I'd always felt that Serious Magic would have been a good fit with the Madison lads, small, nimble and inovative. Instead they've been swallowed by a behemoth, sad indeed.

And what have Sony bought of late?

Grouper.com and then got sued by Universal for profiting from piracy, stange days indeed.

I'm pretty sure the modern Sony corporation is stupid (on average). Coasting along on strategies implemented at it's birth and oblivious to the generational changes in the psycology of the world around it.

Maybe they'll wake up before the wind resistance get's to much and they fall out of the sky.

I have always thought that Serious Magic and Sony's Madison group would make a good team, but in reality Serious Magic design team wouldn't blend well with Vegas design approaches and they probably quit before the merger was completed. But what a product line Sony's Madison group "could" have, if they could have work together. ( I would like Sony's Madison group to get some codec programmers from Blackmagic or Cineform if they have no plans to acquire them).

Adobe's team using GCU rendering and more, probably will permit SeriousMagic team more access to "cutting edge" software and a larger customer base.

this is very sad and disappointing news. adobe bought out Pixmantec and stopped their RAW image processing technology . They used a few of the features in the upcoming Lightroom, but, IMHO, the workflow sucks. Now they have their grimy mits around serious magic. <sigh>
I just hate it when these big corps buy out the innovation of a small company. these big guys couldn't innovate their way out of a plastic sack.

This is amazing to me. Just last month Adobe bought another smaller innovative company that had a loyal following
http://www.interaktonline.com

In that case it was plugins for Dreamweaver . They had a large line of plugins and some of them were immediately shut down with no further support. This move angered a lot of people that had designed their workflows around the use of these helper products.
I heard a talk several years ago by a marketing research leader from Kraft. He talked about how hard it was for them to have a cream cheese that was as good as one they found in a smaller east coast market. So they bought it . That is the other way to innovate -- just buy em out.
Years ago Adobe bought Canoma -- a program for creating 3d environments that could be used in Poser, Bryce or stand alone. The program was never heard from again.
I will miss the Serious Magic products. Kind of sad to think of these programs like some kind of labratory animal being dissected and played with by sinister forces...

Oh well, a toast to the innovative companies that have inspired us -- guess you cant live forever.

TomE

Wow. So I just ordered DV Rack 2 SD. Should I be thinking about whether to send it back? One of the reasons for the purchase now is so I'm positioned for future versions. $350 for a useful, but dead-end tool?

Thoughts appreciated. I have not used dvrack before, but it looks useful.
Thanks!
Tony

Ahhh man... that really sucks!

Seems like the guys at Serious Magic really supported VEGAS. I've seen numerous ScreenShots of VEGAS in their advertising and Demo Videos. Most of the people I've seen that use Serious Magic products also use VEGAS. I guess that's all about to change.

Adobe is really beefing up. They're already a staple in the lives of Media Producers... whether you're on Mac or PC. I LOVE Adobe products (After Effects, Photoshop, Encore DVD, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver)... most all, except Premiere.

Now the question is... what are they gonna do with all this?

If they incorporate the Macromedia & Serious Magic line into their 'Old School' Adobe products so they all talk/communicate & send media back & forth... WOW! They will definitely be a force to be reckoned with and very worthy of becoming the leader in this here media making business.

At the same time it's scary because they could do like Apple... and close their architecture so these products only work with other Adobe products. This would basically FORCE you to use the Adobe suite.

They sure didn't waste any time in getting it up and on the Serious Magic home page.

I both Applaud & Cry at this acquisition.
It soooo should have been Sony that acquired Serious Magic. Now that would have been a match made in heaven.

on their DVCProHD Decoder page -
'Sony Vegas' has been replaced with 'Other Windows Applications'
Yet FCP is still listed

}{:

'Sony Vegas' has been replaced with 'Other Windows Applications'

I don't see that. I've refreshed several times and checked on a different machine, still says Vegas.

Perhaps they wanted to better catch After Effects, but I don't see it.

look in the red box with AVI & QuickTime (on the DVCProHD decoder page)

Thats is where sony vegas is now replaced...

some of the ultra examples are ridiculous though, like ones showing how it can easily deal with wrinkles in the green screen, then you see wrinkles are in a position where they can just be masked out anyway, without any need for chroma keying.

It's a good app, but I dont know why they ( Adobe ) really need it. You can already do all that in any compositing software, even aftereffects.
( Obviously to get Serious magic's customers, but as far as technology goes nothing we can't find elsewhere )

PS: and I obvousy forgot about those other products serious magic offers.

Logan5,

I was looking at the announcement which was obviously written before they decided to, um, put a little tan on their noses.

Coursedesign, indeed you are right, the "adobe girls" will do just that.

Why does seemingly everyone just assume that Adobe buying Serious Magic is a bad thing? There was a lot of hand-wringing and outrage on this forum when Sony bought Sonic Foundry's multimedia applications and, personally, I think that turned out pretty well.

Why don't we just wait and see what Adobe actually does with their new purchase.

John

no outrage here....I'm just pointed out the start of the purge of Vegas from parts of the web site. That is what adobe has done so far with the purchase...its their site now and I'm just pointing out the change.

I don't know the future of Serious Magic, I wish them well, as I just bought Ultra 2, although it seems like (Syntrillium's) Cool Edit Pro 2 is still going strong under it's new name of (Adobe) Audition.

LOL - Spot and I are thinking alike again. I was going to post this as well.

One of the things that people are not always thinking about is that Vegas is somewhat of a "closed" NLE - closed in a way that it made it's own road and did not really follow the road that others took. Now that has always been a plus and a minus. Adobe on the other hand has always been more "open" software. You can have hardware support, you can use many plug-ins and so on. So in a sense it would be wierder for Vegas to suddenly buy an entire program because Vegas sort of "does it all" already.

Adobe has worked harder to make it's apps all play nicer with each other and the thing that caught my eye in the PR was the comment that Adobe plans to continue to sell Serious Magic's products and future versions of Adobe's video solutions will include Serious Magic technologies and software. This could be great because now imaging getting the production bundle for more or less the same price as it is now but it also will come with DVRack and Ultra and have it somehow tied in to Premiere or After Effects. Someone mentioned CEP and it has continued on since Adobe bought it - but also Adobe really had no sort of DAW either. And that goes back to what I said about Vegas being more "closed - Vegas is a DAW *and* a NLE as well as trying to be many other things. I always call it the swiss army knife of NLE's.

Adobe also likes to pick up on ideas that come from third party - for example one might think adding Ultra to Adobe is to replace AE plugs such as lensfeed and zMatte.

Remember that Sony is not fully out of the game when it comes to buying things. Most all of the SoFo stuff was bought up, as we all know, but it was last year that Sony bought Useful Things from ProFound Effects. I have not heard anything much about that product since Sony got it. With Vegas 7 out now I am not sure any of the technology in that plug-in was used.

I'd suspect that's what's been used to create the Vision Loops.
Possibly they've been using the product for years and then the company got into difficulties so SPD bought them.

( I would like Sony's Madison group to get some codec programmers from Blackmagic or Cineform if they have no plans to acquire them).

At the moment I just want them to employ Andreas from Scenalyzer :)