Avid News
Executives Depart Burbank Office
By Steven J. Cohen
Instead of offering tips this month, I'll report briefly on several news items that affect the Avid editing community:
By the time you read this, all three of the top executives at the Avid Burbank office will have left the company. Stephen Goldsmith, Martin Vann and Rob Cloyd all quit or were let go in February. Martin had been the head of the Burbank office for the last four years. Steve was in charge of Hollywood marketing and was the primary liaison with the film community. He knew most of us and understood our needs extremely well because he used to be an editor, and used to work at Ediflex. Rob became a very successful salesman here by taking the time to really learn about the feature film world. Together, they were responsible for most of the relationships that helped create Avid's success here. It's not clear at this point how the company plans to deal with their departures.
Unconfirmed reports indicate that Avid is currently employing only one engineer on the 'film team' (engineers are the people who actually write computer code). He is relatively new to film. There are currently no engineers working on film lists, since the person who did this recently quit (however, Jill Mullan indicated at the Sony User Group that they can call on him as a part-time consultant-see article at left.)
The Sony Feature Film User Group met in February on the Sony lot. Jill Mullan gave a talk about version 6.5. Tom Ohanian and Michael Phillips then gave a demonstration of some of its new features (See story at left.) 6.5 is part of the PCI upgrade that has been very hot news among Avid owners. The upgrade costs at least $15,000 and many people have wondered whether it's worth the money. At the meeting there were many questions from the floor regarding various problems with the Film Composer. Jill stressed how many bugs had been fixed in 6.5, but no one on the dais knew specifically whether some of our favorite film-related bugs had been addressed. In general, the sense I got was that the Avid people present entered the meeting thinking that everything was working well in Hollywood and ended it questioning that assumption.
Avid released its 1996 yearly report in February. Revenues were up, but the company lost $38 million dollars for the year. The stock continues to hover at or near historic lows of about $10-11. You can read the press release on the net at: http://www.avid.com/news/press_releases/corporate_financial/q4-96_release.html
My impression is that many LA editors and assistants do not call Avid customer support anymore. Though the wait times have apparently gone down dramatically, many of you still believe that you won't get the help you need by calling. Instead, when you have a problem, most of you work with your rental company, or find a way to work around the issue in order to get the job done. However, by not putting your concerns in front of Avid, you foster the erroneous impression that there are no problems here.
Speak up
Avid is a company in transition. Now, more than ever, it's important that we make our voices heard. If we want to see changes in the product-bug fixes, improvements and new features, then the company has to allocate 'resources' (read 'engineers') to 'Hollywood'. This will not happen as long as we keep our problems to ourselves. I encourage all of you to call customer support when the system doesn't work as it should and make sure that your issues get reported and moved up the chain of command so things can get done. And use the Avid on-line services (Avid On-line and a mail-list discussion group called Avid-l, described below). People in Tewksbury read those postings even if they don't always answer them.
