If you follow Avid news with any interest then you are probably aware that one of our community’s best writer/bloggers recently took a position with Avid as the Product Designer for Editors. Frank Capria is now working inside the company and will help to steer the ship and the editing products in what we all hope will be a direction toward future success. For all those who don’t use (or don’t like) Avid it has been said before and it is always worth repeating … A world with a strong and healthy Avid is better for Final Cut Pro and vice versa. And if Adobe starts to gain some significant market share then all the better as healthy competition breeds better products and more advancement for all of the major non-linear editing applications.

Frank recently posted a blog entry on the Avid site titled What I’ve Learned My First Month at Avid. It addresses 5 “urban legends”:

Frank was hired because Avid realizes its editing tools needs to move in a new direction, and Frank will shake things up.

Avid product designers, engineers, and marketers live in an ivory tower, oblivious to market realities and the competitive landscape.

Avid is slow and lethargic, lacking in energy and direction.

Current customers are frustrated with the pace of Avid development, and are looking for reasons to switch to the competition.

Avid is ready to acknowledge the NLE is a commodity product.

To read how Frank addresses these items then click over to the article. This is exactly the kind of transparency that I think users of Avid products want to see as the new Avid management team implements New Thinking.  This is the kind of thing that we will probably never see out of Apple’s Final Cut Pro team but yet it is this kind of communication with the end user that can breed loyalty and inspire confidence in the tools that one is using. I hope we see more of this kind of candid talk from our man inside Avid!