My Vegas/Premiere experiences at DV Expo East

Tanjy wrote on 7/18/2003, 9:18 PM
I attended but only briefly.

First place I stopped was the SONY booth. Oddly enough I saw them plugging Adobe Premiere as an example of the products they were supporting. I don't quite recall what product of their own they were pushing but it was something that would support Premiere to the max, and there it was on a big screen with a big sign: Adobe Premiere. At the SONY booth. Go figure.

When I asked a SONY rep what was the meaning of this, given that they just acquired Sonic Foundry and Vegas Video and wasn't this a conflict of interest, he shrugged and said SONY was a big sprawling company and that I shouldn't confuse it with SONY Pictures, whose rep was there and vowed they would be pushing Vegas and enhancing it... whatever that means.

Then I went to the Adobe booth. They were in high gear selling the new Premiere as a revolutionary tool that will beat the pants off of anything out there. The demo guy said they have been building it from the ground up for the past three years and it's a completely different product from the Premiere we all know. He was showing off the surround sound feature and said "can Vegas do this?". I said a lot of the Premiere interface looks like a catch-up to Vegas and he denied, denied but was oh so aware of Vegas.

Then a bystander butt in and said Vegas is toast because SONY is gonna kill it with yet more online activation restrictions and greater content creation restrictions because it cannabalizes and threatens its existing copyrighted content....that SONY is notoriously bad at product support and that's it's essentially a content company. VV is dead in the water, blah, blah...

I hope he's wrong. Any thoughts?

Comments

Bear wrote on 7/18/2003, 9:43 PM
My thoughts are you will be much happier in life if you stop worrying about things that are out of your control. I use vegas I like vegas if Sony screws it up it will be beyond my control and I will find something else to use. Not trying to be a wise ass just recommend you don't worry be happy.
filmy wrote on 7/18/2003, 10:38 PM
Being the story teller - come, sit down and listen. LOL....anyway..ok, so I have a friend who is a guitarist. Now back in the, shudder, 80's when metal was big he had all kinds of endorsement deals. He would go the the NAMM shows and he would run over to the Kramer booth and sit there and sign autographs and play and schmooze. Than he would run over to the G&L booth, stuffing the Kramer artist badge under his shirt, and sit there for a while, than he would be off to the Robin booth...and so on. He would come home with about 7 or 8 new guitars to play around with. When you would see the band live, 99.9% of the time he was playing a guitar he built himself. If a Kramer rep was coming to a show he would play a Kramer for a least one song and have it sitting on stage for the whole set. One time he did an interview for Guitar World magazine, he did it at the NAMM show and at the Kramer booth. So the interview, of course, had all these little things about how Kramer made nice guitars and so on. So when the issue came out the phone rings and it is Leo Fender - "Hey I just read the interview. So what is all the s**t about Kramer? We put you in all of our ads you should talk about us." Ohhh...busted! But no - he calmly tells Leo "Oh well, you know how the press is. They don't say all that you really say and they misquote you..." Yeah..so leo laughed and life goes on.

So - the moral of this story is that people say certian things when they are "working" for certian companies. Doesn't mean the actually *use* that item 100% of the time. Doesn't even mean they use that item 50% of the time. All it means is at that moment in space it is what they are being paid to use.
As far as Sony goes - they are huge and they swallow up things and people. Ya got one person sayiong one thing and another saying something else. Ya go the motion Picture side, ya got the music side, ya got the electronics side - blah blah. They are going to do what they are going to do and if anything you *might* read that comment ("...big sprawling company and that I shouldn't confuse it with SONY Pictures...") as VV is headed for a high end pro user base. Or you could read it as passing the buck or the fact the guy you spoke with was hired to demo a new Sony/Premiere item and not talk about how wonderful the new aquistion of SoFO was/is.