I first used Digital Fusion in 2003. I keyed a whole music video with it, comped and assembled the thing in Inferno. It was painful but DF had Ultimatte and Primatte bundled and the spark costs for Ultimatte alone would have been more than the DF license. Our Inferno license was north of 300k if memory serves.
This was when Autodesk was gearing up their campaign to buy or bully every package in their sphere—Discreet had another couple years of independence before the hammer fell.
Microsoft had picked up Softimage to push a port to NT and had been working tirelessly on an NT only product called DS. Eddy was long gone at that point. Alas they sold it all to Avid after forcing the adoption of NT as a standard in the 3d world. They took a chunk of Avid in the deal and continuing the great push forward for Windows.
Beyond Soft, Parallax had long since sold out Matador and Advance to Avid who added OMF import support from MC and renamed it Media Illusion but kept Matador’s namesake. Media Illusion died in 2001. When soft was sold to Autodesk in 08 Avid held on to DS but killed it off in 2013.
Cineon died in 97 in yet another astounding dumb move by Kodak shareholders but, part of the tech resurfaced in Chalice and then Rays which both met with quick ends as well as all over the PTE for the Spirit. More money in patents and telecine.
Cyborg was on the rise but was about to hit some rocky ass roads along with Monsters and Colossus, the latter which would become Lustre after the acquisition and eventually be killed off like its ill-fated brothers and sisters during the fall.
Denim Software’s Illuminaire Studio bought by Discreet, rebranded, Effect and Paint option 1/2 (along side option 3 which was Flint on O2), then combined into Combustion, acquired with Discreet by Autodesk, then dead.
Sony’s Socratto… need I say more?
Quantel was dying a slow death with no HD prospects because of their hardware dev time. Doing macros in SD that you would scale to HD turned out not to be a winning strategy. The death rattle of the iQ was years away but you could tell the end was neigh or a miracle was needed. People weren’t buying Henry’s really, or Hals. The Domino was dead. Newbury was already selling off the private jets.
Apple had acquired Shake from Nothing Real and was already reducing the price after porting it to MacOS in a bid to siege the post market. First they killed Tremor dead. Eventually Shake would hit 500 bucks for Mac OS while NT and Iris were 9k and then it was all dead. It was the crown jewel of a strategy which should feel very familiar.
I mention all of this only because every player still in existence is complicit in where we find ourselves today and is directly responsible for our limited choices, rocket-science-tax structure and the ever present race to the bottom.
I don’t condone how BMD operates but honestly they all suck. What I can say about DF/Fusion and BMD, is it would appear that, unlike a lot of folks on the list that just bought shit, added one thing that might help their core business and then let amazing tech just die on the vine (because making money in post is hard), BMD has actually made a concerted effort to make a good package great. Not that Fusion is truly great yet, but they appear to be actually trying. And that’s uncommon.
As a postscript I will offer that I’ve edited this post repeatedly. As I would read it back I would keep remembering more and more instances of our niche being fucked (usually with less than altruistic intentions) and seldom did my initial attempt at relaying those tidbits ever land correctly with the first draft. Nevertheless I pounded “save edit” with the same fury as if I had just read the news on that same Ill-fated day.