Running Avid software on legacy machines
The folks at Genius DV posted this neat little trick to enable editors to run Avid Media Composer on PCs with unsupported audio cards.
For mission critical work I’m hesitant to use unsupported configurations, but sometimes I just want to get a jump on things and start logging on an old laptop.
Avid posts RED workflow paper
Credit my colleague Michael Phillips for authoring this RED workflow paper. Avid’s RED support continues to evolve, so stay tuned for further anouncements.
Back to school
The katydids are out. As a kid the sound was the harbinger of the end of summer. To teachers their song is “write your syllabus.” This year is very different. Working at Avid will surely have a profound effect on how I teach FT504-Video Post Production I. Previously I’d always taught the class, quoting my lecture notes, as “Avid-centric, but Final Cut tolerant.” Meaning I used Avid Media Composer for classroom demos, but would answer Final Cut Pro questions.
Beyond loyalty to my new employer, and pride in my new position as Senior Product Designer for Media Composer, my Avid knowledge is deeper than ever, so I’m obviously tempted to make it an Avid-only curriculum. I can teach my students some pretty neat Media Composer tricks. But is that the right thing to do? Should I put more focus on Avid just because I know (and love) it better? Probably not.
This semester I’ll continue to be “Avid-centric” and include Final Cut Pro in some form in my teaching – not just to do right by my students, but to do right by my colleagues at Avid. Everyone should keep an eye on the competition.
Avid makes pop culture list
Entertainment Weekly has listed its picks for the 25 innovations with the greatest effect on pop culture since 1983. Avid came in at number 12. (It doesn’t call out a specific Avid technology. Assume it’s the NLE.)
The whole list is here. Avid came in behind YouTube and the iPod, but ahead of the web browser and the PlayStation2. So take it with a grain of salt.
Corporate reading lists and the 4th of July
You can tell learn a lot about a company by perusing the books recommended and circulated by its executives. Jim Collins’ Good to Great is making the rounds at Avid these days. A pretty good read, its down to earth advice isn’t typical of the business bestsellers lists with their fad of the month approach to management. For those looking to read the tea leaves of their favorite NLE company, Good to Great’s not a bad place to start.
Years ago, as a journalist, I visited Avid and was given a copy of Dealing with Darwin. It’s not a bad book either, but it’s easy enough to finish that book and blame your situation on external factors. I like Good to Great. There’s no wiggle room. Get the right people on board, be willing to face the blunt realities of your situation, concentrate on what you can be the best at, and don’t look for a silver bullet because there won’t be one. Just get to work.
My favorite business book of the month club anecdote happened a few years ago at another company I visited. I ran into the CTO with John P. Kotter’s Leading Change tucked under his arm. “Excellent book. Just what we need.” Well, everyone needs change, I thought. It’s what you change that matters. Leading Change was the main text for a change management class I had taken, so I was well acquainted with it. It’s a typical n-step process book. (Eight in this case.)
The class was better than the book. At the end of the semester one student asked the professor if he believed the book’s approach really worked. “Seven years is a long time to wait for a cultural change to take hold,” she said. The professor replied, “It’s a safe estimate. That’s about how long it takes to cycle through a generation of management.” So either the book works, or no one’s around to remember how they were expected to change.
In this fast-paced era, coming up with a revolutionary new idea and waiting seven years for it to take hold is too risky. By the time you get there, you need to be somewhere else. Good to Great’s evolution over revolution approach strikes me as a more reliable path to success. (Several of the c-level executives in the company reading Leading Change have since been changed.)
What does all this have to with American Independence Day?
Getting back to Good to Great, one of Collins’ observations is that all great companies have core values, and it really isn’t important what those core values are. It’s just that they are shared. I don’t buy it. It seems like an easy way of explaining Philip Morris being ranked as a great company. I don’t care what the numbers say. If the net cost to society exceeds the return to shareholders, a company is not great — in fact it’s not even acceptable. Had shares in the Medllín Cartel been traded on the NYSE, and the numbers were solid, perhaps Collins would have considered it for inclusion in his study.
Core values do matter. For all its faults, and all its failings, the United States of America has succeeded and maintained its place because of those core values stated in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
At any given moment in our history we might not all agree on exactly what the words mean and how they should be implemented. In fact the people who wrote this document didn’t invite women, slaves, and Native Americans to the party. But we all agree that it is what America stands for. Two hundred years from now, America will still be here because of those core values. Phillip Morris won’t.
