AVID INTROS NEW MEDIA COMPOSER HARDWARE & SOFTWARE
LAS VEGAS - Despite not being on the NAB show floor, Avid has a presence in Las Vegas this week and met with many of its users on Sunday night at an event it hosted to introduce changes to its product line. The new lineup includes next-generation versions of Media Composer (v3.0), NewsCutter (v7.0), and Symphony (v3.0) software, as well as new hardware configurations. Mojo DX and Nitris DX maximizes realtime performance for customers by using all available computing bandwidth to evenly disperse the processing of video and effects across the entire system.
The increase in power and performance is the result of an architectural design that tightly integrates Avid software and hardware with the CPU, host graphics card and PCI Express connection, to create a high-bandwidth, high-performance effects engine. This new design eliminates the lag time in responsiveness that users often experience when working with HD material during the editorial process.
Avid's new editing lineup offers a range of new capabilities designed to enhance the HD editing process. The tools offer realtime output of all major SD and HD formats, eliminating the need for rendering with the Avid DNxHD codec. Codec and file-based format support have been improved to include native support for "Thin Raster" formats, including DVCPRO HD and XDCAM HD, with realtime output with multiple streams of HD. There is now native editing support for AVC-I (50 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s) via the same Avid workflow as P2/DVCPRO HD. And support for Sony XDCAM-EX (via Sony Clip Browser software) and JVC 23.976p and 25p HDV codecs has also been added.
Additional enhancements include support for Mac Leopard OS and Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit operating systems; the addition of the MetaFuze tool for merging single-frame files (such as DPX and TIF) from film scanning or CGI systems into a single media clip on the Windows platform; a realtime multi-window timecode burn-in tool; and Blu-ray output capabilities.
The new HD systems are expected to be available in Q2 2008. Pricing is as follows: Media Composer software - $2,495; Media Composer Mojo DX - $9,995; Media Composer Nitris DX - $14,995; Symphony Nitris DX - $35,995; NewsCutter software -$4,995; NewsCutter Mojo DX -19,995; and NewsCutter Nitris DX - $24,995.