So here we go!
So if you asked me for a business card last week, it would have read “Digidesign” on it…this week, as of Monday NAB 2009, it reads Avid. New logo, new web site, new direction, new company…seriously.
Over the last 10 years, Avid as a company have had many CEOs devoted to change, to the principles of “interop” of making the audio and video arms talk and co-operate properly. For various reasons, this hasnt happened at the times when it was promised. Gary Greenfield however, is making change happen. In the last 18 months, we’ve seen some folks lets go (for better for worse) and the marketing, logistics, manufacturing, management and sales teams of the big 5 Avid companies have been slowly but surely merged into one single company. Thats right, not just merging 2 companies, but 5, at the same time!
Lots of great info about the new direction here
And lastly a fantastic showreel of what our customers do and who they are here
I managed to score an interview with Dave Lebolt and will edit that up on my return and post it up. I also grabbed an interview with Paul Neyrinck, Digi (sorry Avid Audio) 3rd party developer of many industry standard surround sound encode/decode solutions. More interviews hopefully to come!
Lastly, I saw a presentation by Larry Blake on our main stage today, talking about ICON and how its revolutionised the way he works – a great quote from him was that working with a traditional hollywood mix stage using a console and PT dubbers is like “typing up a document in word, then printing it out, then typing it up again from scratch to make a few changes, then printing it out and then typing it up again with a few changes…” His point being the lack of integration of the workflow from the sound designer right through to the mix stage when using dubbing workflows over “automation follows edit” type conform within PT. It was a great presentation, wish I could share it with you all but my camera ran out of batteries 
More from NAB soon.
Avid, encompassing Digidesign, M-Audio, Sibelius, Pinnacle, Sundance Media and Softimage products, has gone through some big changes in the last year and a half since our new CEO, Gary Greenfield came on board. He’s brought on board some great new staff to help the company transform, promoted existing staff into new roles and all in all, the company is evolving into a very different entity from the one I joined 6 years ago. The key thing for Gary is “Customer success is our success” and we’ve made a tonne of structural changes to make that more of a reality.
