Editorial by Charlie White

A brand new pizza joint opened just the other day, right down the street from our DigitalVideoEditing.com test facility here in lovely Midwestern USA. Posted out front was an irresistible come-on: "Pizza: Extra Large, only $1.99!!!" Lots of exclamation points. Wow, what a deal! Let's all go and get some. So in we go, and man, is this place nice. How on earth could the owner of this cushy, trendy place stay in business when he's only charging $1.99 for his largest pizza? I'll tell you how: If you want cheese on that pizza, that'll cost you another $8.99. How about some rich, savory tomato sauce? Another $2.99, please. Toppings? $1.99 each. Before we knew it, we were talking about ordering a pizza that cost $25. Some deal. So what the heck does this have to do with digital video editing? Well, if you're in the market for a nonlinear editing system, you're probably going to run into the "pizza syndrome." Get your editing system, right here, only $4999. Oh, you want to do real time dissolves and transitions? That'll cost you another $3999. 3D effects? Another $4999. It's frustrating.

Don't you wish the companies that design and build these systems would just put together one system that does everything you'd ever want to do with an editor, and just sell that one? Just one? Sometimes that actually happens. I'm reminded of a situation about two years ago, when a company called Discreet Logic (now called Discreet) had been selling its high-end Smoke editing and compositing system for about nine months. By all accounts, the company had a tremendously powerful system on the market, but realized that priced at a quarter of a million dollars, it was far too expensive. As a result, it decided to cripple the system in various increments and shave tens of thousands of dollars off the price with each whack. One by one, they'd take off features -- things like color correction, effects, things like that -- and turn each attribute into that darling of every bean-counting executive: Options. Yeah. Then people who didn't have $250,000, but had $200,000 would buy the thing. Yeah?

No. Sales staff noticed that every buyer, all of them, still wanted all the features. Even so, the sales people got these prospective customers in the door quoting that lower base price. But then deals were made that ended up not making much more money than the base price for Discreet. A few months later, along came an upgrade to Smoke, of which its designers were very proud. They were particularly happy about the way they designed the DVE module to integrate so deeply and completely into every facet of the user interface. When writing a review of the new version for some long-gone dead-tree publication, I marveled at the cohesiveness of this beast. It was simply elegant. Then, Discreet's bean counters had their say: "Hey, how are we going to sell this product to all the different market segments? You could just take out that DVE in the cheaper version," they bleated. The designers and coders, brilliant programmers all, rolled their eyes. They hadn't been thinking about ways to market this product -- ways to disable its features so it could be sold at different price points. They had been too busy enhancing the synergy of the product to think about pesky things like marketing. However, after a lot of corporate soul-searching, Discreet did the right thing. It decided to sell Smoke as one unit. No options. No mirrors -- just Smoke. Righteousness prevailed. Cool company.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the benefits of option pricing, though. Suppose I owned a production house that needed a new edit system and I didn't even have any video tape machines with component inputs, and never planned to upgrade to same. Why should I have to pay extra for component I/O? This makes sense. But, on the other hand, if hardware/software manufacturers didn't nickel and dime us to death for every little thing on their systems, maybe it would be no big deal to have a feature or two that was never used. Heck, think of Microsoft Office, a ubiquitous product with 90 percent of its users actually using only about 10 percent of its features. What if the greedmeisters at Microsoft charged extra for Spell Check? I better be careful -- Gates could read this and get some ideas.

See? Makes you mad to think about it, huh? There's just something bothersome about a big, 800-pound gorilla company like Microsoft, or in the case of the digital video market, Avid charging for every little thing. The truth of the matter is that Avid has in its stable one wonderful, glorious, all singing, all-dancing product, Media Composer 9000. It takes this fabulous system and cripples it so many ways that some of its mildly varying iterations actually seem like different products. On the higher-end, Avid takes Media Composer, enhances it in a fantastic way and calls it a Symphony. Then, the company's gigantic PR machine takes over, telling us that this product is for long-form high-end producers, that one's for multimedia producers, here's one for small businesses, that one over there is for high school students and, oh, whaddaya know, here's one for grandmas. Companies can engage in this kind of absurdity if they're the "award-winning market leader." But this can't go on forever. I predict that some whippersnapper upstart company with a product that's even better than Media Composer 9000 will come along soon and sell its full-featured fledgling system for a couple of grand, undercutting these lumbering giants at their own game. It's inevitable. Free enterprise has a funny way of effortlessly enforcing economic Darwinism.

Playing these pricing games and inventing market segment cubbyholes in which to do a marketing song and dance is one thing, but at least it's not like some companies such as Quantel, the company that doesn't even like to talk about the prices of its high-end products. For example, I asked three months ago for the price of a Henry Infinity. I know it's around a million dollars, but I really need a hard and fast figure that I can actually publish here on this Web site. No answer yet, but I'll keep you posted. Until then, let's just assume the British company's strategy is to just not say how much their high-end systems cost. Like a Rolls Royce, [British accent here] "If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it." Some systems are so custom-made, so elaborate, so exclusively dear that it's impossible to say how much the damn things cost. Notice, by the way, that Quantel is quickly moving downmarket with other less-expensive compositing and editing gear after hundreds of employees were laid off not long ago. The old million-dollar club of Quantel users is still going strong, but this can't last forever, so Quantel is finally playing that market-segment game, too, saying this product is for these people and that one is for that, and so on.

But all this is nothing new. The last time you bought a car, didn't you wonder if even the steering wheel would be called optional equipment? It's all just part of that wonderful international pastime called "selling it." The best thing is, all these nonlinear editing products have to compete with each other -- a competition where ultimately the real winners are us, the buyers.

Charlie White has been writing about digital video editing since it was the laughingstock of the post-production industry. He's an Emmy award-winning producer and director for PBS, and Producer of this Web channel. Reach him at chazz@mptv.org.

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