Looks like there's been what's called a Mass Exodus over the past year, and now there are less then 20 people left in the organization. It's characterized as a mere shell of a company these days -- at last count there was only one programmer left on staff, and its been that way since last August. But by far the worst news is that Carr's partner Jack Buchanan, the driving force and nearly single-handed programmer of Speed Razor left the company about a year ago. So, even though the troubled company is still writing bug fixes and trying to make deals with companies like Xentrik (the Vixen people) to improve things, by all accounts Speed Razor is dead-end ware.

Buchanan picked a bad time to fly the coop, right in the middle of development of Speed Razor 2000. As a result, Speed Razor 2000 is basically just a cosmetic improvement/bug fix of Speed Razor 4.0. And, insiders say that a lot of the code is rather hacked together, with only six new features to boot. That's hardly what would qualify as a point-release, I'd say. Also distressing is that one of the main selling points of this new release is QuickTime export, which is nothing to crow about -- it works by writing an AVI file and then having QuickTime convert it. Hmm -- not too innovative in my book. Adding to the bad news, the US support team has also vacated the premises, with reportedly only one support tech left, and he's not too familiar with editing, according to sources.

Yeah, seems like dark days for Carr and company. Red flags went up in my mind when I noticed a marked lack of PR support and the absence of any true innovation with 5.0. This is unfortunate, because it seemed like the company was on the right track for a while there, garnering partnerships with hardware companies and such. But I guess most of those once-promising deals fell through. Perhaps this has happened because of too much competition from Premiere and Final Cut. Companies like Incite, Discreet, United Media and DPS who are putting out rock-solid editing systems, and dedicated compositors like Adobe After Effects and Digital Fusion are blowing Speed Razor away.

Speed Razor used to be innovative, but now it's just not. Maybe an infusion of cash will help in-sync get on its feet again. But I don't hold out much hope. In the technology business, it's getting more and more difficult to get any kind of venture capital funding. And, if a company has fallen behind, which in-sync surely has, it's next to impossible to catch up. Too bad.

Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist for the past eight years, White is also an Emmy-winning producer, video editor and shot-calling PBS TV director. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.