This past Tuesday (07/18/05) I attended a special Avid dealer training session called Avid Summer Camp. During the training session Avid demonstrated two very long awaited and important new features for Xpress Pro coning in the next two releases:
Tiger in the tank! That’s right – we saw it first hand - Avid Xpress Pro running on the new Mac OS! I know this is a very important milestone and while many will complain that it took too long, I think you’ll see it was worth the wait. Avid didn’t just make Xpress Pro run on Tiger – they are tapping into some of the core performance capabilities of Tiger. Want even more good news – how about a target release date of August 18th!
HDV and more! We also had the chance to see Xpress Pro HD with HDV running. I’ve said this before in previous articles and posts – when you combine native HDV support with Avid DNxHD CODEC, wonderful things happen. Avid was demonstrating a timeline made up of mixed HD and SD content, DV, uncompressed SD, HDV at 720p and 1080i and additional HD footage using DNxHD compressed files. Xpress Pro HD ate it up and spit it out – on a laptop! That’s right, real-time editing of mixed resolution HD footage from the timeline. Avid is calling this feature “Open Timeline†- I call it nothing short of amazing! But that wasn’t all. They ran this same mixed resolution footage in multicam! That’s right, you’ll be able mix and cut between your old reliable DV cams and your new HDV cams in realtime. The best news – Avid hopes to have HDV support for Xpress Pro HD by early fall.
Putting it all together. Of course the question came up of when Xpress Pro HD would be available for Mac. The goal we were told was before year-end. At that time Avid hopes to get back to having both PC & Mac with the same features and versions in the box. Avid has always been committed to this strategy. Tiger is a significant OS upgrade and it has taken major efforts by Avid to make Xpress Pro the best performing and most powerful video editing available for Tiger. Avid was the first NLE to run on Macs, and they are and have always been committed to the Mac platform. While the Tiger release took extra time, the future for Avid on Mac looks very bright indeed. Over the next two years Apple will be switching over from the PowerPC CPU to Intel based chips. While this may make some devout Mac lovers nervous, Mac based video editors have absolutely nothing to worry about – Avid has years of expertise on both platforms! In fact, it was no surprise at all to Avid engineers that Apple would switch to Intel, they’ve been telling them all along that it was better for video editing!!
The Xpress Pro Advantage You know, when you sell so many different NLEs and you have so many different flavors of each to support, it’s easy to forget some of the core features that really set Avid editing apart from the competition. I’d like to take the time now to re-iterate some of these features that are found only in Avid Xpress Pro & Pro HD.
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