. "Bin" management - the system is too susceptible to duplicates errors. Adding, removing, renaming, copying project files can all result in duplicate errors.

3. Production settings - Any system can change it for the entire production. They need a locking system or allow changes that affects only your local edit.

4. Media links - have to be restablished everytime you open a "bin". Which can take a long, long, long, long time.

So far, Avid has not indicated anything, as a matter of fact there has been NO response on the Pro Tools export for perpetual users. 

I know of many production and post houses that have not gone subscription and probably won't. With Avid not on the radar for most young users coming up, production houses not upgrading, where does that leave Avid? 

Blackmagic and Adobe have been investing in their software with Blackmagic starting to grab a bigger market share. Post houses are already using Resolve for color.  This one time fee of $299 software or even free, imagine the savings a post house can have with multiple machines? Those that have not seen or tried Resolve, should download the free version. It's not Avid, but new users did not grow up on Avid like us older folk and see software as a one stop shop. Resolve does this with audio, editing, composting, color and delivery. Avid has a big problem in years to come and they have been slow to realize this. 

Keep perpetual, keep updating it, keep your existing clients. Force them into thousands of dollars a year, their bottom line will force them to look elsewhere. Maybe its Adobe, maybe its Blackmagic. Maybe its Avid... 

Either way, a feature that should have been on MC years ago should be available for perpetual users. 

Dom Q. Silverio:

1. Performance. It attempts to emulate the Avid bin structure but it fails miserably. Each "bin" is actually a standalone Premiere project. Opening 3 or 4 large ones and your computer grinds to a halt. The whole point of "bins" is to use computer resources more efficiently. Even with a loaded HP z8 computer, it can really slow down the edit system. Providing a "producer" station (low powered computer meant for screening and/or string-outs) is not viable as it will likely be unusable.

2. "Bin" management - the system is too susceptible to duplicates errors. Adding, removing, renaming, copying project files can all result in duplicate errors.

3. Production settings - Any system can change it for the entire production. They need a locking system or allow changes that affects only your local edit.

4. Media links - have to be restablished everytime you open a "bin". Which can take a long, long, long, long time.

1. My experience does certainly not reflect this, but I haven't done a big networked productions with PPro yet. Locally however, I can open a lot of bins (Projects) with no issues. I follow the Adobe forums as well and this is the first time I see a complaint regarding the performance of Productions;

2, 3. Fair enough.

4. Again, my own experience doesn't confirm this, but just like 1., maybe my projects are not of the nature to trigger this.

Thanks for the info, this in particular is very interesting for me.

Dom Q. Silverio:

4. Media links - have to be restablished everytime you open a "bin". Which can take a long, long, long, long time.

And there is the strength of Avid's Media indexer with its pmr/mdb structure (without in a Mediacentral production setup) laid out in 2 sentences. 

I'm glad to see there are zero bugs in this release since no one is talking about the subject matter at hand, aka 2022.12 release. Instead of all this completely unrelated complaining about licensing and pricing which you have all been complaining about for YEARS!!!!! 

Can we create a separate bf post section for people to complain about pricing and licensing, etc. So threads like this one can focus on the release itself and bugs encountered?

Mods, if you go through this thread and clean out all these unrelated posts, this thread would probably only have 3 replies on it.

This has to do with a FEATURE that SHOULD HAVE BEEN INCLUDED for PERPETUAL users. This is a feature that has been wanted for years and part of this thread has been a response to the NEW FEATURE that they DID NOT include. Everything about this is relevent. 

I've built Avid systems for Hollywood studios, I've supported Avid's since the mid 90's, I've edited, I've trained editors and I've been around long enough when a feature that was requested back then. Even when Avid AudioVision was around competing with Pro Tools. Hell, I even did soundfx on an old AudioVision. Look it up if you don't know.

Avid sucked MILLIONS out of studios and a feature that is only available to subscribers is a slap in the face. I'm sorry you don't see that. You should ask all the studios that have stayed on perpetual licenses what they think of this move.