CompuServe Messages

Shawn, Actually, I'd very much prefer NOT to have to pay high prices for upgrades. In the broadcast arena it's out of control. I mentioned the $2500 software upgrade from Ampex, but that's only one thing. I have three major pieces of equipment to keep up-to-date; two from Ampex and one from Sony. And the management of my company is justifiably hard to convince when it comes to throwing this kind of money around. So often the result is that we have to do without upgrades we need because the manufacturers have priced them out of the ballpark. And I'm not — believe me, I'm NOT — "used to" paying high prices. While I was still freelancing part-time in video, my full-time job was as a software systems analyst for a California-based company. I worked on the PC and mid-size Unix boxes. And got used to PC software prices, which are usually pretty reasonable. By contrast, the amounts they get for firmware upgrades on these dedicated platforms (the ADO, the edit controller and the switcher) just blow me away. As for the 'rough edges' Imagine 1.0 had, I should tell you that 1.0 and 1.1 of the ADO-100 software were sooooo buggy that the ADO would crash several times a day. It would just lock up — you'd have to power it down and restart it. Sure, they released a no-charge upgrade for it — after we'd had it a year, struggling with those problems. And that's a box the company had paid tens of thousands of dollars for! (This was before I got aboard). [More]