Re: harris

Gary,

After you forwarded my post, I got a call from a Harris
VP for global sales and support.

He was very apologetic about the bad service I've received, and also
shared quite a bit of information about the following:

1. The decision to end the hardware based version of the Velocity
product line.

This is pretty obvious. They couldn't make money or compete with Avid and Final Cut in the post-production market. He said their costs for manufacturing the hardware went up every year, and the prices for the product basically stayed the same or came down. He also said the internal R&D costs for software development were obviously expensive. He said they "could've" made money with it but needed a lot bigger market-share to do so.

2. The decision to continue the Velocity software coupled with their
Nexio SAN shared storage based products.

He said Leitch initially wasn't going to continue Velocity at all,
but after Harris bought them, they saw the value in the software and
thought they could use it to bolster sales of their Nexio SAN if
they could sell a bundled system that was ready to edit on right out of the box. So they kept the software folks from the Velocity team and had them re-engineer it to be software based, with support for Final Cut, P2, HDcam etc.

3. The decisions on how to handle the announcement of the EOL on
Velocity, VelocityQ and VelocityHD, and the decisions on target
markets for the new Velocity software/SAN products.

He admitted they did a bad job of communicating what they were doing
with Velocity. But as noted above, the intial decision was to end
the Velocity line completely...so those intitial announcements to
users like us was accurate. Then...just a short time later, Harris
bought them and felt like they could make money with Velocity if it
were software only (remember, they were getting killed on
manufacturing and production costs on the boards). This is where he
admits they "should have" let legacy Velocity users know that they
were going to continue development of the product in software, and
design it to work with Harris' SAN hardware.

Ultimately...it probably doesn't matter...because the cost of
Harris' software/SAN based turn-key solutions are out of reach of almost every member of this user group. The Velolcity News Force and
VelocityNX craft editing system they sell (multiple PC's with
Velocity software along with something like 12TB of SAN
storage)...start at....are you ready for this...over $100,000. And I
said "start at..."

As some of you may know, we just purchased a shared storage server
(Apace vStor), and he asked me what we paid for it....when I told
him with installation it was around $15,000, he was more than a
little surprised. But Apace's products are similar in price to
EditShare and several other LAN based shared storage systems...so
lots of companies are making money selling shared storage systems
for that price point...including Apple's Xserve SAN storage systems,
which is similarly priced.

In the end...I doubt many of us on this list could've afforded any
of their new solutions that use Velocity. They do have a software
based version of Velocity called VelocityXNG that is supposed to
ship in August. Their website (which he said is woefully outdated by
the way) describes it as if it's a shipping product, but it is not.

He got a product manager to call me back and confirm it will
read .dps, .dva, and VelocityHD native files, but will not be able
to render/export them. So I'm not sure how useful it would be to us.

They will sell it as a standalone, but they don't have a price yet.
The main use for this version is for clients that have the Velocity
NewsForce or VelocityNX systems. As I understand it, you can put this version on a laptop and edit in the field, send back proxies of the edit via IP...and once the footage is in-house, the edit can be automatically reassambled from the hi-rez footage.

So the intent isn't to develop a software based editing system for
sale to the masses..or even legacy Velocity users...although he said
I'm not the first person to call and ask about it.

Anyway...there wasn't much he told me that I hadn't already assumed.
I've long said that their decision to end the product had to be based on dollars. There just weren't enough of them to justify the cost of production.

He said they all KNOW it's a great product and that it "could"
compete with Avid and Final Cut, but for any number of reasons, it
never happened. Unfortunately, the best products don't always end up
being the most popular or successful.

Sorry for the long post, but thought some members might be
interested.


Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com