In the last year the case studies Avid chooses to report on on its blog have changed. As well as regularly reporting on aspects of making studio feature films…

August 2014:

We’d take a 2.40 frame and decide where it’s going to be when viewers see it displayed in regular, non-IMAX theaters. I did versions of the tilt scan for setting the 2.40 look from the IMAX frame using the Avid resize effect. Then the assistants replaced the Avid footage with a black-and-white trackable grid pattern, which we then rendered out and delivered to EFILM.

October 2014:

The Expendables 3 features a huge cast of A-list action stars, which posed a major challenge for the editors. “You’re trying to fit in a lot of big personalities, and a lot of big sequences,” Sean says. “There are about 17 main characters in this movie, so we needed to make tough decisions about which individual character stories got told.”

…they’ve started to report on much smaller films:

June 2015:

Because of the film’s small budget, I served as both the editor and the VFX artist. And as you can tell from the following photo, the production scrimped and hired a total noob as my assistant.  He turned out to be a lazy punk, uninterested in performing his DIT and assistant editor duties.

Yesterday:

Given the scale of the project, and the fact that I would be acting as my own assistant editor and liaison between later partners in the post production process, Media Composer was the logical decision.

Avid’s Tier 3

The change in case studies is due to Avid targetting a different market.

As quoted from a Seeking Alpha transcript of Avid’s Q1 2015 analyst call in May:

So we generally think about the media technology market in three tiers comprising a total addressable market of almost $8 billion. We define the three tiers as large media enterprises, businesses and institutions and finally individual creatives. It’s worth noting that there’s also a consumer market at the very low end of tier 3, which is not an area of focus for us. However, we do have tools for discovery so that nonprofessionals and enthusiasts can determine if they like to aspire to become a creative professional. (My emphasis)

There’s a video on Avid tiers on their investor relations website (Uses Flash and requires an email address to play).

In yesterday’s Q2 2015 call, Louis Hernandez, Avid’s Chairman, President and CEO:

We have had our early returns better than we expected, but we think that the Tier 3 leadership, the programs, the systems, the processes, those are still being put in place so we’re encouraged with the early returns there.

Other interesting Avid facts:

• 12,000 paid subscribers (5,000 at end of 2014)
• 25,000 MediaCentral licenses sold so far to Tier 1 accounts
• Tier 1 is mostly buying still on a licensed perpetual model
• Tier 3 market, a largely untapped by Avid – potentially amounts to $1.8 billion

While others have forced customers to move off of perpetual contracts on to subscription, we recognize that this model does not work for all of our customers