Last Thursday (November 3, 2011), there were three major announcements from industry players, in this order: Avid, Canon and RED. To my surprise, none of the announcements played out as I would have expected. This is neither good or bad, it just caught me off guard.

Avid in the morning — Media Composer 6
Avid started the day out with its “live” video stream of their Media Composer 6 announcement. Let’s get one thing out of the way first; the Media Composer 6 update by Avid release is huge. It’s awesome. It’s a home run. I’m extremely looking forward to upgrading. The biggest thing for me is AJA Kona 3 hardware support. The refresh to 64-bit is nice too, although it’ll be a short while for any plugins you have to upgrade to 64-bit as well.

Okay, so what was so surprising about Avid’s announcement? It wasn’t the Media Composer 6 update itself that was so weird, it was how Avid announced it. You had to pre-register on Avid’s website to watch the live feed of this announcement. So me, like many others, was expecting to see a live broadcast from a stage somewhere in the world showing off all the cool new features of Media Composer 6. Instead, it was a pre-recorded, edited soapbox snoozfest on boring marketing slop, which included testimonials of people that most people don’t even know. read more...