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Well...
I can't officially speak on behalf of Avid in this thread, so this is personal reflection but with an insiders perspective...
I've been involved in Avid Digi Aus/NZ for 7 years advising on workflow with an emphasis on audio post, and yes, there are FCP broadcasters out there but they are less than 15% of my market. The vast majority still use Media composer and unity for quick turnaround post work with pro tools hanging off it. There is also two facilities I know of in our little market who were devoted to FCP for post but when they got busy they switched back to avid and unity.
More stories along these lines at avid.com. All fact, with some hype thrown in, that's marketing for you, but still, clients DO switch from FCP to avid, a story which doesnt get believed more often than not.
Either way, our satellite technologys and support of decklink cards (same cards Fairlight use, right Joe?) means Pro Tools is very FCP friendly, a decision backed by Avid. Gary Greenfield, our CEO is big on the mantra "Avid optimised in an open eco-system" - we want to collaborate, thats the New Avid, as of his tenure starting about 2 years ago.
Avid qualified their unity storage for use with FCP last year to make this point clear - we have devoted engineering resources to testing every unity release with an FCP suite to keep that as a supported config co-existing alongside Media composers.
At the end of the day, I say competition is always healthy for the end users. It it wasn't for editing system competition, Avid may not be the revitalised company it is beginning to be these days. We certainly have a much more customer focused direction from on high, a bit different to others times in the comnpany's history. Hence making sure we continue to support mix era peripherals, thats driven by customer feedback, albeit negative, but we listened and acted according with the clients wishes, like a good company should.
Enough of a rant - as stated earlier, these forums get pretty anti-avid/digi at times and mostly I hold my tongue but just wanted to put in 2c here, hopefully you guys dont mind a bit of self-indulgence!
Incidentally its no secret we are consolidating our brands, (see avid.com for the "5 industry leaders becoming one" video) the work started 2 years ago to merge 5 companys into one and it continues today with moves like the new US HQ consolidating our engineering resources and things like that - yes Media composer and DS engineers and Pro tools engineers in one building, hallelujah! Good news from my perspective.
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