More software offered on rental basis

In the space of just a few hours, two more major video software companies began touting their wares under the pay-monthly plans made famous most recently by Adobe with their “Creative Cloud” service.

The grandfather of all editing software, Avid, is now offering Media Composer for prices starting from £39 UKP ($50 USD) a month or you can buy a yearly sub instead. Fear not, diehards, for you can also licence the software in perpetuity if you prefer – if your wallet stretches to £939 GBP ($1,299 USD).

There’s also an option for organisations to buy a multipack of “floating” licences which can be used on various computers within that company, up to the total number of licences purchased.

Meanwhile, if you like your videos all sparkly, effects powerhouse GenArts is also doing pay-as-you-go deals for its Sapphire plug-ins.

Firstly, in a limited trial at present, some users can get the effects on a monthly ($59 USD), quarterly ($149) or annual ($499) basis and the software works with including Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid, Nuke, Resolve 10 plus OFX platforms such as Sony Vegas Pro as well as bigtime software like Baselight, Film Master, Fusion, Mistika, Nuke, Resolve 10, and SCRATCH.

Subscribers get – as you would jolly well hope – any updates to the software during the licence period plus two installations per subscription, such as one for a desktop and one for a laptop.

This is for the full Sapphire effect suite not the more limited Sapphire Edge version; we have the latter and they’re very nice effects but the full package is rather costly so for anyone cash-strapped, this new-fangled option might be something to consider.

Of course the trouble with all these monthly sub programmes is that if you stop paying, your software stops working… bad news if you ever need to go back to an old project. However, if you already have a full Sapphire licence you can also switch to a pay-as-you-go system for ongoing support and upgrades, the benefit being the software continues to work if your subscription lapses, you just don’t get any more support.

Take a look at Avid’s proposition at http://www.avid.com/US/press-room/flexible-licensing-media-composer and for GenArts the address is http://info.genarts.com/sapphire-subscription-pilot-program or http://www.genarts.com/sapphire/maintenance for the maintenance releases option.