Expanded Version - Web Exclusive!
A Conversation with Bill Miller
The CEO of Avid
Technology, joined by
senior product designer Michael Phillips, discusses
the future of the company's film products.
Interview
by Todd Busch
Avid Technology has found itself in the midst of a firestorm since NAB99, when the company unveiled its strategy for moving the Media Composer and Film Composer products onto the Windows NT platform. Based on its announcements at the show, it appeared that Avid was leaving the Mac behind and focusing all of its energy on development of NT-based products. As a result, Avid system owners and users, who have invested heavily in Mac-based technology, cried out in protest. The Guild Newsletter itself ran a front-page story in the May/June issue that proclaimed: "Avid to Abandon the Mac OS."
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Miller went on to outline the company's development plans for its Mac-based products, which include the "Millennium Edition" release for Media Composer in mid-2000, and the introduction of their next-generation 'Meridien' video system for Avid Xpress. In addition, Avid has formed a new Macintosh Development Group dedicated to the ongoing "development and marketing" of Mac-based video editing systems.
But even with these announcements, questions remain, especially as they pertain to Film Composer and the implementation of 24-frame film support on Mac-Meridien systems (the current video system most editors are using is called 'ABVB'). To address the concerns specific to feature film and broadcast television editors, Miller agreed to an exclusive interview with Todd Busch for the Newsletter. He was joined on the teleconference by Avid senior product designer Michael Phillips. The dialogue took place on July 14.
Todd
Busch:
There have been a lot of changes as of late,
and Guild members are trying to get a grasp of where Avid is
now, especially after the most recent announcement about
your new internal Macintosh division. This is a very
important turn of events for all of us in the film
community, because we are so heavily invested in the
Macintosh platform. However, Bill, your open letter to users
says explicitly that Film Composer would not be a part of
that endeavor. We would all like to know for the record,
will there be any Macintosh releases for the Film Composer
after version 8.0?
Bill
Miller:Yes. 8.0 will not
be the final Macintosh release at all. That letter that
popped up on some of the bulletin boards got out a little
bit prematurely and, unfortunately, incorrectly in a couple
of respects. I would like to give a really elegant
explanation for that, but the fact is we just screwed up.
The big difference, besides some editorial changes, is that
we corrected the comment about 24-frame film support.
The answer, first on the 24-frame film support, is that of course we continue to support the current ABVB [Avid Broadcast Video Board] Film Composer. And I would expect that you will see further improvement on that. We are also looking carefully at the question of putting 24-frame film support on the Meridien subsystem for the Macintosh. We've heard from a number of users and customers that they would like to see us do that, so we are trying to assess what the technical barriers are in achieving it. I'm not predicting that there are any, I'm just saying that we have to check, and measure against how much demand there is in the user base to get the features that come with the Meridien subsystem. There are a number of them, including uncompressed video and the 14:1 compression capability, which is something that is of particular interest to the film community. So we are actively looking at these things. We fully intend to support film features, and we of course have film capabilities on NT now, as well.
Busch:
When do you think
Meridien on the Mac will be ready for 24-frame film
editing?
Miller:
I don't have any answer
to that because we haven't committed to that feature yet.
What we've said is that, for Meridien, we are going to have
another major release early next year, which we are calling
the "Millennium Edition" of Media Composer, and 24-frame
support is one of the features we are certainly looking at
as a possibility for that release. We haven't committed to
it yet, because we have to assess how much demand there is
in the user community; for example, how many feature film
editors will want the uncompressed video and the 14:1
compression enough to be willing to upgrade to a new
hardware platform? We have to assess that and see what kind
of technical issues it raises.
Busch:
If there isn't a
Macintosh-based Film Composer and NT is where Avid is going
with its products, then editors don't really have a choice.
If we want to continue using the Avid product, we have to go
to NT and the Meridien subsystem.
Miller:
You can get the Meridien
subsystem on the Macintosh, as well, but it doesn't
currently have 24-frame support. You can get some film
support with Matchback and the FilmScribe option, but for
feature film editors, that's not the 24-frame support they
are looking for.
So, today, for feature films you have two choices: You can either stay with the Macintosh ABVB platform, the Film Composer that is out there now, or you can go to NT a little bit later. (To Michael Phillips) What, two months? So you have a choice of either platform for doing feature films, and we are quite happy to support either one. The only issue that is outstanding right now is whether or not we will bring 24-frame to the Macintosh-Meridien platform.
Busch:
But that will come to
NT?
Miller:
Yes, clearly on
NT.
Busch:
So Film Composer 8.0
will not have 24-frame capability, but 9.0 will? Is this the
same thing as the Millennium release?
Miller:
No. That's the reason we
did it differently, because the platforms aren't identical.
The 9.0 release on NT has two streams of uncompressed video,
for example, and we can't put that through the Macintosh
platform that we have today, so the Millennium release will
not have two streams of uncompressed video. That won't be of
great concern to film users in any case, but for people
doing television finishing it's fairly important. So they
won't be identical. Millennium will have some things that
are in 9.0, it may have some things that aren't in
9.0.
Busch:
Will Millennium include
a Mac and NT release?
Miller:
No, the Millennium
release is just for Macintosh.
Busch:
The film and television
community is waiting for a Meridien system capable of doing
24 frames. That's what it really amounts to. I don't know if
anybody in Hollywood would be upgrading until that is
possible.
Miller:
We have heard that
feedback. I'm not going to argue with that at all, and I
would be delighted to see us provide that capability. I just
don't want to make a commitment until I have the program
support in place and I can have high confidence that we can
keep the delivery dates we promise. I understand that a
significant part of our Macintosh customer base would like
to see film support on the Macintosh/Meridien platform.
They'd like to have both the Meridien capabilities and film
support on the same platform, and if we can do that as a
practical matter, we absolutely would like to do it.
Busch:
When you say "support,"
do you also mean development? Are we talking about
supporting the existing Macintosh systems and developing on
NT, or will there be parallel development on both
platforms?
Miller:
We are going to develop
on both Macintosh and NT. We are not expecting to keep those
developments exactly parallel, as the platforms have
different characteristics. We are going to try and take
advantage of some of the different platform characteristics.
We expect those characteristics to continue to diverge as
both Mac and NT platforms evolve. We are not trying to keep
an identity between the two, and this may be the source of
some confusion.
Busch:
I understand that NT
will provide the capabilities to do a lot of things the
Mac-based systems can't do. I'm looking forward to seeing
what those are.
Miller:
NT provides us with some
pretty powerful solutions, and it gives us the slots and the
bus bandwidth that we need to do some pretty interesting
things, but we are still actively interested in providing
solutions on the Mac as well.
Busch:
In the past there have
been complaints about various products under the Avid
umbrella that do not have the same project files, media
files, GUIs, etc., making it difficult for different systems
to communicate with each other. OMFI is one way to bridge
this gap, but is there a long-term plan to merge the
systems, especially as you talk about separate Mac and NT
divisions of the company? This would give Avid Unity
products a chance to really flourish. What we all hope to be
doing in the future is have picture and sound all working
with the same media.
Miller:
We certainly are working
in that direction. As you pointed out, people use OMF today
to transfer between audio and video tools, and we hope to
expand the functionality of that as we move to the next
generation, which we are calling AAF. We are investing a
significant amount inside Avid to try and improve that
interoperability. We have a new interoperability lab set up
here, and we're trying to duplicate all of the problems
people have when they go to move things from ProTools to our
video and film solutions. Over the long haul, I think that's
going to get steadily better. A good example of that is
actually between Mac and NT, where we've created this Total
Conform capability in a Mac-based Media Composer that will
allow you to take your editing decisions - and even most
effects - and conform those decisions in an uncompressed
environment on the NT-based Symphony. So we are working
within the applications to make that kind of thing better
and easier to do.
Ultimately, we hope to enable active media sharing across the applications in a Unity environment, as you suggest. Don't start looking for products next month that do that, because it takes a significant amount of work with our applications, but we are running into a technology strategy now that is directed toward that goal. I think you'll see it develop over the next couple years. We are working towards the time where a sound designer and an editor and a graphics artist will all be able to go into the same store of media and be able to not only move between them, but share that media in a very natural and compatible way. We think we have some ideas for how to do that, but there is a fair amount of technology involved in getting it done. It's not a trivial problem.
Busch:
I've used OMF, and it's
great when you can communicate between your picture and
sound systems that way. If the process can get better,
that's great.
Miller:
We'll make OMF better,
we'll make the applications more compatible, and,
ultimately, we'll get to a kind of native computability that
will really make sharing very powerful. And very
easy.
Busch:
The main benefit of the
Meridien subsystem is the uncompressed video. Why does
offline editing need to get into uncompressed video at this
time, when the current resolutions on the Avid are
sufficient?
Miller:
Let me just say a couple
of quick things, and then I'll let Michael respond. The
Meridien subsystem was not just designed to do uncompressed
video, although it certainly does do that, because that
capability is something we needed for finishing television
programs. We also wanted to make possible a whole range of
functionality that you can see in the Symphony system,
including the 24P Universal Mastering capability. In the
film environment, Meridien will bring in 14:1 compression. I
think film people will find that attractive, as well as a
lot of other features and capabilities. Michael?
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Designer Michael Philips |
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I want to stress as well that uncompressed is
certainly one of the features of Meridien, but the ease of
I/O, the ability to simultaneously support composite NTSC,
YUV [component analog] and digital, and have multiple
outputs to drive several monitors at once, fits into any
market. It's not really just a television-finishing type of
feature. The quality of the hardware that is doing the I/O
is higher than anything that has been on the market in the
past.
There's also the fact that it can do full progressive, rather than the "s" or "m" resolution that you're used to today, which is only a half-field representation of a film frame. The progressive capture in Meridien allows a full re-creation of the film frame before compressing it. That's why, when you are looking at 14:1, for example, which has the same disk storage as AVR 6s, the picture looks like AVR 71 or 75. Those are some of the benefits that are coming out of Symphony Universal and the Meridien hardware, which was targeted at television finishing in a 24-frame environment. A lot of the offline capabilities of the tape feature set are extremely attractive to television as well as feature film.
Busch:
The term "24P" has come
up a few times. What's the difference between 24P and 24
fps?
Philips:
24P started out as a
code word that said this format was 24-frame progressive,
but which also had a feature set that addressed solutions
for film-based television. We took a lot of the core
technology of Film Composer and built onto it a television
workflow that, until this point, always required the user to
make a choice between frame-accurate EDLs or frame-accurate
cut lists. You couldn't have both. Now, by providing 24P, a
universal editing and mastering system that remains 24-frame
progressive until the very end, for the first time in
history you can have both a frame-accurate 601 online and a
frame-accurate cut list, regardless of broadcast or film
finish.
And that is only the tip of the iceberg. The feature sets that fall out of that are things like better timecode management and PAL and NTSC output, which will help certainly in feature co-productions. I hear of a lot of issues with American films shooting in Europe, where, if they do it in PAL, editors over here can't do a digital cut to watch in their room that night. This will solve a lot of the issues surrounding standards conversions when dealing with co-productions. In addition, 24-frame timecode support has always been a big issue with the PAL filmmaking process. So there's a lot of benefits that came out of that for both television, which we are focusing on for this release, and the feature film world.
Miller:
As Michael said before
in response to another question, the full progressive frame
gives you a much better image than you can get out of
single-field 24-frame.
Busch:
As you just mentioned, a
lot of the features that we see in this release are mainly
for the broadcast community. Where does this leave us film
users? Are you basically creating a system that is directed
at the broadcast community, but with 24-frame features, like
cut lists?
Miller:
Well, you can actually
look at it either way. You can either say that we are
creating a film system and then putting broadcast features
into it, or you can say that we're creating a broadcast
system and putting film features into it.
In fact, we're aggressively pushing the film side. Sony Pictures Studios has an NT Film Composer in beta test right now, so we're pushing that right alongside the systems that more commonly get used in broadcast. I have also seen Symphony systems, which people have described as broadcast finishing systems, on film sites. People are actively using them right now. So the broadcast solution is also a film solution, and that's a good thing for the film community, because the film business is not huge, in terms of the number of systems, and an editing system that was designed for film and only for film would end up being significantly more expensive than one designed by leveraging the technology from both film and broadcast.
As Michael just mentioned, one of the most important things that we are introducing right now to our broadcast users is the whole Universal Mastering capability, which will allow them to work with different frame rates and formats and then easily master the programming. The foundation underneath all that is the work that we did for the Film Composer, which was to get the 24-frame accuracy and capabilities. In that case, the broadcast solution is in some ways a derivative of the film solution. So the technology kind of goes both ways.
Busch:
So, what you are saying
is that, where the Film Composer and the Media Composer were
giving us either 24- or 30-frame outputs, 24P provides for
24, 25, 30 frames, as well as high-def?
Philips:
Yes, if you consider 6:1
on Symphony Universal for the offline for HD, because we can
support the full 24-frame timecode in/out, as far as EDLs
and everything else, that can be used to drive a linear 24P
at the 1080-level online session. The box itself does not do
HDTV resolution.
Miller:
But it is a good deal
more than that as well. It will also give you 4:3 and 16:9
and letterbox. It will get your piece formatted any way you
want.
Philips:
Like I said before, the
metadata about your choices - whether you go 4:3 or 16:9, or
if you pan and scan - can be preserved and retransfered to
HD when the time comes. So when we are talking about HD,
we're talking about preserving the data so that there will
be an easy and economical transition.
Busch:
The Hollywood Advisory
Council was a group of local Avid users who met with your
staff on a regular basis. The last meeting was in January.
I'm curious about the future relationship of the Hollywood
users and Avid. Are we going to continue with the meetings,
and are they worthwhile? Does any of the feedback ever get
back to you?
Miller:
Oh, yes, it sure does.
You're right, the last meeting we had was in January. We've
normally tried to hold them quarterly, but I haven't been
perfect on that. What we have in mind is that we need to
come back and talk to the Guild and some of the other folks
in Hollywood about what the most constructive approach is.
Whether the councils are a good investment of your time, or
if there is a better way to do it. We're perfectly happy to
keep doing the Hollywood Council if that is the best way for
the Hollywood community to connect with what we are doing.
Or we're happy to do it in a different way, if possible. Our
thought was that it was about time that we re-check where we
are on it.
We have been getting good feedback through the Council meetings. In fact, it's through those, and Michael's constant forays through Hollywood, that we get a lot of information. If you go through the more recent releases of Media Composer, and Symphony as well, you'll see a lot of features and capabilities for the film community that have come in response to many of the things that Guild members and other people in Hollywood have requested. I don't think the list is exhausted yet, but we've made significant improvement over the last couple of years. I think most people would concede that.
Busch:
I think it's really
important that we also keep the beta test sites out here,
and maybe add a few more locations so that there is more
input coming in from the local users.
Philips:
We've always gone to
L.A. first for the beta sites, but, and we brought this up
at the council meeting, the trepidation about risking a
feature film on a schedule is always an issue. Also, the
resources and personnel required on our end to shadow a
feature film is something that logistically just doesn't
work. So we find that we run against two very strict
schedules: ours and the feature films'.
Busch:Picking a place
like Sony, where they have a good support staff, is great
for a beta program. I hope it works out.
Philips:
We're finding that it's
working very well. We have other feature film sites around
the world as well.
Miller:
The time before this, we
put a system in the L.A. office of the Guild and invited
members to come in and drive it anytime they wanted
to.
Philips:
When we introduced 7.0.
Busch:Did you get a
good response with that?
Miller:
Yes. The biggest problem
is just trying to find someone who can do it live, who can
work a beta program.
Busch:Something new at
your online site is the Knowledge Base. Can you talk a
little about it? What plans do you have for that? It's a
great setup, but it doesn't have a lot of information in it
yet.
Miller:
We intend to keep
building that capability and make it as robust as possible
to try and give users more information they can work with.
It's something that people have been asking us for and we're
trying to respond. I don't have all the detailed plans in my
head - exactly what's going to come up when - but we intend
to keep pushing along pretty hard.
Philips:
It's a topic we could do
for a Hollywood Council meeting.
Miller:
Yes. It would be a great
Council meeting topic. We all know that this is a customer
service business in many respects. It's a lot more than
providing hardware and software. It's about who can do the
best job of supporting your ability to bring up a show.
We're trying to listen to what people are telling us about
the information we can provide, how to make it more
accessible, how to get more feedback into the system and be
more responsive. We're not nearly good enough yet, but were
trying to get better day by day.
Busch:If users
encounter a bug or error message, is there a place on the
site to input that information?
Philips:
I believe that is in the
plans of making the site interactive, but I haven't seen the
complete plans yet of how it is going to work.
Busch:Before we finish,
is there anything you would like to say to the film
community?
Philips:
I think that more than
ever, film-based processing and technology is extremely
important to what is going on in the industry right
now.
Miller:
This has become a very
big deal for us. We think, especially with high definition
being somewhere in the foreseeable future, we're going to
see people around the world going to film-based material,
and the film community is the driver of the technology we
will use both in film and in broadcast. We are anxious to
keep working with the Guild and its members to figure out
how to do things a little better each time.
Editor's Note:
has asked for feedback on these issues.
Write to him at: mac-business@avid.com
on our Avid Bugs and Suggestions discussion group.
Todd Busch is an assistant editor representative on the Board of Directors.
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