Mercer,

That's the question. How long is the friction between Avid pushing the 2022 (and soon 2023) versions of Media composer and Mediacentral and the majority, at least in my market, holding off on updating because of bugs and performance issues and staying on Media composer 2018.12.15 (with some Mediacentral 2021.x components) sustainable?

Yes Jeroen. Once IBM dominated the personal computer market - they no longer do; Once over 50% of all cars on the world's roads were Ford - they no longer are; Before Arri, Red and Sony Venice, just about every major feature film was shot in Panavision, they no longer are. No dominant player in a market can assume things will go on forever, as they are - they have to keep on top by innovating. There is nothing wrong with subscriptions really, notwithstanding people like to own things, but disastisfaction currently I see here with Avid is with their pace and quality of core product development. Bring us real benefits there and the subs popularity issue will go away for them. That's the way I see it anyway.

Mercer:

Bring us real benefits there and the subs popularity issue will go away for them.

Exactly. 

You could even argue that if they had brought the real benefits for the past decade the need to segregate the users and features between perpetual support renewal and subscription would not be needed. The use of 'force' to get everybody on the latest versions is indicative of their inability to bring the real competitive benefits. 

Jeroen van Eekeres:

Thx Carl,

I don't believe my eyes. Thank you Avid. Even after XX years.

• Mounting UNC Drives in Media Composer. When using storage volumes with drive letters, the number of drives you can mount is limited and hard to maintain over a network. UNC (Universal Naming Convention) paths resolve these issues and are the standard for identifying servers and other resources in a local network. Previously, only NEXIS workspaces could mount drives with UNC paths. In the latest version of Media Composer, available UNC drives will be displayed in the appropriate menus and available for any read and write operations.

And if all the performance and dynamic relink fixes get Media composer up to speed in a Mediacentral environment we might be getting somewhere. 

Found this while browsing the Mimiq documentation and remembered this thread:

Should I mount shared volumes through UNC paths in Windows?

No. 

Avid introduced mounting any shared volume via UNC in Media Composer 2022.12. Our testing reveals their implementation is unpredictable, with erratic OS-level permissions errors. Hence, shared volumes mounted solely through UNC paths are currently not supported by Mimiq.

https://docs.hedge.video/mimiq/questions

I stopped buying upgrades and use my perpetual license for over two years, so for me it´s 2020 and 2019. At least i know the bugs, but I can´t really decide which one is less annoying. The upgrades were just too frustrating, nothing new that really piqued my interest vs lots of new bugs and complications with this new great interface... I´ll jump back onboard if A) it just doesn´t run on my machine anymore B) there are genuinely new hot features like macros or things that really speed up work or when they unmess the stubborn interface C) when I need to because of codecs, resolutions etc. I imagine it might be a few years.

Thomas Erichsen:

I stopped buying upgrades and use my perpetual license for over two years, so for me it´s 2020 and 2019. At least i know the bugs, but I can´t really decide which one is less annoying. The upgrades were just too frustrating, nothing new that really piqued my interest vs lots of new bugs and complications with this new great interface... I´ll jump back onboard if A) it just doesn´t run on my machine anymore B) there are genuinely new hot features like macros or things that really speed up work or when they unmess the stubborn interface C) when I need to because of codecs, resolutions etc. I imagine it might be a few years.

I fully agree. I had to switch to a subscription two years ago, but I didn't like it very much. New versions usually don't bring anything new now, just a lot of bugs. So now I'm forced to subscribe, but I'm staying on version 2020.12 because no other version has brought anything new for me. Even when I tried to upgrade to 2020.12.5, the export to MP4 didn't work properly, so I went back to 2020.12.
For loyal existing customers (I am on Avid systems for 20 years), Avid does nothing, rather complicates their life and creation!