News about Avid Liquid Moving to Pinnacle Div.
 

The following is a quote from Avid support:

"There has been a new development with regards to the Liquid Family of products. Avid is transitioning the management of the Avid Liquid product line to Pinnacle Systems, the company’s consumer division. This change affects all current Avid Liquid products: Avid Liquid software, Avid Liquid Pro and Avid Liquid Chrome Xe.

There are a number of reasons that Avid believes that we can better serve the needs of Avid Liquid users and maximise the potential of Avid Liquid through the Pinnacle division.Avid Liquid’s product development has always been handled by Pinnacle, with the development team that created the original Liquid software residing in Germany. It makes more business sense to have all aspects of the product line (marketing, sales and development) within one division. The product development of Avid Liquid will benefit greatly from this change. With a renewed focus of the development team at Pinnacle, Pinnacle can take optimal advantage of the development of the consumer product line and leverage the recent innovations for future versions of Avid Liquid.

Also, when Pinnacle Studio users are ready to migrate to a more powerful and professional editing solution, Avid Liquid is the ideal choice for them. With Avid Liquid’s availability within the Pinnacle channel, Avid can take maximum advantage of this sales potential."

My take on this development:

1. It makes sense because the Pinnacle team in Germany was doing all of the development work on Liquid anyway. So why try to merge 2 different development teams that are on 2 different continents.

2. I'm hoping that the Avid MC development guys have figured out the JVC HDV metastream and learned from the Liquid team what works in terms of scaling and 24p HDV. Rumors are that the next release will be a v 3.0 for Media Composer and a 6.0 for Xpress Pro and that they will include JVC 24p and 60p support. But we've heard that before so I'll believe it when I see it.
Personally I think they should dump Xpress and lower the price of Media Composer to compete with FCP.

3. Avid is going through a restructuring and it wouldn't suprise me if some day they spinoff or sell Pinnacle. But, they obviously feel that Liquid will be better sold through the Pinnacle channel.

4. There has been a lot of changes at Avid including unfortunate layoffs.
But, the company is at least awake now and at least retrenching to compete.

Only time will tell....

Cheers.

Avid moving Liquid back to the Pinnacle line
 

This news is more than a week old, but in case you missed it, here is the link http://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/thread/266580.aspx

My comment on it, it took a very big person to admit that Avid home office was getting in the way of development between Germany and Mountain View. They spun Liquid back to reduce the amount of hands in the middle of the consumer requests and the developers. This also makes the rising Prosumer upgrade from Studio more obvious instead of losing the Studio user who wants more to Adobe or Sony. I could be wrong.