avid Archive

Well! I just got back from my honeymoon in North America and there have been some odd developments in the last few weeks!

Obviously the death of the founder of the “Jobs-ian movement” was a big one – many apple store genius’ sitting on the sidewalk crying in SF made for an odd air to the city while my wife and I were there…(j/k)

Then there was the outcry over the upgrade pricing for PT10HD…Avid then did a backflip and are including retrospective upgrades for anyone who buys a USD$599 support contract, effectively knocking 40% off the price of the upgrade and including a support contract at no cost – but before they got there, SHEESH, the outcry! Having been using PT10 for a while now, its a great upgrade, fastest PT version yet and first post-centric release IMHO since PT7.2, well worth the price of admission, but for some of these so-called professionals, bitching and moaning about a grand, harden up. Its a tax deductible business expense and it seems like Avid are moving to a yearly upgrade pattern, although PT9 was only the end of last year. A grand per year to stay “in the club” and get bug fixes and decent features that we, the users, ask for seems like a decent deal to me.

On the back of all that, while I was in CA, Avid unfortunately let go of a bunch of staff, people I know and have worked with and deeply respect. It really felt like strange move and lets hope its not a knee-jerk reaction to their stock prices. Best of luck to those who got laid off, I truly hope you all land on your feet in these hard times.

On the night of my return to Aus, I managed to wrangle a last minute ticket in the Australian Screen Sound Guild award night and caught up with the local audio community – fantastic night, and picked up an award for my premixing on “The Missing Key” as well! It means quite a lot to me having only really just started on this side of the fence as a mixer rather than a PT specialist – knowing the gear and doing the craft are very different things as you all no doubt know, so this was a lovely surprise and boost for me Thanks ASSG!

Lastly, a massive thank you to the mixers who made me welcome at the various dub stages I visited while in North America. Lovely to meet Ceri Thomas (who has a great post centric blog), hang with Danny C and Erik Foreman at Skywalker (yes I got to see Gary Rizzo, Gary Rydstrom and Michael Semanik while there, quite a bit of mixer worship going on that day), then down in LA visiting Gary Gegan at AudioHead (an amazing facility full of history), the inimitable Jonathan Wales of Sonic Magic and the lovely Joe Milner of Puget Sound. Thanks so much to all of you for your time and hopefully we get to meet in person again one day.

PS – any readers in Sydney or Melbourne, the local Avid crew have asked me to help out this coming Tuesday in Melbourne and Friday in Sydney to run the practical demo sessions of PT10 at their local launch events, come along, hope to see you there!