If you haven't experienced this yet, you will soon enough. A customer or prospect calls you up and asks if you have an Avid. As a Media 100 owner, you've got three choices: you can tell them yes, you do, no you don't, or you can launch into a long and detailed explanation of how although you don't have an Avid per se, you do have something very similar and in many ways even better. If you take this third route, you realize very quickly that the person on the other end of the phone has lost interest long before you get to the point where you explain that although your Media 100 won't directly import audio from a DAT tape, it does have much better picture quality.

Let's face it. Avid Technology has done a much better job of marketing their product than Data Translation, Editing Machines Corporation, Radius or almost anyone else. The Avid Media Composer has become the "Xerox" of the non-linear editing world. Every ad agency greative and corporate communications manager in the world has heard the name. And even if they aren't very clear yet on the intricacies of digital editing, they naturally assume your facility has one of these nifty machines.

Most of these people wouldn't know the difference between an Avid and a Media 100 if the two machines were sitting directly in front of them. Therein lies the dilemma. Do you tell them the truth, or do you just say, "sure, come on over. . .we can take care of you?" Most of my customers call everything from a simple Radius Videovision Studio setup to a decked-out Grass Valley version of the Media 100 an Avid. They could care less about the myriad of technical and aesthetic details that differentiate these competing systems. They just want to be able to cut and paste, get their projects done quickly and affordably and have them look good on the VHS tape they'll be playing at their next trade show.

Many of these customers will go through an entire edit session extolling the many virtues of my "Avid." I've learned just to keep my mouth shut, because clients never like to be corrected anyway. I can go for days thinking I've got the universal editing maching that can be all things to all people until I actually get an experienced client who's used to editing on a Media Composer. "Why do we have to re-sample my DAT tape," he'll say. Or, "why doesn't that cut you just dragged down there snap to the time line like it should." There are no easy answers for these questions, because the Media 100 actually "should" do these things. When a client wants, late in the game, to change a 20 frame dissolve to a 90 frame dissolve its hard to explain why the process takes so much longer on my Media 100. You start talking about superior picture quality and then realize that when your client's sales force is looking at the VHS dubs of your project in the field, nobody is going to know the difference anyway.

Sometimes I tell my clients that my Media 100 is really kind of a "next generation" Avid, and that they are getting the benefits of all this advanced technology ahead of the crowd. Other times I tell them that I can't actually afford an Avid and that it is the Media 100 that accounts for my very reasonable rates. Most of the time I just try to avoid the issue altogether. It is frustrating though, because I genuinely believe that the Media 100, especially the new PCI Vincent version, has the potential to be even better than a top-of-the-line Avid 8000. Now if I could just get Data Translation would listen to my wish list. Obviously things like the direct import of 48-kHz DAT audio is possible because Avid is already doing it. Equally obvious is that the multiple video streams that allow true real-time transitions are also possible, because Targa and others are offering this feature as well. I feel like I'm caught in the middle, with a product that is a lot better than it has to be, but not nearly as good as it could be.

Media 100 will not be truly successful until it captures the hearts and minds of the ad agency producers and creatives, the film and video professionals and most importantly the editors themselves who have made the Avid a household word. There are an enormous number of Beta-SP and even high-end digital edit suites that are looking for a good reason to purchase a Media 100 system. Unfortunately they won't find that reason in recent Data Translation advertising campaigns. Instead of appealing to the editors and media professionals that made the Avid Media Composer famous, Data Translation is trying to appeal to rock musicians, telling them they don't even "need" editors. They advertize the Media 100 as some kind of magic MTV video making machine, and in the process, go right over the heads of the ad agency clients that are my bread and butter. These people flip through the Media 100 "strait jacket" ads in WIRED and Post Magazine thinking that they are looking at some new kind of guitar amplifier while they continue to cut and paste on my Media 100, talking a mile-a-minute about how great it is to edit on an "Avid."