XSI-Wiki:About this site
Objective
The objective of this site is to provide up-to-date, production-relevant resources to users of Avid (http://www.avid.com/) products and related technologies in computer graphics projects. These resources should help new users to get started quickly; help experienced users to learn new things and get their work done faster; and help pipeline developers and CG professionals in production to solve problems and get better results.
Motivation
No matter how hard a technology company may try, product documentation cannot address all the needs of the user community it strives to help. Also - because it is descriptive in nature and has to focus on a standard set of use cases - traditional product documentation rarely addresses the really hard problems professionals face in production.
Discussion forums related to products (such as XSI Base (http://www.xsibase.com/) and the Alienbrain forum (http://forum.alienbrain.com/)) can help. But these forums are generally not well structured in the way that documentation is structured and they don't provide an easy way to reference that valuable information when needed (without having to comb through old archives).
This site is intended as a solution for these issues. It was inspired by the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) project, an immensely successful open, collaborative web site. By creating a common platform for experts inside and outside the company and by empowering experienced users to contribute information on production-relevant topics, we think that this site can change the way users get information about the technology they work with and can help both professionals to solve hard problems and newcomers to get started more quickly.
This site is a public resource. Anyone can contribute and anyone can modify any article. This is an unusal approach for a public company like Avid - letting users edit the content on a corporate web site. But we think the result will be worth the risk of abuse. We are providing this resources and the manpower to run and maintain the site and make sure our experts are paying attention and solving and documenting hard problems. But the site primarily relies on CG professionals with extensive real-world production experience to share their expertise to move the industry forward.
The Wiki articles that you contribute here and the XSI core documentation should not be considered to be in competition with each other. Rather, they each become more effective when used together, each one building on, and complementing the other.
Please visit the suggestion box if you have ideas on how we can improve this resource.
