[geezer]

....The insane thing about this low cost Movie Studio program is that it allows you to work in 5.1, too.....With all of the surround stuff I have done in the past outside the box, I don't really expect to be diving into this aspect of the cheap program, but I am just amazed at how much it does and how well it seems to do it. I have found a couple of little bugs (some VST plug-in preset saving weirdness), but found the workarounds pretty quickly.

I basically bought this thing to put together a DVD of a funeral service that I took on as a duplicating job that came through my new phone number at my new building.....small money, but LOCAL!....Anyway, one thing that really impressed me was this: The handycam video was recorded at slow speed MiniDV with 32k audio. I brought it into the computer digitally, then processed the audio using my Waves plug-ins and printed a new audio track in a single pass that came up with a 48k track in place in perfect sync!....When I dumped it out to my pro MiniDV deck to test it, it automatically came up with the bars and pre-roll, etc., and controlled the deck flawlessly.

The program seems to have most (probably all) of the functionality of Final Cut Pro of 4 or 5 years ago (with some definite additions), and maybe actually works better in a lot of ways. Truly mindblowing. Kind of hard to comprehend that the non-DVD version of this can be purchased for under $100.....And, even though the manual is printed in an unreadably small font, the online help and tutorials inside the program pop up all the time and lead you right through it pretty logically.

I have overseen all kinds of video projects over the last 10 years, and really understand most of the issues, but I had no intention of actually doing any real video editing on my own. I was sort of forced into it by the economy of running my little business, and the economy of the native software made it possible to get in pretty quickly without much of a learning curve.

Native, native, native. That is what is driving everything. Plus file interchange, file interchange, file interchange. This incredibly cheap program has a truly intelligible mechanism for bringing files of all types, both audio and video, right on top in the program all the time. It just makes sense, and really doesn't even require the amount of computer savvy needed to keep your files together for Medit (which, of course, is not all that much).

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This incredible economy of development has, of course, been accompanied by a real shake-out and consolidation of the software developers. Sonic Foundry was taken in by Sony, Syntrillium by Adobe, Steinberg by Yamaha, etc. Some of this, of course, means that big money has been thrown at software development. It also means that the "big boys" have forced some more standardization of file formats and interchange methodology and protocols, and that the I/O hardware has also become more standardized and higher quality.......Aside from all the Pro Tools stupidity, all these protocols and hardware improvements and standardization seem to be readily available and usable for any developers, even small ones. The clarity that has developed around all these issues in the last 3 or 4 years is pretty astounding.

So, I guess that's how I see the situation for MTU. Can MTU really rework its programming for the native world? Since the death of its hardware (Motorola) is often touted as the original event leading to the end of development for Medit, this has certainly had to be on everyone's mind there for quite a few years.

I am not a programmer in any way, shape or form. I do, however, have a pretty good handle on what has distinguished the "good" native programs from the others:

1)The paradigm. This should be easy for MTU to deal with, though will have to be examined thoroughly. Without going into the whole "studio in a box" thing, MTU should be able to translate its initial elegance into an updated form.....I have my doubts that MTU would or should ever try to capture the "all-in-one" program market (Nuendo, Cubase, Logic, etc.), but the business model clearly has all these other companies putting out "all-in-one" programs as part of their whole cash flow stream....(some of these "all-in-ones" don't have some things -CD burning, for instance- but, in my experience, people don't have a problem with buying a second program for this once they get hooked on the studio in a box of their other program).

The ONLY program I have seen that has anything like the original Medit paradigm going is Wavelab. In order to see this, I had to kill the MTU concept that "tracks" are a negative, and that see waveforms all the time is not necessary or helpful. It turns out that tracks, when not tied to some limitation or intended to ***** a multitrack machine, are a very useful organizational tool. It turns out that seeing accurate waveforms all the time increases your speed by a lot, as long as there is no big redraw issue (Wavelab, like most of the other programs, achieves this by creating a waveform file when you first bring the file into the program).

2)The "audio engine" quality. Around the time that I started buying native software, everyone started becoming aware that there was a difference in the sound of the various "audio engines" being used to calculate things in the different programs. Not being a programmer, I have no idea what ultimately makes this different thing happen in the different programs. I know that MTU was ahead of its time with accumulator depth and 32bitfp in the hardware days, and I'm not sure how that translates to software-only programs. It does matter, though. I think there is general consensus that the Magix folks (Samplitude, Sequoia) have always had a great sounding audio engine. Logic is supposed to be up there as well. SoundCube/Wavelab are definitely good sounding.....The 64bit environment of SoundCube might be a clue for a direction to follow. I don't know.

In this same arena, my brother informed me that a major software company told him that "we all lose at least one bit at the mixdown buss", meaning for the multitrack, "studio in a box" programs. This is why the people with better ears use outboard summing solutions when they use these programs.

I do feel that MTU would definitely need some serious consultation with audio pros with good ears if it were to go down the path of attempting to come up with a good sounding native audio engine. Achievement of quality in this realm actually involves the asking of some very complex questions, in my opinion, and requires a particular mindset and some particular experience.

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----------One other thing that I have been thinking about today: The failure of MTU to get the NPR contract a few years ago.....why, how, etc. There are, of course, many things about this interaction that I do not know, but there is a lot about it that I do know:

--Jan Andrews (main engineer in charge of new projects there) asked me about Medit's internal bit rate before they gave the contract to someone else. I did not know what it was, and had never thought about it. In hindsight, MTU was probably the only product on the market at the time with that high an internal bit rate. Why had Jan not been informed of this by MTU? What was wrong with that communication mechanism, and why wasn't MTU touting those specs back then?
--There was the perception that Medit would not network well, wheras Sonic Solutions would. I think that was probably a false perception. Again, a communication breakdown.
-- Sonic, when it got the contract, went into a long period of development and changes in their product for the NPR contract. It is my understanding that hey never achieved this, and simply cost NPR a whole lot of money before they backed out (I was told they received 1 million and never came up with a product....don't know if that is true). I ran into the main liasson from Sonic for that contract at NPR when they were way into that process. He described for me what they were trying to get Sonic to do (every part of which MTU already did), and said they had only been able to achieve 15% of it at that time.....Again, a clear case of miscommunication up front, for whatever reason.

There is the other part of the equation about giving the contract to a bigger company with deeper pockets, but something about the initial communication was clearly faulty. I always wondered why that was, and why neither Charles nor myself were asked to help out with that process.

.....The only point of this would be to aid self-examination for MTU if they were to embark on a new development and marketing program.

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Anyway, my 2cents to the 10th power for today....