Avid Xpress Pro HD

DMN Review by By Charlie White New version of highly scalable editing software nails it! (6/15/05) Avid Xpress Pro HD ($1695 software only, $295 for students) is a new version of Avid’s lowest-cost line of editing software. Adding to its mile-high feature set are improvements such as DVCProHD support, along with real time HD multicamera editing. You get a lot for your money with this package, but there’s one important thing missing from its extensive list of features that Avid says we’ll seeing by the end of this year—native HDV editing—although it will be provided free to all Avid Xpress Pro HD customers. Let’s take a close-up look. For our testing, we used the basic software-only version of Avid Xpress Pro HD, which doesn’t include the Avid Mojo hardware box, a $1695 option that’s also available bundled with Avid Xpress Pro software for a total of $2595 after rebate. Of course, when equipping yourself for this task of multistream editing, and especially anything having to do with high definition, you’d be much better off with a really fast machine with a RAID -0 array moving data around quickly. But in our testing, even without those fast disks or the Mojo hardware, the performance of the software was still sprightly and useful. The scalability of this software serves as a great performance enhancer—the beauty of this software-driven system Avid has developed lies in that fact that better the host computer and drives, the better your performance will be. read more...